The Love of a Good Woman

the afternoon, and then the streetlights came on, the lights in the trolley buses came on, and often, too, the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun’ setting—and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of a faintly rosy twilight. People who had been shopping were going home, people at work were thinking about going home, people who had been in the houses all day came out to take a little walk that would make home more appealing. I met women with baby carriages and complaining toddlers and never thought that so soon I’d be in the same shoes. I met old people with their dogs, and other old people, slow moving or in wheelchairs, being propelled by theirmates or keepers. I met Mrs. Gorrie pushing Mr. Gorrie. She wore a cape and beret of soft purple wool (I knew by now that she made most of her own clothes) and a lot of rosy face coloring. Mr. Gorrie wore a low cap and a thick scarf wrapped around his neck. Her greeting to me was shrill and proprietary, his nonexistent. He did not look as if he was enjoying the ride. But people in wheelchairs rarely did look anything more than resigned. Some looked affronted or downright mean.
    “Now, when we saw you out in the park the other day,” Mrs. Gorrie said, “you weren’t on your way back from looking for a job then, were you?”
    “No,” I said, lying. My instinct was to lie to her about anything.
    “Oh, good. Because I was just going to say, you know, that if you were out looking for a job you really should fix yourself up a little bit. Well, you know that.”
    Yes, I said.
    “I can’t understand the way some women go out nowadays. I’d never go out in my flat shoes and no makeup on, even if I was just going to the grocery store. Let alone if I was going to ask somebody to give me a job.”
    She knew I was lying. She knew I froze on the other side of the basement door, not answering her knock. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she went through our garbage and discovered and read the messy, crumpled pages on which were spread out my prolix disasters. Why didn’t she give up on me? She couldn’t. I was a job set out for her—maybe my peculiarities, my ineptitude, were in a class with Mr. Gorrie’s damages, and what couldn’t be righted had to be borne.
    She came down the stairs one day when I was in the main part of the basement doing our washing. I was allowed to use her wringer-washer and laundry tubs every Tuesday.
    “So is there any chance of a job yet?” she said, and on the spurof the moment I said that the library had told me they might have something for me in the future. I thought that I could pretend to be going to work there—I could go and sit there every day at one of the long tables, reading or even trying my writing, as I had done occasionally in the past. Of course, the cat would be out of the bag if Mrs. Gorrie ever went into the library, but she wouldn’t be able to push Mr. Gorrie that far, uphill. Or if she ever mentioned my job to Chess—but I didn’t think that would happen either. She said she was sometimes afraid to say hello to him, he looked so cross.
    “Well, maybe in the meantime …,” she said. “It just occurred to me that maybe in the meantime you would like to have a little job sitting in the afternoons with Mr. Gorrie.”
    She said that she had been offered a job helping out in the gift shop at St. Paul’s Hospital three or four afternoons a week. “It’s not a paid job or I’d have sent you to ask about it,” she said. “It’s just volunteer work. But the doctor says it’d do me good to get out of the house. ‘You’ll wear yourself out,’ he said. It’s not that I need the money, Ray is so good to us, but just a little volunteer job, I thought—” She looked into the rinse tub and saw Chess’s shirts in the same clear water as my flowered nightgown and our pale-blue sheets.
    “Oh, dear,” she said. “You didn’t put the whites and the coloreds in together?”
    “Just the light coloreds,” I said. “They don’t run.”
    “Light coloreds are still coloreds,” she said. “You might think the shirts are white that way, but they won’t be as white as they could be.”
    I said I would remember next time.
    “It’s just the way you take care of your man,” she said, with her little scandalized laugh.
    “Chess doesn’t mind,” I said, not realizing how this wouldbecome less and less true