Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

But there was another voice inside her head, and the more she tried to ignore it, the louder and more insistent it became. What if she had been wrong about purity, wrong about what white signified — wrong about everything! The incident at the motel had worried Tula. It seemed an indication that her instincts were wildly off-kilter. Why had she thought the motel was a good place to take Will? Why had she insisted on cleaning behind the toilet? And why hadn’t she realized that no amount of scrubbing could ever change the motel’s drab colors and flimsy wallboard into something more permanent and respectable? She still thought that the Rainbow banner should be re-envisioned, but now she wondered if the added stripe should be black, with all that blackness signified. In any case, the idea of purity suddenly seemed childish and naïve. Were the women who came to the clinic impure? And who had first thought to apply the concept of purity to women so that they could forever after be held to an impossible standard and found wanting?

Tula had resolved to do better by Will, and just before he left for the army, she had tried again to arrange a special evening. Mr. and Mrs. Winslow had gone out of town for a few days, and Tula had volunteered to keep an eye on their house. She invited Will to go there with her, and after making sure the plants were watered and everything was in order, she gave him a tour of the upstairs, ending with the master bedroom.

The room was dominated by an enormous bed that was draped in flounced bed coverings and piled with satin pillows. At the windows, silk curtains fell in shimmering puddles to the floor, and an entire wall was hung with paintings of beautiful women cuddling lapdogs or brushing their hair. The setting was the opposite of the motel room in every regard, and Tula’s heart was thumping erratically as she drew Will across the threshold and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Instead of sitting beside her, Will wanted to peer into the closets and turn on the water in the roomy shower. “Get a load of this!” he exclaimed. “Who ever thought of making the water come out from the sides!”

The bathroom was scrupulously clean. No suspicious yellow scum or lint or curls of pubic hair marred its gleaming surfaces. Instead, there were stacks of fluffy towels and dishes of fragrant, unused soap. Only belatedly did Tula realize that it was clean because her own mother had worked herself to the bone to keep it that way. Will insisted on peering into every cupboard and sniffing every vial of perfume before he sat down beside Tula and told her he respected her too much to force her into anything. “I understand about purity now,” he said. “It took me a while, and even if I don’t completely understand it, I know that whatever’s important to you should be just as important to me.”

Tula wasn’t sure how it all happened, but before she knew it, she and Will were eating ice cream at the Main Street Arcade and promising to wait for each other, and then they were kissing each other good-bye. Tears were oozing from her eyes as she said, “I’ll think about you, Will. I’ll think about you every day.”

“I’ll think about you too, Tula.”

“Do you have the picture I gave you?”

“I’ll keep it in a special pocket. Right next to my lucky crystal and my knife.”

“I have your picture too. It’s sitting right beside my bed, so it’s the first thing I see every morning and the last thing I see at night.”

And then she was waving from her doorstep and Will was gone and the waters of her life closed over him. Some days, if she didn’t count the persistent ache in her heart, it was almost as if he had never been part of it at all.

After the ceremony, the new officers stood in a long line to receive the good wishes of the assembly. Mrs. Winslow breezed around the room, her head held high, curls bouncing stiffly on her head. “You still have a whole year to figure things out,” she said when she saw Tula standing in a corner by herself. At first, Tula thought she was talking about Will, but of course she wasn’t.

“Yes ma’am,” said Tula.

“A lot can happen in a year! Just keep in mind that Mr. Winslow is always looking for good secretarial help at the plant. He might even have a summer position so you can start to learn the ropes. And of course I need household help every now and then.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Tula again. It was as if she had already given up on college, already begun scrubbing bathrooms alongside her mother, already started fading into the grimy shadows of the motel or flushing little pieces of herself down the sparkling toilets of the rich people’s homes.

11.4 Lyle

By the time Will left for the army, Maggie had been gone more than six months. For weeks afterward, Lyle passed shadowlike through the concrete expanse of the munitions factory, avoiding people who approached to congratulate him, as if he were the heroic one. If Jimmy raised his hand from across the parking lot, Lyle pretended not to see him. Then, at the end of April, he took two days off to visit Will before he shipped out overseas. The day he returned, MacBride called him into his office and said, “I know things have been difficult for you, Lyle, but we have standards to uphold.”

“Yes sir,” said Lyle, snapping his shoulders back and speaking crisply. He had spent the last two days watching Will and his fellow soldiers stand at attention and salute, and some of their spit and polish had rubbed off on him.

“It’s not that I don’t know things have been a little rough,” said MacBride.

“Yes sir,” replied Lyle.

“The thing is, I need people who can give me one hundred percent.”

MacBride went on about inputs and outputs and effort and reward while Lyle studied the worn face in front of him, with its squinting eyes and wrinkled skin and specks of ingrained dirt, and wondered if MacBride was happy or at least content.

“I hope you’ll see this as an opportunity,” said MacBride. Then he said he’d be happy to write a recommendation for Lyle and that his final paycheck would be sent to his home. Lyle scanned the cluttered cubicle for clues to his future, but the dusty workplace safety manual and the chipped metal task lamp and the grimy work orders tacked to the bulletin board next to the photograph of MacBride’s son and grandson holding fishing poles seemed like artifacts from an exhibit about the distant past.

“I have a son,” he said. He almost told MacBride that he had missed work because he had been seeing his son off to war, but the rule was that absences were to be cleared in advance, and he hadn’t done that.

“Family,” said MacBride. “That’s what it’s all about.”

Most of Lyle’s acquaintances couldn’t remember whether he attended the high school graduation or not. Afterward they said, “Didn’t see you up at school,” despite the fact that Lyle had been sitting in the R section, right where he was supposed to sit. Will wasn’t there to walk across the stage, but there was a flag with a wooden stick strapped to the empty chair between Rafe Rodriguez and Stucky Place. August Winslow had been asked to give the graduation speech, and the principal beamed out at the audience as he introduced him.

“Our speaker was recently honored as one of Red Bud’s great men, so we are lucky to have him with us today,” he said.

Winslow looked like a politician with his dark suit and silver hair. “I’m probably not the greatest of the great, but the others were unavailable,” he said, which made the audience laugh since everybody knew that all of the other men on Sammi Green’s list were long since deceased.

Winslow spoke about individual strands in the strong rope of the American economy. He said that local businesses like the one he worked for were always happy to welcome new graduates, but that some of the young people before him would spread their wings and fly before coming home again and others would soar farther afield, using what they had learned right there at Red Bud High to help make distant communities stronger. He said “freedom” and “heartland” and “sea to shining sea.” He made special mention of two boys who were joining the armed services immediately after graduation, and then he saluted the flag on Will’s chair and everybody clapped.