Thirty - Jill Emerson [10]
There were no kicks with Edgar. The kicks came back with the others, feeling a little soberer now but remedying that with a fresh drink, and fitting myself back again into the inane conversation, and looking around the room and thinking to myself that I had a secret from all these wonderful people. I know something you don’t know—do kids still chant that? Their parents do.
It felt good, having the secret. For about the same reasons it does when you’re a kid.
But then a thought came to me and almost knocked me over. Because, just as a little earlier I had wondered how many of my good friends and true had smoked pot at one time or another and now pretended it had never happened, well, I found myself wondering how many of the women had necked with Edgar. Or with Howard. And just who had slept with whom, and if anyone was currently sleeping with whom, and—
See? No major revelation. Just a new way of looking at things.
It seems as though I keep coming up with new ways of looking at things and I still have only the same old things to look at.
I don’t particularly remember the last half hour or so of the party. Neither did Howie. One of us drove us both home—probably him, because I think I was higher than he was for a change. And we went to sleep. The next day was Sunday, and instead of a football game there was a basketball game, and I called out for a pizza for dinner, and we watched some shows on television and went to sleep early.
Monday was today. Today, that is, is Monday. And it started with yet another snowstorm, which piled new snow on the old snow and new snow on the few places Howie had shoveled. We made the trip to the train station before too much of the white garbage came down but by late morning the driveway was socked in fairly solid again. Not that I had anyplace to go.
Quit stalling. Get to the point.
But this is the point, or part of it. I was sitting around thinking that I couldn’t go anywhere, and thinking that I had no place to go, and thinking, finally, that this was what it all added up to, that I was free and white, and twenty-nine and had no place to go. And that it was going to go on like this forever.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I mean, I hadn’t originally planned a life of nothingness. It was never my idea. I don’t suppose it ever is, is it? Life has a strange way of happening to people. I don’t know many people who, at about this time of life, thirty or so, are doing what they originally set out to be doing. Doctors and lawyers, yes—but people who had vague ideas and who went to college and drifted through it and then got a job and quit it and got another. Or girls, in particular. We wanted so much not to be mere housewives that even now we join discussion groups and take evening courses and do all sorts of things to convince ourselves we are not mere housewives, and when all is said and done that’s precisely what we are, and the dumb little games we play only prove it.
I just went down the hall for some coffee. They have a row of machines, coffee and cigarettes and candy and soft drinks and ice. A person could stay here forever if she didn’t run out of quarters. I think I need the coffee.
He came to the door at a quarter after one. When I opened the door I looked at him and thought it was the bag-carrier from the Pathmark. Looked nothing like him on second glance, but even I can see the implications. You don’t need a psych degree. He was tall and rangy with a shock of once-combed black hair and the healthily stupid (or stupidly healthy) face that athletes have at Midwestern colleges. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. He was holding an aluminum snow shovel over his shoulder, so I should have been able to figure it out, but the old mind wasn’t working all that well.
He said, “Shovel your walk, ma’am?”
I absolutely hate being called ma’am. As must everyone.
“Oh,” I said, cleverly. “Oh, yes, that would be good.”
“Walk and driveway?”
“Yes.”
“And I guess the path to the front door?”
“Yes, fine.”
“Right,” he said. He was wearing a sheepskin jacket with the hood thrown back.