Alice McDermott - After This

She unwrapped the lamb chops from their white butcher paper and peeled a few potatoes and opened a can of peas. Her father came in with the newspaper under his arm and then swatted her on the hip with it as he went to the table to sit down. And then Jimmy came in still wearing his overcoat to say, “What’s this? What’s this?” And then told their father with his hands on his hips that George was taking “our miss here” out to dinner. And her father lowered the paper and smiled at her-his round, florid face and his sparse white hair which he no longer bothered to slick down with water or tonic, being mostly housebound and hardly out of his slippers all week long-and only began to pout a little, Jimmy too, when she set the plate of lamb chops and the mint jelly and the mashed potatoes and peas in their bowls on the table and then pulled off her apron and said, “I’m just going to take a shower.”

“Be sure to put it back,” Jimmy said and winked at her father, but she was barely out of the small kitchen before the two men faced each other across the table, across the empty place where she usually sat between them, and glimpsed the possibility of a change in their routine.

George took her arm again, walking across the sidewalk to his car. He opened the car door for her and once she was inside, he leaned down to smile through the glass. And once inside himself, he took the wheel and told her without prompting that they were going to a steak house downtown that a friend had recommended. His hands on the steering wheel were short and clean and it slowly dawned on her that his fingernails were buffed, perhaps even manicured. She looked at his ear, under the brim of his hat. Sometime since this afternoon, he’d stopped for a haircut, too. The thought flattered her, even made her shy as he talked about this pal of his who knew from steak houses and fish markets, a connoisseur of mushrooms and artichokes who actually ordered cheese for dessert, his tastes were so refined. He took his eyes from the road for a minute to look at her, smiling again, laughing as he spoke, being charming even as she, smiling back at him, found herself growing demure.

In the restaurant, he told her everything about himself that he had already told them over dinners at home-a Midwest childhood, a kidney condition that kept him out of the service, a stint at the Navy Yard before the job at the brewery. She merely nodded, trying to look attentive but actually studying his face, which was pleasant enough, studying his table manners, which were passable but in need of certain refinements-he buttered the back of his entire roll and put the half-bitten piece on the edge of his dinner plate.

In the car coming home he kept his hand on the seat between them. She wished out loud for the weekend and then told him a little about Pauline, and the story of Adele and Mr. Someone-or-Other. He nodded, his eyes on the road. She wasn’t sure he followed, or had any interest. She wondered if he thought this was girlish gossip that she was foolishly telling him, if he had missed her point that girlish gossip was what she had sought to avoid. The uncertainty that had clouded his face this afternoon in the moment after he’d asked her out to dinner was now a tangible presence in the car as they approached her building and the time for some kind of conclusion to this odd impulse of his had finally come.

“Thanks so much for this,” she said as he pulled to the curb. She put the strap of her pocketbook over her arm, put her hand on the door handle. “You really didn’t have to.”

He seemed to rouse himself from a growing disengagement. “I wanted to,” he said. “It was nice to have a chance to get to know you better,” he added, although she could not imagine a single thing he might have learned. He leaned toward her, slowly raising his hand to his hat and then doffing it quickly, as if taken by surprise, when she leaned forward to meet him. And this, she thought, of course, was what the whole evening had been for, the delightful feel of his rough cheek against her fingertips, his hand and lips and warm breath. The lingering taste of coffee in his mouth. Something awkward and lovely (a drumming on the roof, was it rain?) and absurd about Jimmy’s pal George moving his arm around her waist, pressing his hat into her back, and her fingers finding the newly trimmed border of his hair. All that trying to be charming and trying to be demure and hoping to look attentive and to speak well and wondering how this strange impulse of his will come to a conclusion put aside now that they had agreed, finally, that this, after all, was simply what they’d wanted. The warmth of it, the moment’s respite.

Jimmy was in the living room, in his undershirt, reading the Daily News beside a single lamp. He lowered the paper and began to fold it neatly as soon as she came in, but asked only where she had eaten before he said good night. She went into the kitchen and was surprised to find the dishes, including the serving bowls, washed and drying in the dish rack and the remaining lamb chop, a scoop of mashed potatoes, and a handful of peas on a plate in the icebox, another turned over it. She wondered at their logic: Had they thought she’d be too nervous to eat with George? Or that she’d just nibble, hoping to appear dainty, like Scarlett O’Hara at Twelve Oaks? She decided they simply didn’t know what to do with her portion: something ungenerous about eating it themselves, something unkind about throwing it away. She wiped down the kitchen table and the counter and swept the floor, and then ran into Jimmy in the hallway, now in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, as he came out of the bathroom. He held the glass of water he would put by his bedside, on the nightstand between his bed and their father’s.

“Sleep tight,” he whispered, and then surprised her by putting his arms around her, the glass at her back. “Our Mary Rose,” he said, and kissed her head, as if he were bidding her a fond farewell.

She laughed. There could be worse lives than this lonely one. There could be life married to someone like George.

In her own room, she pulled back the covers, took the rosary beads from under her pillow, and got into bed. Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious Mysteries. She chose the Joyful for this night-another day gone, not so bad, a date no less-but in her weariness forgot where she had begun and followed the Visitation with Jesus being lost in the Temple and then Mary’s assumption into heaven, wondering all the while just who-Mr. Who?-had wiped the tear from Adele’s eye.

The next afternoon she lit her candle and said her prayer, and then playfully linked arms with poor Pauline who always waited at the back of the church, no longer on speaking terms with Catholicism. It was a lovely afternoon, a bright afternoon in spring that even Pauline was taking some pleasure in (there were her good new shoes in a rich burgundy, a fresh Danish she’d had this morning at coffee break, a blouse she had made last night from a remnant of green silk and placed on Mary’s desk this morning, because, she’d said, it would only fit someone without much of a chest). There wasn’t a tear to be seen on the faces of the men and women in the street as the two of them walked down to Schrafft’s. Only him, again, leaning by the door, suit jacket and fedora, the sunlight striking gold, the leg he had favored bent back and pressed against the building. He was smoking a cigarette. He was the handsomest man on the block. He was waiting for her.

She felt Pauline beside her, stiffening against his greeting. She thought, giving him her name, how there was a trace of sorrow in every joy. She thought, as he held the door, smiling at her, Poor George.

The day before Mary and John Keane were married, Pauline tripped on the sidewalk outside her building (the landlord was somehow to blame) and broke her wrist. When she appears in photographs of that day, her dark suit is slashed by a white sling, and under her stylish turban, her big powdered face is dignified, carved in ivory, only a certain determination about the jaw and the mouth betraying a reluctant smile.