Paying for her new shoes on Tuesday, she had wished she could use the credit card she was carrying in her wallet. If only a credit-card trail were not so easily traced! And then a peculiar thought had struck her. Most untraceable of all, she had thought, would be dying.
But of course she hadn’t meant that the way it sounded.
The print in her library book was so large, she worried she had chosen something that wouldn’t last the evening. She forced her eyes to travel more slowly, and when her meal arrived she stopped reading altogether. She kept the book open, though, next to her plate, in case somebody approached.
The waitress set out scalloped paper place mats for the supper crowd. The cook stirred something on the burner. Two creases traversed the base of his skull; his smooth black scalp seemed overlaid with a pattern of embroidery knots. He had made the pot pie from scratch, Delia suspected. The crust shattered beneath her fork. And the potatoes accompanying it seemed hand mashed, not all gluey and machine mashed.
She wondered whether her family had thought to thaw the casseroles she’d packed.
“If he do come,” the cook was telling the waitress, “you got to keep him occupied. Because I ain’t going to.”
“You have to be around some, though,” the waitress said.
“I ain’t saying I won’t be around. I say I won’t keep him occupied.”
The waitress looked toward Delia before Delia could look away. She had those bachelor’s-button eyes you often see in redheads, and a round-chinned, innocent face. “My dad is planning a visit,” she told Delia.
“Ah,” Delia said, reaching for her book.
“He wasn’t all that thrilled when me and Rick here got married.”
The waitress and the cook were married? Delia was afraid that if she started reading now, they would think she disapproved too; so she marked her place on the page with one finger and said, “I’m sure he’ll accept it eventually.”
“Oh, he’s accepted it, all right! Or says he has. But now whenever Rick sees him, he always gets to remembering how ugly Daddy acted at the start.”
“I can’t stand to be around the man,” Rick said sadly.
“Daddy walks into a room and Rick is like, whap! and his mouth slams shut.”
“Then Teensy here feels the pressure and goes to talking a mile a minute, nothing but pure silliness.”
Delia knew what that was like. When her sister Linda was married to the Frenchman, whom their father had detested…
But she couldn’t tell them that. She was sitting in this booth alone, utterly alone, without the conversational padding of father, sisters, husband, children. She was a person without a past. She took a breath to speak and then had nothing to say. It was Teensy who finally broke the silence. “Well,” Teensy said, “at least we’ve got ourselves a few days to prepare for this.” And she went off to wait on a couple who had just entered.
When Delia walked out of the café, she felt she was surrounded by a lighter kind of air than usual-thinner, more transparent-and she crossed the street with a floating gait. Just inside Belle’s front door she found an array of letters scattered beneath the mail slot, but she didn’t pick them up, didn’t even check the names on the envelopes, because she knew for a fact that none of them was hers.
Upstairs, she went about her coming-home routine: putting away her things, showering, doing her laundry. Meanwhile she kept an ear out for Belle’s return, because she would have moved more quietly with someone else in the house. But she could tell she had the place to herself.
When every last task was completed, she climbed into bed with her library book. If there had been a chair she would have sat up to read, but this was her only choice. She wondered whether Mr. Lamb’s room was any better equipped. She supposed she could request a chair from Belle. That would mean a conversation, though, and Delia was avoiding conversation as much as possible. Heaven forbid they should get to be two cozy, chatty lady friends, exchanging news of their workdays every evening.
She propped her pillow against the metal rail at the head of the cot and leaned back. For this first little bit, the light from outdoors was enough to read by-a slant of warm gold that made her feel pleasantly lazy. She could hear a baby crying in the house across the street. A woman far away called, “Robbie! Kenny!” in that bell-like, two-note tune that mothers everywhere fetch their children home with. Delia read on, turning pages with a restful sound. She was interested in Gatsby’s story but not what you would call carried away. It would serve to pass the evening, was all.
The light grew dimmer, and she switched on the goosenecked lamp that craned over her shoulder from the windowsill. Now the children across the street, released from the supper table, were playing something argumentative outdoors. Delia heard them for a while but gradually forgot to listen, and when she thought of them again she realized they must have gone in to bed. Night had fallen, and moths were thumping against the screen. Down in the street, a car door closed; heels clopped across the porch; Belle entered the house and went directly to the front room, where she started talking on the phone. “You know it’s got great resale value,” Delia heard, before forgetting to listen to that as well. Later she stopped reading for a moment and heard only silence, inside and out, except for the distant traffic on 380. It was cooler now, and she felt grateful for the lamp’s small circle of warmth.
She came to the end of her book, but she kept rereading the final sentence till her eyes blurred over with tears. Then she placed the book on the floor and reached up to switch the lamp off so she could sit weeping in the dark-the very last step in her daily routine.
She wept without a thought in her head, heaving silent sobs that racked her chest and contorted her mouth. Every few minutes she blew her nose on the strip of toilet paper she kept under her pillow. When she felt completely drained, she gave a deep, shuddering sigh and said aloud, “Ah, well.” Then she blew her nose one last time and lay down to sleep.
It amazed her that she always slept so soundly.
The toddler wanted the pigeons to eat from his fingers. He squatted in their midst, his bulky corduroy bottom just inches from the ground, and held a crouton toward them. But the pigeons strutted around him with shrewd, evasive glances, and when it dawned on him that they would never come closer he suddenly toppled backward, not giving the slightest warning, and pedaled the air in a fury. Delia smiled, but only behind the shield of her newspaper.
Today there was no further mention of her disappearance. She wondered if the authorities had forgotten her that quickly.
She folded the Metro section and laid it on the bench beside her. She reached for the cup of yogurt at her left and then noticed, out of the corner of her eye, the woman who stood watching her from several yards away.
Her heart gave a lurch. She said, “Eliza?”
Eliza moved forward abruptly, as if she had just this second determined something.
There was no one beside her. No one behind her.
No one.
She was wearing a dress-a tailored tan shirtwaist that dated from the time when they still had a Stewart’s department store. Eliza almost never wore dresses. This must be a special occasion, Delia thought, and then she thought, Why, I am the occasion. She rose, fumbling with her yogurt cup. “Hello, Eliza,” she said.
“Hello, Delia.”
They stood awkwardly facing each other, Eliza gripping a boxy leather purse in both hands, until Delia recollected the old man on the east bench. He appeared to be intent on his magazine, but that didn’t fool her in the least. “Would you like to take a walk?” she asked Eliza.
“We could,” Eliza said stiffly.
She was probably angry. Well, of course she was angry. Bundling her lunch things into the trash basket, Delia felt like a little girl hiding some mischief. She sensed she was blushing, too. Hateful thin-skinned complexion, always giving her away. She slung the strap of her handbag over her shoulder and set off across the square, with Eliza lagging a step behind as if to accentuate Delia’s willfulness, her lack of consideration. When they reached the street, Delia stopped and turned to face her. “I guess you think I shouldn’t have done this,” she said.