Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

music lessons for Mr. Moonlight Sonata.”

    And then to top if all off, later she found the cake.
    She found it wrapped up in a dish towel and then wrapped in waxed paper just as she had remembered. And put into a shopping bag and hung from a hook on the back porch. Of course. The sunporch was the ideal place because it got too cold to use in winter, but it wasn’t freezing cold. She must have been thinking that when she hung the cake there. That this was the ideal place. And then she forgot. She had been a little drunk—she must have been. She had forgotten absolutely. And there it was.
    She found it, and she threw it all out. She never told Stan.
    “I pitched it,” she said. “It was just as good as ever and all that expensive fruit and stuff in it, but there was no way I wanted to get that subject brought up again. So I just pitched it out.”
    Her voice, which had been so woeful in the bad parts of the story, was now sly and full of laughter, as if all the time she had been telling me a joke, and throwing out the cake was the final, ridiculous point of it.
    I had to pull my head out of her hands and turn around and look at her.
    I said, “But he was wrong.”
    “Well, of course he was wrong . Men are not normal , Chrissy. That’s one thing you’ll learn if you ever get married.”
    “I never will, then. I never will get married.”
    “He was just jealous,” she said. “He was just so jealous.”
    “Never.”
    “Well, you and me are very different, Chrissy. Very different.” She sighed. She said, “I am a creature of love.”
    I thought that you might see these words on a movie poster. “A creature of love.” Maybe on a poster of one of the movies that had played at Queenie’s theater.
    “You are going to look so good when I take these rollers out,” she said. “You won’t be saying you haven’t got a boyfriend for very long. But it’ll be too late to go looking today. Early bird tomorrow. If Stan asks you anything, say you went to a couple of places and they took your phone number. Say a store or a restaurant or anything, just so long as he thinks you’re looking.”

    I was hired the next day at the first place I tried, though I hadn’t managed to be such an early bird after all. Queenie had decided to do my hair still another way and to make up my eyes, but the result was not what she had hoped for. “You’re really more the natural type after all,” she said, and I scrubbed it all off and put on my own lipstick, which was ordinary red, not glimmering-pale like hers.
    By this time it was too late for Queenie to go out with me to check on her Post Office box. She had to get ready to go to the movie theater. It was a Saturday, so she had to work in the afternoon as well as in the evening. She got out her key and asked me to check the box for her, as a favor. She explained to me where it was.
    “I had to get my own box when I wrote to your dad,” she said.

    The job I got was in a drugstore in the basement of an apartment building. I was hired to work behind the lunch counter. When I first came in I felt fairly hopeless. My hairstyle was drooping in the heat and I had a moustache of sweat on my upper lip. At least my cramps had moderated.
    A woman in a white uniform was at the counter, drinking coffee.
    “Did you come about the job?” she said.
    I said yes. The woman had a hard, square face, pencilled eyebrows, a beehive of purplish hair.
    “You speak English, do you?“
    “Yes.”
    “I mean you didn’t just learn it? You’re not a foreigner?”
    I said I wasn’t.
    “I tried out two girls in the last two days and I had to let them both go. One let on she could speak English, but she couldn’t and the other I had to tell her everything ten times over. Wash your hands good at the sink and I’ll get you an apron. My husband is the pharmacist and I do the till.” (I noticed for the first time a gray-haired man behind a high counter in the corner looking at me and pretending not to.) “It’s slow now, but it’ll get busy in a while. It’s all old people in this block and after their naps they start coming down here wanting coffee.”
    I tied on an apron and took my place behind the counter.
    Hired for a job in Toronto. I tried to find out where things were without asking questions and had to ask only two—how to work the coffeemaker and what to do about the money.
    “You make out the bill and they bring it to me. What did you think?”
    It was all right. People came