At first I thought I would go inside and be already sitting at the table waiting. Then I thought better: it must be casual but not taken-for-granted casual. So I stood at the entrance, but back, not to impede the juvenile flood or perhaps rather not to be trampled by it.
Because she must not see me from a block away waiting, but casual, by accident outwardly and chance: first the little ones, first- and second-and third-grade; and now already the larger ones, the big grades and the high school; it would be soon now, any time now. Except that it was Chick, with a folded note.
“Here,” he said. “It seems to be stuck.”
“Stuck?” I said.
“The record. The victrola. This is the same tune it was playing before, aint it? just backward this time.” Because she probably had insisted he read it first before she released it to him. So I was the second, not counting her:
Dear Mr Stevens
I will have to be a little late if you can wait for me
Linda
“Not quite the same,” I said. “I dont hear any dollar now.”
“Okay,” he said. “Neither did I. I reckon you aint coming home now.”
“So do I,” I said. So I went inside then and sat down at the table; I owed her that much anyway; the least I could give her was revenge so let it be full revenge; full satisfaction of watching from wherever she would be watching while I sat still waiting for her long after even I knew she would not come; let it be the full whole hour then since ‘finis’ is not ‘goodbye’ and has no cause to grieve the spring of grief.
So when she passed rapidly across the plate glass window, I didn’t know her. Because she was approaching not from the direction of the school but from the opposite one, as though she were on her way to school, not from it. No: that was not the reason.
She was already in the store now, rapidly, the screen clapping behind her, at the same instant and in the same physical sense both running and poised motionless, wearing not the blouse and skirt or print cotton dress above the flat-heeled shoes of school; but dressed, I mean ‘dressed’, in a hat and high heels and silk stockings and makeup who needed none and already I could smell the scent: one poised split-second of immobilised and utter flight in bizarre and paradox panoply of allure, like a hawk caught by a speed lense.
“It’s all right,” I said. Because at least I still had that much presence.
“I cant,” she said. At least that much presence. There were not many people in the store but even one could have been too many so I was already up now, moving toward her.
“How nice you look,” I said. “Come on; I’ll walk a way with you,” and turned her that way, not even touching her arm, on and out, onto the pavement, talking (I presume I was; I usually am), speaking: which was perhaps why I did not even realise that she had chosen the direction, not in fact until I realised that she had actually turned toward the foot of the office stairs, only then touching her: her elbow, holding it a little, on past the stairs so that none (one hoped intended must believe) had marked that falter, on along the late spring store-fronts — the hardware and farm-furnish stores cluttered with garden and farm tools and rolls of uncut plowline and sample sacks of slag and fertilizer and even the grocery ones exposing neat cases of seed packets stencilled with gaudy and incredible vegetables and flowers — talking (oh ay, trust me always) sedate and decorous: the young girl decked and scented to go wherever a young woman would be going at four oclock on a May afternoon, and the gray-headed bachelor, avuncular and what old Negroes called ‘settled’, incapable now of harm, slowed the blood and untroubled now the flesh by turn of wrist or ankle, faint and dusty-dry as memory now the hopes and anguishes of youth — until we could turn a corner into privacy or at least room or anyway so long as we did not actually stop.
“I cant,” she said.
“You said that before,” I said. “You cant what?”
“The schools,” she said. “The ones you.… the catalogues. From outside Jefferson, outside Mississippi.”
“I’m glad you cant,” I said. “I didn’t expect you to decide alone. That’s why I wanted to see you: to help you pick the right one.”
“But I cant,” she said. “Dont you understand? I cant.”
Then I — yes, I — stopped talking. “All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
“I cant go to any of them. I’m going to stay in Jefferson. I’m going to the Academy next year.” Oh yes, I stopped talking now. It wasn’t what the Academy was that mattered. It wasn’t even that the Academy was in Jefferson that mattered. It was Jefferson itself which was the mortal foe since Jefferson was Snopes.
“I see,” I said. “All right. I’ll talk to her myself.”
“No,” she said. “No. I dont want to go away.”
“Yes,” I said. “We must. It’s too important. It’s too important for even you to see now. Come on. We’ll go home now and talk to your mother—” already turning. But already she had caught at me, grasping my wrist and forearm with both hands, until I stopped. Then she let go and just stood there in the high heels and the silk stockings and the hat that was a little too old for her or maybe I was not used to her in a hat or maybe the hat just reminded me of the only other time I ever saw her in a hat which was that fiasco of a Sunday dinner at home two years ago which was the first time I compelled, forced her to do something because she didn’t know how to refuse; whereupon I said suddenly: “Of course I dont really need to ask you this, but maybe we’d better just for the record.
You dont really want to stay in Jefferson, do you? You really do want to go up East to school?” then almost immediately said: “All right, I take that back. I cant ask you that; I cant ask you to say outright you want to go against your mother. — All right,” I said, “you dont want to be there yourself when I talk to her: is that it?” Then I said: “Look at me,” and she did, with the eyes that were not blue or gray either but hyacinthine, the two of us standing there in the middle of that quiet block in full view of at least twenty discreet window-shades; looking at me even while she said, breathed, again:
“No. No.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s walk again,” and she did so, docile enough. “She knows you came to meet me this afternoon because of course she gave you my telephone message. — All right,” I said. “I’ll come to your house in the morning then, after you’ve left for school. But it’s all right; you dont need to tell her. You dont need to tell her anything — say anything—” Not even No No again, since she had said nothing else since I saw her and was still saying it even in the way she walked and said nothing.
Because now I knew why the clothes, the scent, the makeup which belonged on her no more than the hat did. It was desperation, not to defend the ingratitude but at least to palliate the rudeness of it: the mother who said Certainly, meet him by all means.
Tell him I am quite competent to plan my daughter’s education, and we’ll both thank him to keep his nose out of it; the poor desperate child herself covering, trying to hide the baseness of the one and the same of the other behind the placentae of worms and the urine and vomit of cats and cancerous whales. “I’ll come tomorrow morning, after you’ve gone to school,” I said. “I know. I know. But it’s got too important now for either of us to stop.”
So the next morning: who — I — had thought yesterday to have seen the last of lurking. But I had to be sure. And there was Ratliff.
“What?” he said. “You’re going to see Eula because Eula wont let her leave Jefferson to go to school? You’re wrong.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m wrong. I dont want to do it either. I’m not that brave — offering to tell anybody, let alone a woman, how to raise her child. But somebody’s got to. She’s got to get away from here. Away for good from all the very air that ever heard or felt breathed the name of Snopes — —”
“But wait, I tell you! wait!” he said. “Because you’re wrong—”
But I couldn’t wait. Anyway, I didn’t. I mean, I just deferred, marked time
