Charles Williams - Hill Girl

She smiled at me lazily, uncovered to the waist. “Do I need a nightgown? Why?”

I looked at her and began to feel less like the great planner. “I’ll be damned if I know now.”

“Go on and tell me why I need one.”

“Well, we could get you one eight feet long and made out of canvas with a drawstring at each end, so I could think out our schedule.”

She pulled the sheet over her, clear up over her head, with only one brown eye looking out. “Now go ahead. I can see your thinking is too easy to interrupt. The teenciest little thing upsets you.”

“And after we get all this stuff done, we’ll go swimming in the surf,” I went on.

“Couldn’t we go this morning? There was a sign on the pier saying they rented suits.”

“Put you in one of those gunny sacks? Like hell we will. It’d be a sacrilege, like dressing Helen of Troy in a burlap bag.”

“I knew it.” The one brown eye regarded me impishly.

“You knew what?”

“That when you did want to, you could say nicer things than anybody.”

“Nuts,” I said. “I’m a great oracle and I speak only profound truths.”

“Great oracle yourself. You’re just sweet.”

“That’s no way to speak to oracles. I’ll take it up with the union.”

She bobbed her head out from under the sheet. “Is there any room in this big schedule of yours where I’m going to get my hair cut?”

“You don’t seriously mean to cut it off, do you?” I said.

“Of course, silly. Haven’t I been telling you for the last two or three days? I’m going to have it cut real short. I saw a girl on the street the other day and hers was cut that way and curled up in little curls close to her head and it was the cutest thing you ever saw, and mine is naturally wavy so it wouldn’t be hard to make it stay and that’s the way I want to do it, and I almost went up to her and asked her where they did it and—” She was talking faster and faster and started to sit up in bed, carried away with the project. I put a hand over her mouth.

“Relax,” I said. “Saying hair to you is like breaking a fire main.” She bit my hand.

“I can get it cut today, can’t I?”

“I don’t think you ought to cut it off. I think it’s beautiful the way it is.”

“Yes, but how do you know what it’ll be like cut short? It’ll be lots prettier.”

“No. It couldn’t be.”

“It’s my hair, Bob Crane, and I’ll do what I damned please with it.” She hitched away from me on the bed with the sheet up to her ears ‘and her eyes angry. There was that stubborn-mule look in them.

“You’ll like hell do what you please,” I started, and then caught myself and shut up. After all, it was her hair, and Sam Harley had been telling her she couldn’t cut it all these years and trying to browbeat her, and look where he had wound up in her eyes. You couldn’t get anywhere by trying to bully her. She didn’t bully worth a damn. You might get your way if you overpowered her, but it wouldn’t be worth what you lost in the process.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We’ll have it done today. I didn’t mean to get tough about it. It’s just that I think it’s so lovely the way it is.”

“I’m sorry, too. Oh, Bob, I don’t want to be stubborn about it, and I won’t do it if you absolutely don’t want me to. But I know you’ll like it better the other way. And all my life somebody has been telling me what to do with it and I didn’t like it when you started to sound like Papa.”

I grinned. “Well, it’s all set I don’t want to wind up where Papa did.”

It was only about seven-thirty when we came out of the hotel, so we walked along the sea wall a long way before we went downtown, with Angelina excitedly asking questions about the shrimp boats offshore and whether any big ships tied up at the swimming pier and laughing at herself when I explained that the water was only about four feet deep under it. She insisted we go down on the beach and look for shells. After a while we came back and caught a streetcar and had breakfast at a restaurant near the interurban. She wouldn’t eat anything except some sliced bananas and kept telling me how we looked in the mirror that was on the wall across from our table.

We hunted up a beauty shop and I left her there while I went off to see about the bank draft. When we parted in front of the place, she said, “What on earth are you looking at, Bob?”

“Your hair,” I said. “I’m seeing it for the last time and I want to remember what it looked like if this new business is a flop.”

She laughed. “You’ll be back in about an hour, won’t you? I don’t like you to be away from me.”

“Yes,” I said. “But you’ll probably be in there two hours or longer. You may have to wait, because I think you’re supposed to have an appointment.”

I looked up an old friend of the Major’s who was in a cotton firm and he went down to his bank with me and helped me cash a draft. I bought a traveling bag for Angelina and had her initials put on it and told the shop to deliver it to the hotel and then went to a florist’s shop and ordered some flowers. When I had finished this I walked down Market to 24th and the car was still there across from the bar. One of the taxi drivers in front of the cab stand next door grinned at me as I went by and said, “Say, ain’t you the guy that tangled with Jack the other day?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“He’s been telling it big about what he’ll do if you ever show up down here again. Says the reason you haven’t picked up your car is because you’re afraid to come back.”

I went on to the car. His eagerness to see a free fight was a little disgusting. In front of the place I hesitated and wondered if I should go in, but then I remembered I was supposed to meet Angelina in about a half hour and went across the street and got in the car and drove off, feeling proud of myself as a married man with responsibilities. I wondered at it a little. Before, the prospect of another fight with Big-mouthed Jack would have had an irresistible allure.

I parked across the street from the beauty shop and waited. After a while she came out of the shop and stood looking up and down the street. I felt warm and happy watching her and waited a minute before I hit the horn and waved at her. The close-cropped hair was a shock, as I had known it would be, but now with the sun on it and striking fire in the curls I could see that it was going to be easy to live with and that by the time she got ready to change it again I would be just as outraged as I had been this time. I got out and went across the street and she waited for me eagerly.

“Well?” she asked.

“You’re right,” I said. “I was talking through my hat all the time. It’s lovely.”

“Feel,” she said. I put my hand on the side of her head, very gently so as not to muss anything, and felt the brush of the ringlets against my palm.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said.

She grinned at me. “No. You have too much trouble working out your schedules back there. Let’s stay downtown until we get finished.”

We went around to one of the department stores and picked out a blue bathing suit and a woolly beach robe of canary yellow and some sandals and a bathing cap. I bought some bathing trunks for myself while she ran ecstatically through their stock shopping for more clothes. We filled the car with bundles and went back to the hotel. The flowers were there in the room when we came in. She put her arms up around my neck and pulled down hard, with that way she had, like a drowning swimmer, and with her lips against my ear she whispered fiercely, “Hold me tight like this, Bob. Don’t ever let me go.”

Nineteen

Those six days were wonderful.