Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

The dog lolled against her legs as she stood peeling the potatoes, and the warmth of its body touched cold, loveless places and slowed the clock a little.

Harold said, “I just remembered, a fellow down at the plant told me about some stuff the other day. You spray this junk on, see, and what happens is, it kills all the weeds but not the flowers.”

“I don’t believe it,” Ruth said. “I don’t believe that about the jungle and the native women, either.”

Harold looked injured. “Well, for crying out loud, I’m not making it up.”

“You’re gullible, Harold. You’ve always been gullible.”

Harold didn’t know what gullible meant, and Ruth knew he didn’t know. She stared at him in triumph until Harold dropped his eyes.

“I wonder how much he charges,” Hazel said.

Ruth put down the paring knife. “Who?”

“The Mexican gardener that works next door.”

“Have you gone out of your mind? Hiring somebody to do a little job like digging?... You must be crazy, Hazel. Why, Harold’s going to do it. He promised, next Sunday. Aren’t you, Harold?”

“Sure, I am. Sure.”

“There,” Ruth said. “He’s promised on his word of honor he’ll do it on Sunday. Won’t you, Harold?”

“Absolutely.”

Hazel walked back to the table and sat down with great deliberation.

“Listen, you two. Who’s running this joint? Who pays most of the bills? Who owns the house?”

“Well, I didn’t say anything, Haze,” Harold said anxiously. “I hardly opened my mouth.”

“You better not. It’s my house, and if I want it to look respectable, by Jesus it’s going to look respectable!”

“Sure, sure it is.”

“And if I want flowers around it, by Jesus I’m going to have flowers around it, see?”

“You bet you are, Haze.”

“Distinction, that’s what I want, a distinguished-looking house with some class to it.”

“People in our circumstances hiring a gardener ,” Ruth said bitterly.

“I didn’t say for sure I was going to. I said I wonder how much he charges.”

“A dollar an hour, at least a dollar an hour. And a Mexican, at that. Why, I–I just wouldn’t feel safe in the house if he was out there.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t trust them, any of them... Of course I realize I have no voice in the matter. I’m living on your charity for the present.”

“Baloney,” Hazel said kindly. Her irritation had passed. She was always happiest when she was following her impulses and her current impulse was to hire the Mexican gardener and live in a distinguished-looking house waiting for a distinguished-looking millionaire.

Hazel rarely suffered from second thoughts. Once a decision was made, it seemed good, and Hazel stuck by it the way she stuck by her friends.

A nice yard would (a) increase the value of the house, (b) look pretty, (c) show up the neighbors, and (d) provide a suitable background for gentlemen friends.

Humming to herself Hazel went out into the back yard, gathered up all the broken halves of beer bottles sticking out of the gopher holes, and threw them in the trash can. Then she went over to the house next door and rang the front doorbell.

Half an hour later she returned with a pleasant glow induced by two glasses of cooking sherry, and a piece of paper bearing the address and phone number of Santana Escobar. She stood looking out of the kitchen window at the back yard. Tomorrow, Hazel thought, everything would be different; the muss and clutter would be gone, and the whole place would be blooming with gardenias and camellias, no more of those lousy geraniums.

Santana. The very name sounded prophetic, a symbol of a brand-new life. She had no clear plans for this new life beyond the fact that it would be different from the old one, and that at some point in it her millionaire would turn up, or at least someone with a little money like Mr. Cooke.

It’s the beginning, Hazel thought solemnly. It’s the beginning of a new life.

She wanted to communicate this thought to someone, not to Ruth who would blame it on the sherry, or to Harold and Josephine who had their own new life cut out for them, but to someone like George. George was very keen on new beginnings. He would understand perfectly.

She phoned the Beachcomber.

“George?”

“George isn’t here. Who’s that?”

“It’s me, Willie. Hazel.”

“Oh, hello, Hazel. This business about George, well, he left about an hour ago. Didn’t say where he was going, just walked off. There was some rumpus in the kitchen. He fired one of the girls. He lost his temper. You know George, he gets fussed up. Then, wham. ”

“You said it, wham. Which girl did he fire, Willie?”

“One of the new ones. I forget her name.”

“Ruby?”

“Could well have been Ruby. Anyway, we’re short one girl and we’re short George. If you run into him anywhere, tell him we’ve got a crowd here, will you?”

“I’ll do that, Willie. So long.”

Hazel put down the phone.

In spite of George’s defection, it was still the beginning of a new life, and since Harold had gone back to work and Josephine was still asleep there was no one to tell but Ruth. She told Ruth.

“You shouldn’t drink in the afternoon,” Ruth said.

“Ruby? Let me think a minute.” Mrs. Freeman paused, searching for Ruby amid the tissue of fact and fiction that enveloped her mind.

“Ruby MacCormick,” George said.

“Oh, that’s our new girl, yes. We get so many here. They come and go. I hardly have time to catch their names.”

“I’d like to speak to her.”

“Now let me think, is she in or out? Wait a minute and I’ll go see. Sit down on the porch and make yourself easy.”

“Thank you.”

George sat down on a redwood bench beside the sign that identified the house: “Mrs. Freeman’s Tourist Home, Ladies Only, Reasonable Rates, Ocean View.” The bench creaked under his weight and he got up again, brushing off the seat of his trousers. He didn’t actually want to sit down anyway. He wanted to do something violent, to run away as fast as he could. But at the same time he wanted to have Ruby running along beside him, just as violent as he. He gazed blindly at Mrs. Freeman’s Ocean View — nineteen blocks down the highway a tiny strip of sea was visible — and wondered what he could say to Ruby to make everything all right.

On the highway in front of the house, cars hurried north to San Luis Obispo and San Francisco, and south to Los Angeles and San Diego. George wished that he were in one of them. He felt split in two. Half of him was headed for San Francisco, but the real half stood on Mrs. Freeman’s soot-covered porch, nervous and scared like a gangling adolescent.

Mrs. Freeman reappeared. She had taken off her apron, out of deference to George’s Buick, silk shirt, and masculinity in general.

“She’s in. She’ll be right down. What did you say your name was?”

“Anderson.”

“Any relation to the Anderson that makes that frozen split-pea soup?”

“No.”

“I just wondered.” Mrs. Freeman was disappointed. She had made a habit of asking people if they were connected with well-known names ever since she had met, down at the beach, a lady who claimed to be a second cousin of Joan Blondell, the movie actress. Mrs. Freeman had relayed this news to all of her pen pals back east, changing second cousin to first cousin because it was practically the same thing anyway and sounded more interesting.

“All these frozen things they make nowadays, it’s a miracle of science,” Mrs. Freeman said thoughtfully. “In my opinion, science is making great strides.”