After This Read Free Page B

the busy industry of her job, her shoulders
straight and her ankles crossed beneath her chair, her desk neat—
blotter, stapler, paper clips, dictionary, the surface dusted with a tissue
every morning and every afternoon—if she
     
simply worked, worked well, efficiently, competently, then time would
pass. Time would march on. Not merely the afternoon hours but the
weeks and months. The lunch hour would come and then five o’clock
would come and then the evening would come, and then the weekend
again, and then another. Christmas would come and mad April again
and lovely summer and fall. The war would begin and the war would
continue and the war would end and time would pass with all that
behind us now, another life (she would have put her palm to the worn
gold on his belt), and all that was ahead would pass, and none of it,
looking back, would seem to have been very much time at all, even
though looking ahead it had seemed endless. If she kept her back
straight and her ankles crossed beneath her chair and her hands over
the keys, if her fingers struck them quickly and rhythmically and the
sound of all their industry filled the room, and if she remembered to
take some pleasure in it, the sound, the industry, the feel of Pauline’s
eyes on her back, even after Pauline herself had gotten up to take
dictation in one of the offices, if she found some pleasure in the
changing light as the afternoon moved forward, in the fading perfumes
of the other girls as they passed her desk, in the good smell of the
paper, the carbon, the old building itself, then time would pass and
when she stood to cover her typewriter and to run another tissue over
the surface of her desk, to smile apologetically at Pauline already in
her hat and coat and waiting like the schoolgirl she surely must once
have been for the stroke of five (adding, in her hissed stage whisper,
“This isn’t the first time they’ve been seen together like that”), she
could tell herself another day gone and not so bad at that and what
else to do when you’re a single girl of thirty still at home, the war over
and no prospects in sight, your body not meant for mortal sin or a
man’s attention or childbearing, either, it would seem, what to do but
accept it and go on—a walk to the subway, the air chilled even further
without the sun but the wind not nearly so bad as it was, and the
ten-stop ride among the crowd of other office workers, and then the
walk home, spears of crocus and daffodil rising out of the hard dirt
around the caged trees and along the brick foundations, not so bad.
     
She unwrapped the lamb chops from their white butcher paper
and peeled a few potatoes and opened a can of peas. Her father came
in with the newspaper under his arm and then swatted her on the hip
with it as he went to the table to sit down. And then Jimmy came in
still wearing his overcoat to say, “What’s this? What’s this?” And then
told their father with his hands on his hips that George was taking
“our miss here” out to dinner. And her father lowered the paper and
smiled at her—his round, florid face and his sparse white hair which
he no longer bothered to slick down with water or tonic, being mostly
housebound and hardly out of his slippers all week long—and only
began to pout a little, Jimmy too, when she set the plate of lamb chops
and the mint jelly and the mashed potatoes and peas in their bowls on
the table and then pulled off her apron and said, “I’m just going to
take a shower.”
     
“Be sure to put it back,” Jimmy said and winked at her father, but
she was barely out of the small kitchen before the two men faced each
other across the table, across the empty place where she usually sat
between them, and glimpsed the possibility of a change in their
routine.
     
George took her arm again, walking across the sidewalk to his car.
He opened the car door for her and once she was inside, he leaned
down to smile