Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You Read Free

up right away on Blaikie was that she didn’t like him.
    “Of course he is,” said Char.
    She told Blaikie. “Et says you’re stuck on yourself.”
    “What did you say?”
    “I told her you had to be, nobody else is.”
    Blaikie didn’t mind. He had taken the position that he liked Et. He would with a quick tug loosen and destroy the arrangement of looped-up braids she wore. He told them things about the concert artists. He told them the Scottish ballad singer was a drunk and wore corsets, that the female impersonator even in his hotel room donned a blue nightgown with feathers, that the lady ventriloquist talked to her dolls—they were named Alphonse and Alicia—as if they were real people, and had them sitting up in bed one on each side of her.
    “How would you know that?” Char said.
    “I took her up her breakfast.”
    “I thought you had maids to do that.”
    “The morning after the show I do it. That’s when I hand them their pay envelope and give them their walking papers. Some of them would stay all week if you didn’t inform them. She sits up in bed trying to feed them bits of bacon and talking to them and doing them answering back, you’d have a fit if you could see.”
    “She’s cracked I guess,” Char said peacefully.

    One night that summer Et woke up and remembered she had left her pink organdy dress on the line, after hand-washing it. She thought she heard rain, just the first few drops. She didn’t, it was just leaves rustling, but she was confused, waking up like that. She thought it was far on in the night, too, but thinking about it later she decided it might have been only around midnight. She got up and went downstairs, turned on the back kitchen light, and let herself out the back door, and standing on the stoop pulled the clothesline towards her. Then almost under her feet, from the grass right beside the stoop, where there was a big lilac bush that had grown and spread, untended, to the size of a tree, two figures lifted themselves, didn’t stand or even sit up, just roused their heads as if from bed, still tangled together some way. The back kitchen light didn’t shine directly out but lit the yard enough for her to see their faces. Blaikie and Char.
    She never did get a look at what state their clothes were in, to see how far they had gone or were going. She wouldn’t have wanted to. To see their faces was enough for her. Their mouths were big and swollen, their cheeks flattened, coarsened, their eyes holes. Et left her dress, she fled into the house and into her bed where she surprised herselfby falling asleep. Char never said a word about it to her next day. All she said was, “I brought your dress in, Et. I thought it might rain.” As if she had never seen Et out there pulling on the clothesline. Et wondered. She knew if she said, “You saw me,” Char would probably tell her it had been a dream. She let Char think she had been fooled into believing that, if that was what Char was thinking. That way, Et was left knowing more; she was left knowing what Char looked like when she lost her powers, abdicated. Sandy drowned, with green stuff clogging his nostrils, couldn’t look more lost than that.

    Before Christmas the news came to Mock Hill that Blaikie Noble was married. He had married the lady ventriloquist, the one with Alphonse and Alicia. Those dolls, who wore evening dress and had sleek hairdos in the style of Vernon and Irene Castle, were more clearly remembered than the lady herself. The only thing people recalled for sure about her was that she could not have been under forty. A nineteen-year-old boy. It was because he had not been brought up like other boys, had been allowed the run of the hotel, taken to California, let mix with all sorts of people. The result was depravity, and could have been predicted.
    Char swallowed poison. Or what she thought was poison. It was laundry blueing. The first thing she could reach down from the shelf in the back kitchen. Et