Chapter Six #5
She got to know some of the neighbors on their floor. The wives, anyway. The woman with the dachshund. The woman with all the lovely handbags. The woman with the little girl who always waved hello. Margaret always waved back.
She dressed better. Nothing over the moon, no furs, just pretty things she noticed when she and Felix were walking past the display windows, things he bought for her.
Her sense of color, in clothes, became more sophisticated and urbane.
She liked dressing up to go about her day because it felt like wearing who she was now for people to see.
She still turned heads on the street. She still got whistled at, on occasion.
The classes she had the easiest—and most enjoyable—time with were those she took at a dance school. She had a flair for the samba, a flair for the Balboa, a flair for any step she tried, really; she could always remember where to put her feet and was a favorite partner among the other students.
She visited the smaller art gallery shops, the ones that sold work by the artists who were still alive and not well known (meaning affordable), and she began to figure out what she liked and what she didn’t.
The smoke stain on the walls of their apartment bore the footprints of other people’s picture frames.
Having nothing of her own to put up felt like a little failure to her.
Felix didn’t have anything, either, but he didn’t seem concerned with interiors—or even aware of them.
On a walk one Sunday, when she mentioned how nice their apartment would look with a little art up on the walls, something to contrast all that light blue, he looked mildly surprised.
“The walls are blue?” But he supplied her with a modest art budget—carved out of his Christmas bonus.
She kissed him and thanked him and went straight back to the galleries, where she chose a few landscapes and still lifes and—her favorite—a Leon Dolice cityscape with explosive pinks and oranges and a sky the color of saffron and lemon chiffon.
She ate at cafeterias like Anton’s, though never at Anton’s itself, and made a point of saying thank you to the girls on the serving line.
She ran into Dotty downtown, and the two of them had a coffee together and caught up.
Dotty told her what a louse Larry had turned out to be, and Margaret said there were plenty of fish in the sea, but she was speaking from the opposite shore and they both knew it.
When Margaret asked how work was, Dotty said, “If it were any more fun, I’d pop a vein.
” On the sidewalk, she hugged Margaret and said how happy she was for her and that she wanted to keep in touch.
Margaret said the same, but she had the feeling they would never see each other again. And they never did.
She really was on the opposite shore of something.
She had accounts under her married name at Lazarus and several other stores.
The salespeople knew her. At times, it almost felt as if Felix, who was only seven years older than she was, had swept in and adopted rather than married her.
Finally adopted, she would think, smiling wryly, for in a strange way she felt more like a little girl than she ever had.
Almost as if this were her childhood, the one she didn’t get to have growing up.
The only hitch—other than the bedroom hitch, and the fact that she wasn’t entirely sure she was in love with him hitch—was that Felix wanted to have a child.
He started suggesting, each time they were about to do something, that she not use her diaphragm.
Was this something new, and sudden for him, or had he always wanted a kid (or kids) and hadn’t mentioned it?
Of course she should’ve expected as much; how many movies had she seen where, if two people got married, there was a baby by the time the lights went up?
The world wanted a baby, it seemed; it just hadn’t wanted her.
Well, guess what? She didn’t particularly want one of her own.
She didn’t see the point. So, gently but out loud, she told Felix she’d prefer if they waited.
She didn’t feel ready, was still getting her bearings, she explained—and there really was no rush, was there?
He said of course not, they could set the matter to the side and revisit it at a time that felt right for both of them.
He was polite, he was gentle. All this was so very Felix.
He put things down at right angles, she’d noticed.
The newspaper, when he was finished with it.
His comb and his razor. She rolled his socks, the way they had at Open Arms, and tossed them into his sock drawer; when she wasn’t around, he took them out, unrolled them, folded them in half, and lined them up vertically.
—
One evening in early summer 1939, he came home from the plant wearing a new chocolate-brown fedora.
He was holding a bottle of champagne and a box of LaFourche Hard Candies.
His promotion had finally come in, he said.
The one they’d been waiting for, for two years.
He was going to be the Manager of the Quality Control Division at one of the western branches of Tuck & Sons.
Technically an executive-level job, he said, and it meant a bigger salary—which was really something, given that so many guys were out of work right now.
It meant they could buy a house. Have room for a family.
Get a second car. She could learn to drive!
It also meant moving to a town called Bonhomie.
Margaret was sitting on the couch, cross-legged, holding the two goblets he’d handed her from the drink cart. “Where’s that?”
“West. Northwest, actually. About an hour from Toledo.” He picked at the foil on the neck of the champagne bottle, fiddled with the cage. “Beautiful country, they told me. Lots of farmland.”
“But I like it here.”
“You’ll like it there too. And I’m telling you, we’ll have a house. And I’ll get a bonus just for moving, and probably another raise after that.”
“But, Felix, no—I really like it here.”
“Margaret,” he said, his eyes gleaming as his hands kept fiddling, “this is how people get ahead. This could really change things for us. Will you trust me?”
The cork shot from the bottle and bubbles flowed into the goblets.