Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged

It began immediately. For the rest of that morning she sat in the telephone office rest room, staring at the tiled floor, wiping her nose on cheap toilet paper, crying quietly, her recently curled strawberry blonde hair fallen forward about her abashed and stricken face and her slim white neck bowed and exposed as if she were waiting for some final blow of some Holt County inquisitor’s ax. All of that — that dreadful individual remorse and despair and submission — while the fan overhead went on making its maddening little noise and while the other women out in the front office continued to talk about her and to send a representative from among themselves every fifteen minutes or so to check on her. She stayed in the rest room all that morning. Then at noon one of the women drove her home.

For the rest of that spring she drank. In the evenings she went home after work and sat in front of the television, drinking cheap wine or vodka until she fell asleep. And on the weekends that spring she went out to the bars in town, going out alone now to the same places where previously she and Jack had gone together. Invariably she drank until the bars were closed. Then, in time, she began to take someone home with her too. She brought them back to that little bedroom in the house on Chicago Street, and the bed wasn’t even made anymore and the sheets smelled of sweat and the stale smoke of old cigarettes. But none of that was important to her now. It was only important to her that he — whoever he was, and there were a lot of them during those months of late spring and early summer, and even occasionally more than one at the same time — it was only important that he do his own laundry. She insisted on that.

By June she was a mess. She was completely lost and pitiable. And people in Holt did pity her too — the women, in particular, but some of the men as well, when they thought about it. They all felt sorry for her. But no one knew what to do for her either. Finally, however, some unexpected help came from the outside. It came in the guise of a little mousy middle-aged man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a white shirt and tie: a Mr. T. Bleven McGill. He was a telephone company supervisor and it turned out that he had a heart. T. Bleven McGill persuaded Wanda Jo to apply for a transfer to another office. Thus, at the end of June in 1971, she moved to Pueblo. And so far as I know she is there still.

But before she left she did one thing — something which has become a part of Holt County legend too — she delivered that last brown paper bag of clothes to Jack. They were all clean and dutifully laundered of course. In fact they still smelled faintly of soap. She had washed them during that week just prior to the time that Jack had gone down to Tulsa to the manager’s convention, and naturally when he returned he hadn’t thought to pick them up. Now Wanda Jo presented them to him one afternoon while he was at the elevator office. Bob Thomas and several other men were there too. She didn’t say anything to Jack, nor to any of the others. She merely set the bag on the counter, looked at Jack, stared at him, met his eyes, and then swept her glance over the other men. Finally she turned and walked out.

After she had gone Burdette looked inside the paper bag. He recognized the contents; they were his clothes all right, but they had been changed. They had been cut by a razor or by a pair of scissors, sliced methodically, bitterly, into tiny pieces, the biggest of which was no larger than a single square in a checkerboard or a little girl’s hair ribbon: all his socks and shirts and pants and underwear. Burdette dumped the things out onto the counter.

“Huh,” he said to other men in the office. “You reckon this means we’re through? You suppose this means she won’t be doing my laundry no more?”

Bob Thomas and a couple of the men laughed.

“But hell,” Jack said. “She was a nice girl. Only she always was a little short on a sense of humor.”

She was the exact opposite of what people in Holt thought she would be. That is, she was the exact opposite of what people in Holt thought she would have to be. If Burdette was going to marry her, if he was going to leave someone as beautiful and selfless and long-suffering as Wanda Jo Evans was and then marry someone else, she would have to be something. At the very least she would have to be some husky-voiced Oklahoma version of Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe.

She wasn’t, though. She wasn’t like that at all.

Still from the very beginning Burdette himself misled people about her. That Thursday morning in April, after he had come back from Tulsa the night before and had then returned to work at the elevator the next day, he told Arch Withers about her. And what he told Withers at least implied that she was the kind of woman people still expected her to be. Also, since it was from him, from Arch Withers, that people first heard about her and since no one had met her yet or had seen her on Main Street, and wouldn’t see her or meet for another three or four hours — not until noon when she would leave the Letitia Hotel and meet Burdette at the Holt Cafe for lunch — for the length of that one morning (which was still the same morning that Wanda Jo Evans was crying privately, miserably, in the telephone office rest room) people in Holt assumed that she would have to be blonde at least, even if she wasn’t also brassy and vacuous and loud, a kind of empty-headed lipsticky Sooner starlet.

That Thursday morning back in April, Arch Withers had been waiting for Burdette near the rough plank steps leading up to the elevator office. He was standing on the gravel in the morning sun, leaning up against the fender of his old black pickup, chewing on a flat toothpick and cleaning his fingernails. By the time Burdette arrived at eight o’clock that morning Withers had been waiting for him for nearly an hour. Then Burdette drove up in the company vehicle he had taken down to Tulsa. He got out and walked over to Withers.

“Well,” Withers said. “What happened? Did you get tired of motel food and decide it was time to come home again?”

“No. I liked their food all right,” Burdette said. “Their beds was satisfactory too.”

“So it wasn’t that. Well that’s something at least. I wouldn’t want to think you missed any meals or lost any sleep on our account — just because you finally come back two days after you was supposed to and never called nobody the whole time and never even answered the phone when somebody else tried to call you.”

“Arch,” Burdette said, “you sound a little upset.”

“That so?”

“Yeah you do. And it doesn’t become you.”

“Then you’ll have to excuse me,” Withers said. “Maybe I ought to apologize. Because I’m not upset, goddamn it. I’m mad. Just where in the goddamn hell have you been all this time anyhow?”

Burdette told him about Jessie Miller then, about meeting her in the Holiday Inn lobby where she was showing that continuous monotonous film about hybrid seed corn. He told Withers about dancing with her. “She was pretty good-looking too,” he said.

“Was she?” Withers said. “Then I guess I’m glad for you. But what the hell’s that got to do with anything?”

“Quite a lot,” Burdette said.

“How do you mean?”

“Well. I married her.”

“What?”

“I married her.”

“The hell you did.”

“That’s right. I’m a old married man now. Like everybody else.”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Withers said. “I thought you had better sense.”

Then, as Arch Withers told it later himself, he chewed his toothpick for a while and studied Burdette, looking him up and down as if Burdette were some sudden bump in the evolution of humankind, and not an attractive one necessarily but as if he were a talking mannequin, say, or an enormous and potentially dangerous aberration.