Chapter Three Judy
Chapter Three
Judy
The letter from Pan Am arrives precisely two weeks after the interview, and I’d spent every one of those impossibly long days fashioning myself into the perfect, perfect wife. I cooked all Henry’s favorite dishes. Ironed his shirts with extra care and optimal starch. Curled my hair the way he liked it even though the pins poked my scalp when I tried in vain to sleep on them. I wore the satin nightgowns that he preferred and let him do the things to me in it that he liked. If he noticed all the effort, he didn’t say anything.
But his moodiness stayed at bay. So I must have done everything right.
I began to wonder if I had been the problem all the time. Had I not been putting in enough effort? Had I incurred his wrath because I hadn’t tried my best?
Ronelle told me such thoughts were weeds in the garden of my mind and to pluck them right out before they took root. But it was tempting to believe when they were all I heard from my husband.
Henry’s criticisms had seeped into my thoughts like a slow poison whose effects only show themselves after a duration. Like the seemingly harmless erosion of water over a rock whose damage is revealed in crevices and canyons only after much time.
The peace was short lived.
On the twelfth day, Henry’s boss turned down his request for a raise. The cashier at the cigarette shop shorted him by seventy-five cents. And the Phillies were shut out by the Pirates, creating some razzing at work toward those who’d bet on the losing Pennsylvania team. All of these riled him out of the quiet I’d been tentatively enjoying, and I paid the price. My skin was going to be a rainbow of yellow, green, purple.
But not my face. Henry never touched me anywhere that couldn’t be covered up. It was the one thing that convinced me that these were not just bursts of emotion that he couldn’t control. They were actions that had just enough precision behind them as to keep me from being able to believe that they were anything but intentional.
Because I had a long history of making excuses for the man who had so enthralled me when we first met.
The man who had caused an irreversible rift between me and my mother. A division that was never healed before she went to be with the angels, just a few years after my father.
Ronelle snapped me out of my doubts when she came over the next morning. In fact, she sat in my kitchen, holding my hands, crying as if the pain was her own. Pleading with me. To come to her house. Or go to her in-laws’.
But Henry would find me at either of them. And then Pan Am wouldn’t find me at all.
I had to remain here until I got their letter.
Ronelle ran home to grab her Polaroid Land Camera, taking pictures of my skin until the package of film was spent and we were left with a mosaic of images spread across the table. They could not portray the colors, but even the gray tones revealed the truth. Insurance in case ... well, I don’t know. Henry likes to go to the horse races with his buddy since grade school—the chief of police in Red Lion. So I would have no recourse through local law enforcement. But Ronelle was right to insist that we have evidence.
If the Pan Am letter is a rejection, I will find some other way to leave. I have to.
Today, the green shoots of spring have given way to the blossoms that suggest that summer is upon us. New life heralded by my small flower garden and, I hope, a sign of good things to come. I see Ronelle step out of her house and make her way toward mine. Of course, she’d waited a good half hour after Henry had left for work just to be safe.
I fling the door open before she gets a chance to knock. As excited as I am to open the envelope that arrived with the mail this morning, I wait until she finishes the careful routine we’d put in place.
She removes her boots outside the front door so as not to leave any tracks, and she has no trace of perfume or lotion or anything whose scent would linger. Henry still knows nothing of our friendship, let alone the mornings that we spend planning my departure.
My escape.
I hold up the envelope, waving it in the air.
“It came?” she asks as she pulls me into a hug. I cling to her like the life preserver that she is, her heart beating against mine in a unified rhythm that makes me feel the kind of love that I haven’t known since that of my mother’s.
She sways, still holding me as she speaks. I can smell maple syrup on her breath. “Wow—fourteen days on the nose. That speaks well of their punctuality.”
I stand back, my chest constricting in anticipation of what the letter will say. My skin feels clammy and my head is light. I grip one of the decorative spindles by the front door to steady myself.
“Am I really doing this?” I ask her.
She nods, and her dark curls bounce. She threads her fingers through my hair, and I bite my lip to keep from crying. I’m going to miss her. Because I’m leaving whether it’s with Pan Am or not. “You’re really doing this. You have to, Judy.”
“What if he finds me?” I manage to admit the fear that has been gnawing at me. Just the thought sends a chill through my lungs. I can hear the quiver in my voice.
She puts her hands on either side of my arms and looks at me with her familiar intensity.
“How will he? I’m not going to tell him. Richard’s not going to tell him. And you’ll open a post office box wherever you end up so he can’t find an address.”
“I’m just afraid that half a world away isn’t enough.”
“Then you’ll apply to the space program and hope they take you on as an astronaut. You can wave to John Glenn as you pass him in orbit. They’d do well to shoot that pretty face of yours up to the moon instead of that damn test monkey.”
I grin. Ronelle does that to me. She makes me smile no matter what.
“I wish you could come with me,” I say under my breath.
She shakes her head. “I am happy here making my mark with Richard Rorbaugh at my side in this funny little corner of the world. Besides—they don’t let women like me apply.” And then she grins as she waves a finger in the air. “At least, not yet .”
She always believes that tomorrow will be better, and not for the first time, I am swept up in her unrelenting optimism.
She supports me by the elbow as we walk toward the kitchen. The letter rattles as my unsteady hand tries and fails to hold on to it. It falls onto the green linoleum tiles, covering a patch that has been worn from a chair rubbing against it over time.
I pick it up.
“Do you want me to open it?” she asks. She takes it from my hand, pulling it with some force because I don’t even realize that I’m gripping it.
She takes a knife from the drawer and slides it through the top. I think, What does it matter if it’s jagged; just rip it open, but I realize that her methodical way of operating is exactly why I’ve gotten as far as I have with all this. Without Ronelle, I might not have the courage to leave. Without Ronelle, it might have been too late.
I close my eyes. I hear her take some papers out and then she shuffles them, and I wonder if that is a good sign or a bad sign that there are several, but she doesn’t keep me waiting long because she lets out a gasp.
I look up, and her hand is covering her mouth. Her eyes are wet, and her mascara is melting off her lashes.
“Judy. You’re in! ”