The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [140]
The boarders already waited at the table. Mick had supper in the dining-room. The cabbage leaves were limp and yellow on her plate and she couldn’t eat. When she reached for the bread she knocked a pitcher of iced tea over the table.
Then later she waited on the front porch by herself for Mister Singer to come home. In a desperate way she wanted to see him. The excitement of the hour before had died down and she was sick to the stomach. She was going to work in a ten-cent store and she did not want to work there. It was like she had been trapped into something. The job wouldn’t be just for the summer--but for a long time, as long as she could see ahead.
Once they were used to the money coming in it would be impossible to do without again. That was the way things were.
She stood in the dark and held tight to the banisters. A long time passed and Mister Singer still did not come. At eleven o’clock she went out to see if she could find him. But suddenly she got frightened in the dark and ran back home.
Then in the morning she bathed and dressed very careful.
Hazel and Etta loaned her the clothes to wear and primped her to look nice. She wore Hazel’s green silk dress and a green hat and high-heeled pumps with silk stockings. They fixed her face with rouge and lipstick and plucked her eyebrows. She looked at least sixteen years old when they were finished.
It was too late to back down now. She was really grown and ready to earn her keep. Yet if she would go to her Dad and tell him how she felt he would tell her to wait a year. And Hazel and Etta and Bill and their Mama, even now, would say that she didn’t have to go. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t lose face like that. She went up to see Mister Singer. The words came all in a rush: ‘Listen--I believe I got this job. What do you think? Do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think it’s O.K. to drop out of school and work now? You think it’s good?’
At first he did not understand. His gray eyes half-closed and he stood with his hands deep down in his pockets. There was the old feeling that they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. The thing she had to say now was not much. But what he had to tell her would be right--and if he said the job sounded O.K. then she would feel better about it. She repeated the words slowly and waited.
‘You think it’s good?’
Mister Singer considered. Then he nodded yes.
She got the job. The manager took her and Hazel back to a little office and talked with them. Afterward she couldn’t remember how the manager looked or anything that had been said. But she was hired, and on the way out of the place she bought ten cents’ worth of Chocolate and a little modeling clay set for George. On June the fifth she was to start work. She stood for a long while before the window of Mister Singer’s jewelry store. Then she hung around on the corner.
10
THE TIME HAD come for Singer to go to Antonapoulos again.
The journey was a long one. For, although the distance between them was something less than two hundred miles, the train meandered to points far out of the way and stopped for long hours at certain stations during the night. Singer would leave the town in the afternoon and travel all through the night and until the early morning of the next day. As usual, he was ready far in advance. He planned to have a full week with his friend this visit. His clothes had been sent to the cleaner’s, his hat blocked, and his bags were in readiness. The gifts he would carry were wrapped in colored tissue paper--and in addition there was a deluxe basket of fruits done up in cellophane and a crate of late-shipped strawberries. On the morning before his departure Singer cleaned his room. In his ice box he found a bit of left-over goose liver and took it out to the alley for the neighborhood