Other soldiers asked her to dance as well: Louis Biglarderi, who was often posted as a sentry at the gate; Corporal David Laux; several privates who looked young enough to be her charges. “I’m not much of a dancer,” Bea would protest each time, but they were in a merry, even riotous mood; they took her along, twirled her out, and while she must have been a good decade older than most of the girls, the men seemed to either not notice or not care. Agnes danced with Smitty too, her eyes on Bea, and when the bandleader called an all-ladies dance, Agnes took Bea around, leading like a man, and afterward Smitty said they’d been the best pair of the lot.
“By all means go—I mean, if you want to,” Mrs. P. had said when Agnes brought it up with her two days earlier, and before they’d left the house that evening, she’d come onto the porch and offered each of them a little rhinestone brooch—Agnes’s shaped like a star, Bea’s like an anchor. Annie, nearly fifty, had not wanted to come. Lizzy, who had a Scots fellow from another house in Orange, had considered but finally said no. Have fun, said Mrs. P., and then she laughed, and something about that laugh (more of a yelp, it was, involuntary, like when you stepped on Blackie’s tail) had made Bea nearly turn around and go back inside. But Agnes had her by the arm, and one of the Childs’ maids, an American, was coming toward them from down the road, and two busloads of local girls had already gone by, waving handkerchiefs out the open windows. Dossy and Helen were nowhere to be seen. Janie, through a fail-safe recipe of active play and early supper, was already in bed.
It was not until a good hour into the dance that Bea saw Helen being whisked by in a soldier’s arms, and Helen locked eyes with her and smiled in her devilish way. In her embarrassment, Bea ducked her head onto Smitty’s shoulder so that it must have looked—must have felt—like she was embracing him, and he leaned full up against her and whispered Darling, and she pulled sharply back.
Too many things, then: wanting to yank Helen away from the soldier; to find her own privacy again; to stay in the moment as it played out, fast and rollicking; to flee its soak of aftershave and beer. Smitty’s belt buckle was polished brass; his hands were scrubbed, clean and callused from the guns. Underneath his spearmint gum, beer breath and big laugh, he seemed a large and milk-sweet baby, and underneath that, an animal, at once dumb and powerful—one of the Angus bulls penned in the cattle yard at home. Her father had preferred working Goods, but when they were shorthanded he got put in Livestock, the bulls broad-shouldered, dim-eyed, worth a fortune (buyers came from Argentina). “Dangle down,” the yard boys used to call as they passed the pens, clutching their trousers and doing jigs; how Bea had hated running messages down there.
Dance,
she told herself now. Smitty was guiding her again, and once you got on you could not get off, or was it a joke, his courting of her—it would not have surprised her, at the same time that she was (Mrs. P.’s words returned to her)
having fun
.
“I’ve got to get back,” she gasped, breathless, when the music stopped.
“Back?” Smitty had been steadily drinking between dances, leaving his cup on a shelf and taking a gulp each time they went by. His hair was sweaty, his face red and flecked with salty peanut crumbs. He leaned toward her, and she had a brief, untoward urge to draw him closer, followed by an equally strong urge to back away. “Already, Cinderella?” he asked. “Why?”
“Janie.” She both meant it and did not.
“Why? Isn’t she sleeping?”
“If she wakes.”
“You have the night off, Bea. Live a little! What about her mother?”
“It’s me she wants. And the older girls snuck in here.” (Where Helen was, so too was Dossy, though Bea had not yet spotted her.) “I’ve got to get them home.”
As the music started up again, she wove her way through the bodies, off the dance floor, and Smitty followed her out of the rec hall, past the P.X. and a row of tents, onto the road and through the gate. There was the sentry, slow dancing with his gun; he gave it a loud, smacking kiss as they walked by. Smitty waved him off and lengthened his stride, moving ahead of Bea. He was angry with her, it was clear to see, and suddenly—she felt it in her steps, her quickening blood—she was angry too. Go find Agnes, why don’t you, she wanted to blurt out. Agnes will dance with you all night. She was prettier than Bea and knew more about men, and she had her complaints (Mrs. P. was a skinflint, Janie was spoiled, Charlie thought he owned the world), and talked, now and then, about moving back to Scotland, or had, anyway, before the war, though she had promised—they both had, to each other—never to leave Bea. Empty your pockets, Bea thought suddenly; she could not say why. Empty your pockets. No lint or coins, nappy pins or handkerchiefs, just outturned pockets, holding nothing, clean.
She turned to Smitty, then, and stood stock-still. He was a good man (though drunk as a skunk) and they had danced all night; it was a little kindness she could give. He kissed her first in a series of dry pecks, and when she did not move or protest, his tongue muscled its way inside her mouth, his hand rising up to press her cheek. They stood on the side of the road for a good five minutes. First he tasted salty from the peanuts; then he did not. It had been years since anyone had kissed her this way, but after the first shock of it, it did not feel like that long, it felt, well, regular, though she had expected, she realized, something different, more
American
, more
soldierly
. This had a plainness to it, in a good way; she might have been here, or home. Her anger was gone. A calmness, now, though she was aware, as she’d not been inside, of how full of drink she was, her bladder near bursting.
She did not kiss him back at first, but neither did she resist, letting his tongue move about inside her, bump up against her teeth (she was missing a back one, did he notice?). And then, despite herself, the prying open of a door long painted over, swollen shut. The sea breeze had started up by then. The music came fast and loud and jolly from the rec hall. The searchlight made its sweep. Even drunk, Smitty was a gentleman, his hands on her waist but lightly, their two chins shifting, two necks moving in their own kind of dance. Without quite meaning to, she kissed him back, finding there a sweetness, full and male, a foreign but sustaining food. Oh. My. It had never happened before, not like this, and the place where she found herself was watery and shape-shifting, a current tugging her along, and Bea gave in to it, queer feeling though it was; she fell inside.
Not since tending Janie as an infant had she come so close to someone, not since tending her mother on her deathbed, though this was even closer, to be inside his mouth this way and he in hers. He wanted her, that was the difference—he was no baby or old woman; he wanted her because he wanted her, because she was a woman and he a man, because (perhaps?) she was herself. She shut her eyes and raised a hand to touch his cheek, clean-shaven but still rough. She cupped his square-jawed, oddly handsome, oblong face and drew him further inside the kiss. It was he who finally pulled away and bent to look at her. She saw, to her dismay, that he was laughing.
“What?” Her skin grew tight with shame.
“See?” he said.
“What?”
“You liked it. I knew you would, under all that grumbling! I knew it!”
He was triumphant as a victorious child. He drew her toward him, kissed her brow, released her, laughing all the while, and then she was laughing too. She had never known a man to laugh like Smitty did. It took up his whole body.
“Oh,” she said, and felt another wave of laughter come on. She gasped and bent over; she had to stop or she would wet her pants. It hurt, this laughter, even as it was a relief. “Stop!” she snorted, finally, straightening up and wiping her eyes.
“Was that your first real kiss, honeybee?” Smitty asked
She shook her head, annoyed. Did he really think she’d never done it before, at her age? She’d kissed a boy from her church, another, named Donald, who worked at the ropeworks with her brother. She had let that boy, or man, really—he’d been twenty, she nineteen—go down her knickers, up her dress. Donald had been fevered when they kissed, shy but friendly when they went on walks and, twice, to dinner and a show. She had rather liked the kissing and felt complimented and worried that he drank too much and was not from Forfar; his family had come for the mills and attended no church. Still, if he’d asked her to marry him, she’d likely have said yes. Then there were layoffs, and her mother took sick, and Donald had no work and moved to Glasgow, sent two letters, disappeared. Bea had minded less than she’d thought she would, glued, as much as she could be, to her mother’s side. In America, Stewart came after her a few times in the back hall when he was drunk; he’d tried the same with Agnes (they all thought him a ne’er-do-well in this regard, though a few years later he would marry a nice Scots girl who also worked in Grace Park and be happy enough until Mr. P. died, when he’d fall apart).
Smitty began to whistle, one of the songs they’d danced to. Bea looked back at the sentry, who quite politely, if against all regulations, was facing the sea now, not the road. In the house, the light in the Porters’ bedroom blinked off, the windowpane gone black. The dim-out shades were supposed to be down, but Mrs. P. must have forgotten, and this seemed abruptly a sign of something bad. Then a shade lowered, a hand came with it. Was Mrs. P. watching, waiting up? Bea moved toward the partial cover of a stunted tree.
“How old are you, anyway?” Smitty followed her, looping an arm around her waist.
“Me?” She ducked her head. She had been dreading the question. “Not young.”
“How much not young?”
“Twenty-nine.” Her mouth lied for her, lopping off seven years (and her birthday coming up in September).
If he doubted her, he did not show it. “That’s nothing. I’m thirty-five. Are you surprised?”
“No. I mean, yes—” Surprised in which direction? “You—”
In fact, he looked his age, which was nearly her own, a mere year younger, maybe less depending on when his birthday fell. So why isn’t he married? she could hear her mother ask. So why is he courting you, or is he just out for a grope and poke? Smitty reached for her again.
“I’ve got to go,” she said faintly.
He lurched toward her.
“Thank you,” she said. Now her voice was firm. She sidestepped. Prim, she was. Prim and proper. Desperate. Horrid—to herself and, no doubt, to him. She might have curtsied; she might have dropped, a possum playing dead, into a still, small ball.
“Don’t go,” he said. “Don’t . . . why?”
“I’m sorry. Thank you,” she repeated stiffly. “And good night.”
And then she was lurching too—down the road, along the lawn, onto the porch, through the front door (still, she did not let the screen door slam). She stopped in the W.C. to release an urgent stream and was off again, up the stairs to the landing, across the landing to the top. She was running, stumbling a few times, and Janie’s door was three-quarters open as Janie liked it and Bea had left it, and there was Janie, one arm bent over her head, the sheets twisted around her legs. Bea lowered the child’s arm to her side, fixed the covers and sat at the foot of the bed.
Right. All right then.
She did not remember about the big girls being at the dance, not until later, when she was finally in her own bed, nearly asleep, her knickers washed in the sink and hung to dry (or gather damp) inside the closet. She did not picture Smitty going back through the gate, returning or not returning to the dance. She did not dwell in her own body, where she might, if she’d looked, have found her own well-guarded version of desire.
All right, then.
For a long time she sat there, catching her breath, watching Janie sleep.
T
WENTY SHADES OF
green, or was it twenty shades of gray? In the town where Bea grew up, the buildings went right down to the pavement; it was, like the smell of the jute mills, something you didn’t notice until you left. The buildings were stone and so were the sidewalks, with rarely a patch of dirt or grass between, not even on the side streets. Only the drying greens and graveyard interrupted all that rock, and Castle Hill, which you reached from the bottom of her street. You got the key from the chemist’s, slid open the iron gate and climbed up the stairs up to the top, where a turret sat without its castle, most of it missing, she’d realize later, though as children they never wondered why. There was a bit of grass at the top of the hill, and you could see the town below you, and beyond it in spring, fields and hills in twenty shades of green, and the train tracks heading out.
As a girl, Bea had liked to climb up, not to think about leaving, for she rarely did, but rather to have a good look around. There, the prison set on a hill. There, the train yard, the steam laundry, the stern brown gables of her school. Often she would take her brother along, and a few of the younger children from the neighborhood. She liked to drop the key into her pocket and feel its weight there, to chide the little ones to stay away from the edge or to organize games for them, King of the Castle, Duck Duck Goose. Later, when they were older, she and Tilly would climb up together after work. Tilly was the one to talk of leaving.
Pah
, she’d spit out from up above the town, dismissing the whole place at once. One day at dusk, Tilly gathered pebbles and began to throw them at the rooftops. Don’t, Bea pleaded. You’ll break a window or hit someone. You should throw one, Tilly told her. It might cheer you up. Bea had not thought herself uncheerful, though this was early on in her mother’s illness, when she was just beginning to understand that things would get harder and harder in ways she did not care to imagine. “If you live in a glass house—” she began, but Tilly just laughed at her, turned toward their own rooftop and lobbed a stone.
Her mother had begun in the sorting room at the laundry, where the smell of dirty linen could kill a pig, but for years, until she took sick, she’d been in ironing, doing fancy work on the hand irons, and when Bea finished up school she’d started there too, but on the gas irons. It was not a bad place. Unlike at the mills, you could hear yourself talk, and there was something about the work itself—stained collars turned clean, tea towels pressed, folded and wrapped in tissue, bachelor bundles made presentable again—that pleased Bea and also her mother, who had grown up doing laundry in an outdoor tub. At Pearl, steam ran almost everything, and if the windows stayed closed, if the air was heavy and the gas irons could give headaches or watery eyes, you learned to live with it, for it was a job and better than most. Once a year, the proprietor had a social at McLaren’s Tearoom, and when, after New Year’s, months of unclaimed fancy work sat on a shelf, there was a drawing. Bea had gotten two lace collars that way. One went with her mother to her grave; the other, she brought to America. And while her mother had taught her to iron by hand at home, she preferred the machines, to have just her little piece to worry over—two weeks of nothing but collars, then a month of nothing but right cuffs—while behind her, on the other side of the room, her mother spat on flatirons and changed a big iron for a small and sang under her breath, her voice still girlish, pure and pretty, and she seemed to sing for herself alone.