Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

This went on for several months, although Trevor was always afraid he was going to be fired if the bakery found out. This was perfectly true — we didn’t have a union — and we both knew what hideous strains of ugliness might be waiting for him. We rarely talked about race, that most delicate of topics.

“Happy but going nowhere,” he said of us.

“I know, I know,” I said.

We never went outside together, we never went anywhere except my place. The kids in the building tittered at us in the hall and sometimes worse. They were just kids but I hated them. We kept ourselves out of sight, like the scandal we were.

“You know what I have in Trinidad, near Port-of-Spain?” he said one night.

“No,” I said.

“You know. A wife.”

Why are you telling me this? I hadn’t known but I wasn’t stunned for more than a minute. I had a husband, didn’t I?

“Her name is Hyacinth,” he said.

This was not a good sign, that he wanted to invoke her by name. Some dopey little girl of a wife, who sat home in a tiny kitchen all day, waiting for his MoneyGrams.

“That’s how it is,” he said.

Oh, was it? He wanted me to let him go before there was trouble for either of us. He wanted me to be a good sport.

“Time to call it a day, isn’t it?” I said.

“I am so sorry,” he said. He did have manners.

In the bakery, for weeks after, we hardly spoke when we passed each other. When we moved around the kitchen and made sure our gazes didn’t meet, I felt that life had insulted us both. I tried not to hear his voice in the room, the tune of his English.

One evening I didn’t see him on his shift, and one of the counter girls said he’d left for another job. “When?” I said. “When did he go?” None of them had the name of where he’d gone—“How would I know?” they said — and I couldn’t keep asking every single person.

Ruthie said, “Is your heart broken? I’m worried about you.”

“I would say no. Not broken. Do I look devastated to you?” I said. “A little the worse for wear maybe.”

“Do you have a heart?” Ruthie said. “Just kidding.”

Ted wrote, And you know what is interesting about the Japanese? Their single-mindedness at any task. How purely they concentrate. I like their sake too!

It wasn’t really that much of a surprise, near the end of the second year, when Ted began to say in his letters that he might be staying on. What did I think? What kind of man wants to live on an air base? I thought. I still thought of Trevor every day, but I’d gotten sort of interested in a guy I’d talked to about getting a union into the bakery. He worked for the CIO, traveling to their member unions, and was on the road all the time. We hadn’t done more than have conversations, but he called from Duluth and Sioux Falls and told me goofy jokes. So it was clear that life had possibilities. If you really feel you’re needed there , I wrote to Ted.

You are such a rare wife , Ted wrote. This is hard on both of us but I will be getting a raise and sending a little more money .

“How can he keep you on ice like that?” Ruthie said. I thought Ted probably had a Japanese woman in town or maybe some secretary on the base, somebody he wasn’t about to marry. I wasn’t angry at him for this. I told people he was staying because the salary kept getting higher, and sometimes I said it was because his work was so rewarding.

My mother said, “It’s very unusual.”

“Is that a crime?” I said. “Unusualness? I thought you were on the side of that.”

Ted came back in July that year, in time for Ruthie’s wedding. I had to bring him, I couldn’t leave him home. There we were, sitting together in the synagogue, with Ruthie in white silk organza marching toward this Bob guy she was so crazy about. It made me as tearful as it made everyone else, at the same time I felt it was all a poufy fraud. Why would you vow yourself to an unlikely ideal? I snuck a look at Ted, dressed up in a navy-blue suit I’d never seen, and to my amazement he took my hand. We had been getting along at home but not saying much. Now he was rubbing my fingers, an old sweet gesture. He’s grateful to me , I thought.

So it went. Once he was gone, I did take up with Mick, the union organizer, who was really a very charming guy and never in town for more than a month at a time. He was used to talking to all kinds of people, and once you got him off his rhetoric, he had great stories. The guy whose dog always knew what time it was, the woman who sang in two languages at once: Mick could tell you about all of it.

He was very taken with me, and he didn’t like it when I neglected him for my night classes or my homework, but I pretty much stuck to my guns. He’d say, “Sweetie, just tonight,” and I could say, not too meanly, “Honey, I’m not your wife.” Ted paid the rent, such as it was, and I had no reason to take off my wedding ring. I had the protection of a husband without the nuisance of him being there. Everybody thought I was kidding myself.

Meanwhile, Mick and I, after a lot of work, got the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union voted into Mrs. Plymouth’s, much to the disgust of the burly old owner. (Mrs. Plymouth was a fiction.) The owner was very disappointed in me and would’ve fired me if he could’ve (not legal!), but I was leaving then anyway, because I’d actually managed to graduate from college.

My mother wanted to make me a dress to wear to commencement, a touching but terrible idea. My father was immensely pleased. One of his kittens was getting a diploma. “We did okay, didn’t we?” he kept saying. Mick, who was not a secret from my family, sat with him at graduation. They were great pals.

Ted wrote, Congratulations to my brilliant wife .

I got a silly English-major’s job as a proofreader at a women’s magazine, where I read pap all day (“twenty smart tricks with paper towels”) and was good at finding mistakes about baking, which I did know about. My proofreading skills catapulted me into a much better job at the National Maritime Union (okay, Mick knew someone), where I copyedited their newsletter and eventually sort of rewrote most of it and was, in time, listed on the masthead as an editor.

And what about Ted? When I moved to a better apartment, he wrote, Don’t make it so nice I don’t recognize it . How long could this go on? Have unpacked your favorite sheets , I wrote, and they lie waiting for you . Ted wrote, Miss those sheets like crazy . Did I mind that Ted didn’t come home that year? I thought I did. He said he was saving his money to improve his housing, or something like that. He stayed faithful in his monthly allotments to me, whatever that meant. Mick wasn’t around then either — he was working in Idaho for a few months — and it was a long, bleak summer. “Don’t take this personally,” Ruthie said, “but I think you’re an idiot.”

“It’s okay now, but what if you get sick?” my mother said. “Later on, I mean. What if you need help and there’s no one?” My health stood every chance of staying excellent for a while, Mick had once made me a hot toddy when I had a cold, and we all knew women lived longer than men anyway. “Someday,” my mother said, “you’re going to have to decide.”

Lots of people at the Maritime Union knew Mick, but my name was still Mrs. Pfeiffer to them. I never lied about any of my life, when asked, and because of that I was considered very frank and outspoken. Imagine that. The job suited me — the old thuggish union guys in their rumpled suits, the seamen getting their papers, the no-nonsense women in the office. And every day I was glad to have something to do with keeping the boot of heedless profit off the necks of workers. The newsletter was a little hokey, but I did my best.