My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (6 page)

“It’s natural law,” Preston said reprovingly. “Don’t get emotion mixed up with it.”

One evening when my sister and Sonny didn’t have a date to go out, my mother tapped lightly on my foot, which protruded from under the dining-room table. “I have a feeling Sonny may call,” she whispered. I told Preston I had to hang up, and crawled out from beneath the table. “I have a feeling that they’re getting to the point,” my mother said. “Your sister’s nervous.”

I put the phone back on the telephone table. “But, Mother—” I said, and the phone rang.

“Sh-h-h,” she said.

The phone rang three times. My sister, on the extension upstairs, said, “Hello. . . . Oh, Sonny. . . .”

My mother looked at me and smiled. Then she pulled at my sleeve until I bent my head down, and she whispered in my ear, “They’ll be so happy. . . .” She went into the hall, to the foot of the stairs. “Tell him he can come over,” she whispered passionately.

“Sure,” my sister was saying on the phone. “I’d like that. . . . If you want. . . . Sure. . . .”

My mother went on listening, her head tilted to one side, the light falling on her aging face, and then she began to pantomime the answers my sister ought to be making—sweet yeses, dignified noes, and little bursts of alluring laughter.

I plunged down the hall and out the screen door. The street lamps were on, and there was a moon. I could hear the children: “I see Digger. One-two-three, you’re caught, Digger. . . .” Two blocks away, the clock on the Presbyterian church was striking the hour. Just then a little girl left her hiding place in our hedge and ran shrieking for the tree trunk that was home-free base: “I’m home safe! I’m home safe! Everybody free!” All the prisoners, who had been sitting disconsolately on the bumpers of Mr. Karmgut’s Oldsmobile, jumped up with joyful cries and scattered abruptly in the darkness.

I lifted my face—that exasperating factor, my face—and stared entranced at the night, at the waving tops of the trees, and the branches blowing back and forth, and the round moon embedded in the night sky, turning the nearby streamers of cloud into mother-of-pearl. It was all very rare and eternal-seeming. What a dreadful unhappiness I felt.

I walked along the curb, balancing with my arms outspread. Leaves hung over the sidewalk. The air was filled with their rustling, and they caught the light of the street lamps. I looked into the lighted houses. There was Mrs. Kearns, tucked girlishly into a corner of the living-room couch, reading a book. Next door, through the leaves of a tall plant, I saw the Lewises all standing in the middle of the floor. When I reached the corner, I put one arm around the post that held the street sign, and leaned there, above the sewer grating, where my friends and I had lost perhaps a hundred tennis balls, over the years. In numberless dusks, we had abandoned our games of catch and handball and gathered around the grating and stared into it at our ball, floating down in the darkness.

The Cullens’ porch light was on, in the next block, and I saw Mr. and Mrs. Cullen getting into their car. Eleanor Cullen was in my class at school, and she had been dating Joel. Her parents were going out, and that meant she’d be home alone—if she was home. She might have gone to the library, I thought as the car started up; or to a sorority meeting. While I stood there looking at the Cullens’ house, the porch light went off. A minute later, out of breath from running, I stood on the dark porch and rang the doorbell. There was no light on in the front hall, but the front door was open, and I could hear someone coming. It was Eleanor. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Me,” I said. “Are you busy? Would you like to come out for a little while and talk?”

She drifted closer to the screen door and pressed her nose against it. She looked pale without makeup.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll have to go put my shoes on. I’m not in a good mood or anything.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Neither am I. I just want to talk to somebody.”

While I waited for Eleanor to come out, Mattie Seaton appeared, striding along the sidewalk. He was on the track team. “Hey, Mattie,” I called out to him.

“Hi,” he said.

“What’s new?”

“Nothing much,” he said. “You got your trig done?”

“No, not yet.”

“You going with
her
?” he asked, pointing to the house.

“Naw,” I said.

“Well, I got to get my homework done,” he said.

“See you later,” I called after him. I knew where he was going: Nancy Ellis’s house, two blocks down.

“Who was that?” Eleanor asked. She stepped out on the porch. She had combed her hair and put on lipstick.

“Mattie Seaton,” I said.

“He’s pinned to Nancy,” Eleanor said. “He likes her a lot. . . .” She sat down in a white metal chair. I sat on the porch railing, facing her. She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You want a cigarette?” she asked.

“No. I’m in training.”

We looked at each other, and then she looked away, and I looked down at my shoes. I sat there liking her more and more.

“How come you’re in a bad mood?” I asked her.

“Me? Oh, I don’t know. How did you know I was in a bad mood?”

“You told me.” I could barely make out her face and the dull color of her hands in the darkness.

“You know, I think I’m not basically a happy person,” Eleanor said suddenly. “I always thought I was. . . . People expect you to be, especially if you’re a girl.”

“It doesn’t surprise
me
,” I said.

A breeze set all the leaves in motion again. “It’s going to rain,” I said.

Eleanor stood up, smoothing her yellow skirt, and threw her cigarette off the porch; the glowing tip landed on the grass. She realized I was staring at her. She lifted her hand and pressed it against her hair. “You may have noticed I look unusually plain tonight,” she said. She leaned over the porch railing beside me, supporting herself on her hands. “I was trying to do my geometry,” she said in a low voice. “I couldn’t do it. I felt stupid,” she said. “So I cried. That’s why I look so awful.”

“I think you look all right,” I said. “I think you look fine.” I leaned forward and laid my cheek on her shoulder. Then I sat up quickly, flushing. “I don’t like to hear you being so dissatisfied with yourself,” I mumbled. “You could undermine your self-confidence that way.”

Eleanor straightened and faced me, in the moonlight. “You’re beautiful,” I burst out longingly. “I never noticed before. But you are.”

“Wait,” Eleanor said. Tears gathered in her eyes. “Don’t like me yet. I have to tell you something first. It’s about Joel.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I know you’re going with him. I understand.”

“Listen to me!” she said impatiently, stamping her foot. “I’m
not
going with him. He—” She suddenly pressed her hands against her eyes. “Oh, it’s awful!” she cried.

A little shudder of interest passed through me. “O.K.,” I said. “But I don’t care if you don’t tell me.”

“I want to!” she cried. “I’m just a little embarrassed. I’ll be all right in a minute—

“We went out Sunday night . . .” she began after a few seconds. They had gone to Medart’s, in Clayton, for a hamburger. Joel had talked her into drinking a bottle of beer, and it had made her so drowsy that she had put her head on the back of the seat and closed her eyes. “What kind of car does Joel have?” I asked.

“A Buick,” Eleanor said, surprised at my question.

“I see,” I said. I pictured the dashboard of a Buick, and Joel’s handsome face, and then, daringly, I added Eleanor’s hand, with its bitten fingernails, holding Joel’s hand. I was only half listening, because I felt the preliminary stirrings of an envy so deep it would make me miserable for weeks. I looked up at the sky over my shoulder; clouds had blotted out the moon, and everything had got darker. From the next block, in the sudden stillness, I heard the children shouting, uttering their Babylonian cries as they played kick-the-can. Their voices were growing tired and fretful.

“And then I felt his hand on my—” Eleanor, half-drowned in shadow, was showing me, on her breast, where Joel had touched her.

“Is that all?” I said, suddenly smiling. Now I would not have to die of envy. “That’s nothing!”

“I—I slapped his face!” She exclaimed. Her lip trembled. “Oh, I didn’t mean—I sort of wanted—Oh, it’s all so terrible!” she burst out. She ran down the front steps and onto the lawn, and leaned against the trunk of an oak tree. I followed her. The pre-storm stillness filled the sky, the air between the trees, the dark spaces among the shrubbery. “Oh, God!” Eleanor cried. “How I hate everything!”

My heart was pounding, and I didn’t know why. I hadn’t known I could feel like this—that I could pause on the edge of such feeling, which lay stretched like an enormous meadow all in shadow inside me. It seemed to me a miracle that human beings could be so elaborate. “Listen, Eleanor,” I said, “you’re all right! I’ve
always
liked you.” I swallowed and moved closer to her; there were two moist streaks running down her face. I raised my arm and, with the sleeve of my shirt, I wiped away her tears. “I think you’re wonderful! I think you’re really something!”

“You look down on me,” she said. “I know you do. I can tell.”

“How can I, Eleanor. How
can
I?” I cried. “I’m nobody. I’ve been damaged by my heredity.”

“You, too!” she exclaimed happily. “Oh, that’s what’s wrong with me!”

A sudden hiss swept through the air and then the first raindrops struck the street. “Quick!” Eleanor cried, and we ran up on her porch. Two bursts of lightning lit up the dark sky, and the rain streamed down.

I held Eleanor’s hand, and we stood watching the rain. “It’s a real thundershower,” she said.

“Do you feel bad because we only started being friends tonight? I mean, do you feel you’re on the rebound and settling on the second-best?” I asked. There was a long silence and all around it was the sound of the rain.

“I don’t think so,” Eleanor said at last. “How about you?”

I raised my eyebrows and said, “Oh, no, it doesn’t bother me at all.”

“That’s good,” she said.

We were standing very close to one another. We talked industriously. “I don’t like geometry,” Eleanor said. “I don’t see what use it is. It’s supposed to train your mind, but I don’t believe it. . . .”

I took my glasses off. “Eleanor—” I said. I kissed her, passionately, and then I turned away, pounding my fists on top of each other. “Excuse me,” I whispered hoarsely. That kiss had lasted a long time, and I thought I would die.

Eleanor was watching the long, slanting lines of rain falling just outside the porch, gray in the darkness; she was breathing very rapidly. “You know what?” she said. “I could make you scrambled eggs. I’m a good cook.” I leaned my head against the brick wall of the house and said I’d like some.

In the kitchen, she put on an apron and bustled about, rattling pans and silverware, and talking in spurts. “I think a girl should know how to cook, don’t you?” She let me break the eggs into a bowl—three eggs, which I cracked with a flourish. “Oh, you’re good at it,” she said, and began to beat them with a fork while I sat on the kitchen table and watched her. “Did you know most eggs
aren’t
baby chickens?” she asked me. She passed so close to me on her way to the stove that, because her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright, I couldn’t help leaning forward and kissing her. She turned pink and hurried to the stove. I sat on the kitchen table, swinging my legs and smiling to myself. Suddenly we heard a noise just outside the back door. I leaped off the table and took up a polite position by the sink. Eleanor froze. But no one opened the door; no one appeared.

“Maybe it was a branch falling,” I said.

Eleanor nodded. Then she made a face and looked down at her hands. “I don’t know why we got so nervous. We aren’t doing anything wrong.”

“It’s the way they look at you,” I said.

“Yes, that’s it,” she said. “You know, I think my parents are ashamed of me. But someday I’ll show them. I’ll do something wonderful, and they’ll be amazed.” She went back to the stove.