“Yes, I was fired.” Sylvia began to sit up. “Please, Estelle—I’ve got to get ready; I’ve got an appointment.”
“Be still. You’re not going anywhere till I know what’s wrong. The landlady downstairs told me you were found sleepwalking.…”
“What do you mean talking to her? Why are you spying on me?”
Estelle’s eyes puckered, as though she were going to cry. She put her hand over Sylvia’s and petted it gently. “Tell me, honey, is it because of a man?”
“It’s because of a man, yes,” said Sylvia, laughter at the edge of her voice.
“You should have come to me before,” Estelle sighed. “I know about men. That is nothing for you to be ashamed of. A man can have a way with a woman that kind of makes her forget everything else. If Henry wasn’t the fine upstanding potential lawyer that he is, why, I would still love him, and do things for him that before I knew what it was like to be with a man would have seemed shocking and horrible. But honey, this fellow you’ve mixed up with, he’s taking advantage of you.”
“It’s not that kind of relationship,” said Sylvia, getting up and locating a pair of stockings in the furor of her bureau drawers. “It hasn’t got anything to do with love. Forget about it. In fact, go home and forget about me altogether.”
Estelle looked at her narrowly. “You scare me, Sylvia; you really scare me.” Sylvia laughed and went on getting dressed. “Do you remember a long time ago when I said you ought to get married?”
“Uh huh. And now you listen.” Sylvia turned around; there was a row of hairpins spaced across her mouth; she extracted them one at a time all the while she talked. “You talk about getting married as though it were the answer absolute; very well, up to a point I agree. Sure, I want to be loved; who the hell doesn’t? But even if I was willing to compromise, where is the man I’m going to marry? Believe me, he must’ve fallen down a manhole. I mean it seriously when I say there are no men in New York—and even if there were, how do you meet them? Every man I ever met here who seemed the slightest bit attractive was either married, too poor to get married, or queer. And anyway, this is no place to fall in love; this is where you ought to come when you want to get over being in love. Sure, I suppose I could marry somebody; but I do not want that? Do I?”
Estelle shrugged. “Then what do you want?”
“More than is coming to me.” She poked the last hairpin into place, and smoothed her eyebrows before the mirror. “I have an appointment, Estelle, and it is time for you to go now.”
“I can’t leave you like this,” said Estelle, her hand waving helplessly around the room. “Sylvia, you were my childhood friend.”
“That is just the point: we’re not children any more; at least, I’m not. No, I want you to go home, and I don’t want you to come here again. I just want you to forget about me.”
Estelle fluttered at her eyes with a handkerchief, and by the time she reached the door she was weeping quite loudly. Sylvia could not afford remorse: having been mean, there was nothing to be but meaner. “Go on,” she said, following Estelle into the hall, “and write home any damn nonsense about me you want to!” Letting out a wail that brought other roomers to their doors, Estelle fled down the stairs.
After this Sylvia went back into her room and sucked a piece of sugar to take the sour taste out of her mouth: it was her grandmother’s remedy for bad tempers. Then she got down on her knees and pulled from under the bed a cigar box she kept hidden there. When you opened the box it played a homemade and somewhat disorganized version of “Oh How I Hate to Get up in the Morning.” Her brother had made the music-box and given it to her on her fourteenth birthday. Eating the sugar, she’d thought of her grandmother, and hearing the tune she thought of her brother; the rooms of the house where they had lived rotated before her, all dark and she like a light moving among them: up the stairs, down, out and through, spring sweet and lilac shadows in the air and the creaking of a porch swing.
All gone, she thought, calling their names, and now I am absolutely alone. The music stopped. But it went on in her head; she could hear it bugling above the child-cries of the vacant lot. And it interfered with her reading. She was reading a little diary-like book she kept inside the box. In this book she wrote down the essentials of her dreams; they were endless now, and it was so hard to remember. Today she would tell Mr. Revercomb about the three blind children. He would like that. The prices he paid varied, and she was sure this was at least a ten-dollar dream. The cigar-box anthem followed her down the stairs and through the streets and she longed for it to go away.
In the store where Santa Claus had been there was a new and equally unnerving exhibit. Even when she was late to Mr. Revercomb’s, as now, Sylvia was compelled to pause by the window. A plaster girl with intense glass eyes sat astride a bicycle pedaling at the maddest pace; though its wheel spokes spun hypnotically, the bicycle of course never budged: all that effort and the poor girl going nowhere. It was a pitifully human situation, and one that Sylvia could so exactly identify with herself that she always felt a real pang. The music-box rewound in her head: the tune, her brother, the house, a high-school dance, the house, the tune! Couldn’t Mr. Revercomb hear it? His penetrating gaze carried such dull suspicion. But he seemed pleased with her dream, and, when she left, Miss Mozart gave her an envelope containing ten dollars.
“I had a ten-dollar dream,” she told Oreilly, and Oreilly, rubbing his hands together, said, “Fine! Fine! But that’s just my luck, baby—you should’ve got here sooner ’cause I went and did a terrible thing. I walked into a liquor store up the street, snatched a quart and ran.” Sylvia didn’t believe him until he produced from his pinned-together overcoat a bottle of bourbon, already half gone.
“You’re going to get in trouble some day,” she said, “and then what would happen to me? I don’t know what I would do without you.” Oreilly laughed and poured a shot of the whiskey into a water glass. They were sitting in an all-night cafeteria, a great glaring food depot alive with blue mirrors and raw murals. Although to Sylvia it seemed a sordid place, they met there frequently for dinner; but even if she could have afforded it she did not know where else they could go, for together they presented a curious aspect: a young girl and a doddering, drunken man. Even here people often stared at them; if they stared long enough, Oreilly would stiffen with dignity and say: “Hello, hot lips, I remember you from way back. Still working in the men’s room?” But usually they were left to themselves, and sometimes they would sit talking until two and three in the morning.
“It’s a good thing the rest of Master Misery’s crowd don’t know he gave you that ten bucks. One of them would say you stole the dream. I had that happen once. Eaten up, all of ’em, never saw such a bunch of sharks, worse than actors or clowns or businessmen. Crazy, if you think about it: you worry whether you’re going to go to sleep, if you’re going to have a dream, if you’re going to remember the dream. Round and round. So you get a couple of bucks, so you rush to the nearest liquor store—or the nearest sleeping-pill machine. And first thing you know, you’re roaming your way up outhouse alley. Why, baby, you know what it’s like? It’s just like life.”
“No, Oreilly, that’s what it isn’t like. It hasn’t anything to do with life. It has more to do with being dead. I feel as though everything were being taken from me, as though some thief were stealing me down to the bone. Oreilly, I tell you I haven’t an ambition, and there used to be so much. I don’t understand it and I don’t know what to do.”
He grinned. “And you say it isn’t like life? Who understands life and who knows what to do?”
“Be serious,” she said. “Be serious and put away that whiskey and eat your soup before it gets stone cold.” She lighted a cigarette, and the smoke, smarting her eyes, intensified her frown. “If only I knew what he wanted with those dreams, all typed and filed. What does he do with them? You’re right when you say he is Master Misery.… He can’t be simply some silly quack; it can’t be so meaningless as that. But why does he want dreams? Help me, Oreilly, think, think: what does it mean?”
Squinting one eye, Oreilly poured himself another drink; the clownlike twist of his mouth
