Chapter Nine #3
Not at all pointedly, just making conversation, Sam said, “How come they didn’t make you 1-B?”
“Full up, I guess,” Cal muttered.
Brenda announced to the room that she was stealing one of Ruth’s cigarettes.
The staircase creaked again.
“Boomps-A-Daisy!” a voice called out.
“What is this,” Mrs. Cox said, “men’s night?”
The old man danced his way into the room.
He had thick white hair and wore black-and-white wingtip shoes, black trousers, an electric-blue guayabera, and thick-framed glasses that magnified his rheumy eyes.
He danced around Mrs. Fletcher and Brenda, around Margaret and Agnes and Mrs. Cox, and when he reached Ruth he knocked his backside into hers.
“Good evening, Mr. Pruitt,” Ruth said.
“ ‘I like a bustle that bends!’ ” he sang.
“We aren’t Boomps-A-Daisying at the moment, but we’re always happy to see you.”
Mr. Pruitt accepted an iced tea and took the smallest sip from the glass before handing it back to Brenda.
When he learned that Sam was just back from Germany, he made a point of crossing the room and thanking him for his service.
He himself had fought in the Great War, he reminded the room, then suggested they all pair off for a rigadoon.
What a world of difference between Everett and Mr. Pruitt and Roman, Cal thought. All of them around the same age, veterans of the same war, sent home in one piece. Life chewed you up and spat you out, but it didn’t often spit the same way twice.
“I’m not sure we’re familiar with the rigadoon,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “How about the Big Apple instead?”
“Finally,” said Mrs. Cox, who adored the Big Apple.
This put all of them in a circle, including Sam, just catching his second wind. Before the needle was set down, Margaret looked over and motioned for Cal to join them.
“I can’t,” Cal said, smiling, waving her off.
“You can.”
“I don’t know it,” he said, feeling the same old flutter of panic in his stomach that he used to feel in grade school when kids would try to taunt him into doing any activity that involved running or a ball.
“It’s easy,” Margaret said. “I’ll show you.” Her hand was extended. The look in her eyes was familiar—he realized it was the same look she’d given him in the basement of the store almost a week ago, just before they’d kissed.
The music was peppery with clarinets and saxophones.
He stood reluctantly and stepped forward to join the circle—between Margaret and Mrs. Cox.
It turned out a person didn’t have to have isometric legs or any particular knowledge in order to dance the Big Apple.
A person just had to brook being a few steps behind everyone else, and nothing could have been more familiar to Cal than that.
—
Over the next couple of weeks, two letters arrived from Felix, neither mentioning the German surrender (which hadn’t occurred at the time he was writing), and both telling Margaret the contents of the Teague’s cargo holds, as if he thought that mattered to her, or as if he’d forgotten he was writing a letter and not a ship’s manifest. She wrote to him about the wasps’ nest under the eave of the garage, the warblers in the backyard, what she was reading (Green Dolphin Street, which Mrs. Talbot from next door had lent her because it had a Marguerite in it).
She wrote about Sam Liddick and Mr. Pruitt but not Cal.
To even think about Cal was to want to kiss him again, and more.
Powerful fantasies—but harmless, as long as she didn’t give them anything to work with.
Then, on the last day of the month, just past noon, they ran into each other in the Rexall across from Food Town.
What do you know? they said, almost giddy, and, What are the odds?
Knowing the odds were fair. She was holding a bag of Epsom salts.
Salts for the Salt, Cal quipped, then rattled the pill bottle in his hand: aspirin for the leg.
She asked if he was taking a break from work, and he said Thursdays and Saturdays were his father-in-law’s days at the store.
So that was the unpleasant little man she’d met when she’d first tried to return the handkerchief.
Cal’s dark-yellow cowlick stood like an antennae from his crown.
Just as she’d had the urge to pluck his tie out of his shirt the day they met, she had the urge to lick her finger and flatten it.
She told him again that it’d been nice to see him at the studio.
She hoped his leg wasn’t bothering him too much.
Not at all, he said. She expected Nice running into you or something to that effect, but he just stood there, waiting to hear what she had to say next.
She asked if he had any interest in a bit of lunch somewhere. When he shrugged and said “Sure,” she told him to pick the place. “Somewhere fun,” she said.
—
They both had their cars, so she followed him down Osborne Street, past the train station, to a stamped tin and red lacquer diner that looked clean but smelled a little like mop water.
They sat at a table by the front, and she glanced at the menu for less than a second before telling the waitress she’d have tomato soup, French fries, and a chocolate malt.
Cal ordered a BLT and an orange Nehi, and after the waitress left he told Margaret he admired her decisiveness.
“I haven’t eaten this kind of food in ages,” she said. “I used to—quite a lot, in fact.” Suddenly she missed Columbus all over again.
While they waited for their lunch, she asked him things about himself.
Whatever came into her head, she asked, and he answered.
He’d lived here his whole life. He’d been to Toledo, yes, and Columbus once.
But not Cleveland, or Cincinnati. (When she asked about Chicago, he admitted that he’d never been out of Ohio.) He had no interest in farming, he said.
He’d worked in concrete before hardware.
He hadn’t seen The Enchanted Cottage, but he’d seen Objective, Burma! “What about you?”
She told him she’d grown up outside of Columbus and moved into the city when she was eighteen. Had been married for eight years, had come to Bonhomie because of Felix’s job.
Cal said, “The man on the mantel.”
“That’s him.” Margaret’s eyes landed on the hand wrapped around his soda. The ring there.
“Becky,” Cal said. “And we’ve got a boy. A junior—fifteen months.”
“No kids.” She raised her hands and showed him her palms, for some reason.
Cal asked where Felix had worked before the war, and she said Tuck trains don’t sneak up on you.
She felt so strangely okay around him. She had the impulse to tell him about her past. Her upbringing.
Not because she wanted him to know but because she wanted there to be something between them that didn’t exist with anyone else.
Hadn’t they earned a little harmless conversational intimacy?
Instead, she said, “Tell me something most people in Bonhomie don’t know. ”