Wives and Lovers

7

Mr. Escobar arrived for work on Saturday morning. He steered his bicycle with his right hand, and with his left he balanced over his shoulder his own tools, a rake, a spading fork, a hedge clipper and a shovel as polished and sharp as a carving knife. In his bicycle basket he carried an oiled rag, a small wooden box which he used to trap gophers, a bottle of Pepsi-Cola, and three bologna on rye sandwiches moistened with cold beans.

He drove up Mrs. Anderson’s lane and parked his bicycle in the garage. A small black and white dog came bouncing across the yard. When Escobar opened the gate the dog danced wildly around his legs and finally flung itself on his heavy boots, stomach up. Escobar leaned down and rubbed its stomach. The friendly dog was a good omen. Only friendly people kept friendly dogs.

“Little fellow,” Escobar said. “Hello, pretty little fellow.”

Wendy got up and shook herself. Then she started to explore with her nose every inch of his boots. Escobar cleaned his boots almost daily but they never quite lost the smell of fertilizer. Sometimes Lucia, his wife, complained of this. She was a city girl, born and raised in San Diego, and she considered manure (even steer manure swept off cement floors) as rather coarse and unpleasant. When Escobar tried to explain to her that manure was sometimes necessary as food for plants, Lucia wasn’t quite convinced. She kept two potted geraniums on the windowsill in the kitchen and they got along nicely without fertilizer, only a little water now and then.

The boots moved across the yard and Wendy followed them, sniffing, and yelping in frustration when they wouldn’t stand still.

Ruth came to the screen door. “Be quiet, Wendy.”

“He is a pretty little fellow,” Escobar said.

“It’s a she. A girl. Her name’s Wendy.”

“She’s a pretty little fellow.”

“She’s only a pup, eight months old. Naturally” — Ruth’s laugh came through the door, sharp and defensive — “naturally she’s not a thoroughbred.”

Escobar nodded cautiously. He was not certain what a thoroughbred dog was, since he had always connected the word with horses. He could not see Ruth clearly through the screen door, but he didn’t like her sound, and in spite of the omen of the friendly dog, Escobar was uneasy. He hoped the woman would stay on the other side of the screen door.

“Mrs. Anderson’s gone to work,” Ruth said. “I’m her cousin. I’ll be here all morning if you want to consult me.”

“Yes, boss.”

“Mrs. Anderson said just to start in. The tools are in the garage. I noticed, I happened to be looking out the window, and I noticed you brought some extra ones.”

He nodded again and began to back away from the porch. The dog followed him and Ruth called her back.

“Wendy, come here.”

“Go on, little fellow,” Escobar said, waving his hand toward the house. “Go on.”

The dog paused and Ruth said, “Come and get your goody. Here’s your goody. Come on.”

She opened the door and the dog streaked into the house. Escobar had a momentary glimpse of her before she closed the door again. She was an old lady with white hair.

Ruth fed Wendy the rest of the scrambled eggs from breakfast, bit by bit, and as she fed her she talked. This was Ruth’s hour — two of them had gone to work, and the other one was still in bed — and she intended to spend it as she usually did. But with the Mexican out in the yard, she felt self-conscious, as if he might be eavesdropping. He couldn’t hear anything, of course, since she talked in whispers to avoid waking Josephine, but still he was there, and the words she used to the dog were a little different from usual.

“There, my pretty, there’s your goody. What a glutton you are. What a fat little glutton. And the manners! Sniffing people like that, my goodness, what bad manners!”

He probably smells, Ruth thought. He looked clean enough but they all smelled under the surface. Their dark skins didn’t show the dirt and they were too lazy to wash if it wasn’t necessary. Bone-lazy. She would have to supervise him and see that he didn’t cheat Hazel out of her hard-earned money by standing around watering things instead of really working, or by taking too much time to eat his lunch. Hazel was too easy on other people and too easy on herself as well.

You had to watch these Mexicans very carefully. They were sly. They put on a great show of innocence and stupidity but Ruth saw through that clearly enough. She had had several of them in her fifth-grade class before she lost her job, and one of them in particular was very sly. He had curly black hair and brown eyes like an angel’s, but Ruth knew that the instant she turned her back the Mexican boy did something. What this something was or how he did it, she never knew, but she knew it was done. The boy terrified her and she reported him to the principal at least once a week. “He does something, Mr. Jamieson, I swear it, I feeI it!” “I think you need a rest, Miss Kane.”

That had been two years ago, but she still thought of the Mexican boy, she thought of his smooth innocent forehead and the dark angel’s eyes. In the middle of the night she tried and tried to figure out what he had done, until desperation seized her and she had to cram her fist into her mouth to keep from screaming and waking Hazel. The boy had become a symbol of fascinating, exciting, evil things she dared not name.

You need a rest, Miss Kane.

To: The Superintendent of Schools, Ernest Colfax, A.M.

From: Percy Hoag, M.D.

I advise an immediate medical leave of absence for Miss Ruth Kane, such leave to extend for an indefinite period of time.

She was only thirty-six, but her hair was white and her skin and eyes were pale as if she had been bleeding internally for years.

Josephine called from the bedroom, “Ruth.”

“Coming.”

She went through the dining room, drying her hands on her apron, and opened the door of Josephine’s bedroom.

“Oh dear,” Josephine said. “I woke up — what time is it?”

“Nine.”

“Oh dear.”

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t moved yet.” She hadn’t moved at all during the night. She’d gone to sleep on her back with her head propped on two pillows, and now she was awake in the same position, and not a strand of her long brown hair was out of place. Nearly every night Josephine slept like this, quietly and without dreams, and when she woke up she lay without moving for a long time, remote and self-contained. During the day she brooded or wept, she had placid daydreams or she quarreled, she had headaches and spells of overwhelming fear. But at night she entered another world, and emerging from it in the morning she was rejuvenated. Her face was untroubled, her eyes clear and lustrous, and her skin seemed to glow. It was as if she drew nourishment, during sleep, from a part of her mind or body that she didn’t know existed.

“Something woke me,” Josephine said. “A noise. There, you hear it?”

They listened and heard just outside the window the spasmodic sounds of Escobar’s shovel. The faint shriek as it cut the ground, and the smack as Escobar spanked each clod of earth to free the roots of the weeds.

“That’s the Mexican,” Ruth said.

“So early.”

“Do you want a graham cracker before you get out of bed?”

“No, no, I think—” Josephine moved her head experimentally. “No. Is Harold—? Of course. Oh dear. I guess I’ll get up. It’s Saturday, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Harold’s off this afternoon. It’s nice having Harold around. The days—” She helped herself up with her elbows — “awfully long sometimes. The waiting — hand me my corset, will you? — four months yet, oh dear.”

She stood up and began lacing up the maternity corset, not too tight, just tight enough to give her some support. She was small-boned and slender, and her condition was becoming much too noticeable.

“I wish I was taller,” she said. “If you’re tall you can carry things off. Like clothes.”

Ruth was making the bed. When Josephine paused between sentences Ruth could hear the gentle shriek, smack, shriek, smack, of Escobar’s shovel. He’s working. Well, he’d better be. I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll see Hazel doesn’t get cheated.

She went to the window and peered out through layers of mauve net curtains. He was only two feet away from her. He had rolled up the sleeves of his plaid shirt and opened the collar. He wore a yellow undershirt. Sweat glistened on his forehead and in the crooks of his elbows, and his hair was a cap of wet black silk. He was breathing through his mouth. She could see part of his lower front teeth, and they were very white, almost as if he’d cleaned them.

He looked up suddenly and his eyes pierced the mauve net curtains like needles. She stepped back with a shock, feeling the needles in her breasts and her stomach. Her insides curled up and then expanded, disintegrated, dissolved into fluid. I feel quite faint. It’s the heat. It’s going to be a hot day.

“It’s going to be quite a hot day,” she said.

“Oh, I hope not,” Josephine said. “I feel the heat so. Remember? — I never used to mind the heat— Remember? — I never even sweated. And now — it’s the extra weight, don’t you think? Harold says I should sweat if I’m hot. Otherwise the poison stays in my system.”

Josephine said the same things nearly every morning. Her mind revolved in ever-decreasing circles as her body became larger. I feel, how do I feel? Have I a headache? I wish I was taller. The heat bothers me. Harold says. Harold, Harold.

Always she referred to Harold. No matter how small the circle got, Harold was right there in the middle of it, sometimes sliding along smoothly and sometimes getting bounced and jostled and bruised beyond all recognition.

Harold was Josephine’s second husband. Her first had been a silent irascible man, a veterinary doctor named Bener. Though he kept no pets of his own, Bener had a great deal of patience with the animals he boarded and treated. He had none at all with Josephine, and it was rather a relief to both of them when he died quietly one night, of coronary thrombosis, leaving all his money to his mother and his brother Jack. Josephine later received some of it under the Community Property Law. She spent it on clothes and then she married Harold.

She married Harold partly because he was handsome and partly because he was the exact opposite of Bener. In their three years together Harold had never spoken to her sharply, and even lately, when she wept or abused him and all men, including God, Harold remained tender and took the abuse as being well deserved.

Harold was no ball of fire, but he was a good deal sharper than most people thought. He showed up badly in front of Hazel (his older sister) and Ruth (his conscience). In their presence he was always making inconsequential remarks, holding his hand up to his mouth as he spoke, as if in apology. Alone with Josephine he was different and talked quite freely about the government and the Teamsters Union, which had nice new headquarters downtown with a neon sign, and the atom bomb, which something would have to be done about, no matter if the baby turned out to be a boy or a girl.

The others might underestimate Harold, mistaking his good nature for laziness, and his dreaminess for impracticality, but Josephine knew better. Make no mistake, Harold thought great thoughts as he drove his truck.

Josephine took her toothbrush and tube of toothpaste from her bureau drawer and carried them into the bathroom. She squeezed a quarter of an inch of paste onto her brush and thought, by the time this tube is finished, I’ll know. I’ll be dead or the baby will be dead or we’ll both be alive and all right and Harold will be a father. By the time—

She had an impulse to press the tube and squeeze out the future inch by inch, an inch for each day, squeeze out the time, a long white fragile ribbon of toothpaste.

She replaced the cap, soberly. It was a brand-new tube, giant size, eighty-nine cents, and it would last a long, long time.

“—for breakfast?” Ruth’s voice floated into the turning pool of her thoughts.

“Oh. Anything. I’m not very hungry. Shredded wheat, maybe.”

“Hot or cold?”

“Cold. It’s going to be a hot day.” She was sweating already. The poison was seeping out of her system through her pores, underneath the maternity corset and the wraparound skirt and flowered smock. “No, I think I’ll take it hot, don’t you think so, Ruth?”

“I don’t know, it depends on how you feel.”

“Oh, cold then. It doesn’t matter. Anything.”

She followed Ruth into the kitchen like a sheep, and sat down heavily at the table.

“It’s such a nice day,” she said. “We should all do something, go down to the beach.”

“We can’t,” Ruth said sharply. “Not with the Mexican here. He’d probably go to sleep if he thought no one was watching him.”

Josephine smiled pensively. “Mexican babies are cute.”

“The very small ones.”

“And Chinese babies. I saw a Chinese baby in a buggy outside the Safeway yesterday. The way it looked at me! So knowing. It seems a shame — to grow up, I mean. Ruth, I know what we could do this afternoon. We could all go down to the harbor and see George. Maybe he’d lend us his sailboat, Harold’s crazy about boats.”

“I don’t know that it’d be good for you, all that up and down motion.”

“I don’t think it would hurt.”

“Anyway, you know my feelings on the subject of George.” Ruth let her feelings about George show on her face. They pulled down the muscles around her mouth and shriveled her eyes. “It’s my opinion that when you divorce a man you ought to stay divorced from him and not go phoning him and asking him over all the time the way Hazel does.”

“She feels sorry for him. He gets lonesome.”

“Even so. It’s a matter of taste. I have nothing against George, and I have nothing against Hazel, but if they want to see each other they should never have gotten divorced. It’s the principle of the thing.”

“Oh well. It doesn’t matter.” Josephine sighed imperceptibly. It was hard to talk to Ruth without coming eventually on something which was a matter of principle or good taste. Divorce, George, drunkenness, Mexicans, horse racing, leaving dirty dishes overnight, teenaged girls who giggled, motor scooters, two-piece bathing suits, dyed hair, chewing gum, not airing blankets every week and the School Board.

It was becoming increasingly difficult for Josephine to excuse Ruth, but each time she did it anyway.

“I bet the ocean looks nice today,” she said.

“The rest of you can go down if you want to. There’s nothing to stop you.”

“There’s nothing to stop you either.”

“I want to take the curtains down and wash them. Besides—” She left the word hanging in the air, radiating implications. Besides, there was the Mexican, he couldn’t be left alone to be lazy. And besides, she didn’t like the sea. Its soft inexorable voice spoke of violence and eternity. When she went out onto the pier where George worked, she felt the water beneath her and the water on each side of her and she always had the wild idea that the sky itself was part of the ocean and ready to drop down on her and slowly and gently drown her. Watching the sea gave her a feeling of expansion and disintegration inside her.

“Besides,” she said after a time, “there’s too much to be done around the house.”

She rose briskly, unable to resist her own bait. Something would have to be done about something, and everything about everything, and right now. Like a professional soldier ready to take up arms against anyone, for any reason, she marched out into the back yard on the offensive.

Escobar was on his knees digging out a root of wild morning glory with a knife. He looked up at her, squinting.

“Those are flowers,” Ruth said. “What are you digging them up for?”

“The lady of the house said on the phone to plant gardenias on this side.”

“Gardenias.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Gardenias. You’d think she was made of money. How much — how much do they cost?”

“For the one-gallon size, maybe about five dollars.”

“How many did she tell you to plant?”

“Six. She likes the smell, she said, ma’am.”

“Six, That’s thirty dollars. She must be out of her mind.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You mustn’t do it, until I get a chance to talk to her... Geraniums are plenty good enough. Some people get ideas beyond their pocketbooks. Some people think money grows on trees.” She let out a sudden harsh laugh. “For you it does. That’s funny. For you money grows on trees.”

A spot of bright pink appeared in the center of her throat, as if someone had, with malicious accuracy, aimed a spoonful of paint at her. Knowing the spot was there, she covered it with her hand while Escobar wiped off his knife on his brand-new levis. His wife had told him to wear his old ones and he was sorry now that he hadn’t; it was a dirty job.

At noon, sitting with his back propped against the wall of the house, he ate his sandwiches and drank the warm Pepsi-Cola. Then he washed his face with the hose and dried it with his bandana.

A pile of weeds burned slowly in the yard. There was no open flame but the pile was diminishing, eaten away at the core, and the smoke rose thin and straight into the windless sky.

When Hazel came home after doing the weekend shopping she noticed with satisfaction that the eugenia hedge had been clipped, the yard raked, and the orange tree pruned, but Escobar was nowhere in sight.

She opened the screen door and went inside.

“Ruth,” she called. “Hey, Ruth! Where’s the Mexican gone?”

A gentle moan slid through the house. It seemed to come from nowhere and to mean nothing, except that somewhere, in any of the six rooms, something was still half-alive.

“Ruth, where are you?”

A second sound, louder and more definite than the first. Hazel tracked it down to the locked door of the bathroom.

“Anything the matter, Ruth?”

“No.”

“Are you crying?”

“No.”

“What on earth are you crying about?”

“No, no—”

On the other side of the locked door, Ruth leaned her head against the medicine chest over the wash basin. The tap was turned on, and the tears slid down her cheeks and dripped off her chin to mingle with the tap water.

Ruth opened her eyes. She saw Hazel’s toothbrush and her own, blurred and magnified by tears, and the blotches of tooth powder on the mirror, and the smudge of fingers around the catch of the medicine chest. I really must wipe things off, I must wipe—

“Ruth, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“I thought—”

“I’m all right.”

And she was. She was not crying. From some inner reservoir filled to capacity the overflow dribbled out. She did not weep passionately and convulsively as Josephine had been doing lately. Ruth’s tears were without cause, without meaning.

I am not crying. It’s my eyes, they get so dry sometimes. They feel so small and shriveled, they need moisture. This is desert country, Harold, and don’t you forget it. The sun pours down, day after day. My eyes get dry and dusty.

“I bought a couple of pounds of ground round,” Hazel said. “We can have meat loaf. Then if there’s any left over we can make some sandwiches tonight in case Mr. Cooke drops in.”

“All right.”

Meat loaf. The oven would be on. The hot dry air would seep out of its cracks and the hot dry air would pour in the windows from outside. Her eyeballs would feel crisp and hard, like little dried peas.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” Ruth said. “I’m bathing my eyes, they felt gritty.”

Everything in the house was gritty, though she dusted every day. There was a school playground across the street, and the faintest breeze swept up the dust and wafted it into the neighboring houses. The children didn’t seem to mind the dust. Ruth watched them often from the windows of the living room. Some of the younger ones flung themselves boisterously into the dirt as if it were clean white snow. They sat in it, they threw it at each other, they scooped it up in their hands, they ate it mixed with ice cream, bubble gum, lollipops and peanut butter sandwiches.

It was August now and the children were not in classes, but they arrived at the playground early in the morning to play. The school, built to resist earthquakes, was a one-story L-shaped structure with all the classrooms opening on to an outside corridor. This corridor was asphalt, ideal for roller skating, and the long summer days echoed with the steady whirr of roller skates punctuated by sharp rhythmic clacking as the wheels slid over the cracks in the pavement. The playground was to Ruth, at first, an interminable chaos of noise which tore at her ears in a merciless, meaningless way. But she had gradually learned to distinguish the sounds and finally to identify them and speculate about them. The teeter-totter squeaked and banged, and Ruth could tell, from listening to the rhythm of the bang-squeak-bang, whether the children on the teeter-totter were the same size or not. If the rhythm was uneven Ruth wondered whether she should go over to the playground and tell the heavier child to sit further toward the center of the teeter-totter, but she never went.

The teeter banged, the swings creaked, the basketballs plopped, wide of the net, the flying rings gave off a brassy clang, and the children communicated naturally with each other by shouts and screams. A hundred times a day the derisive chant of I’m-the-king-of-the-castle filled the air. The tune was always the same, no matter how the words varied: Can’t catch a flea... Billy’s got a girlfriend... Brown Brown went to town, with his britches upside down... Red red wet the bed wipe it up with gingerbread... Lewis is a stinker... Helen is a tattletale... Rita is a garlic face...

Every time the chant rose, Ruth’s heart cringed and she thought, cruel, children are cruel, I must not let it bother me. I must ignore everything.

Miss Kane is a Cross Teacher — written in chalk on the sidewalk.

Miss Kan madam My son Manuel on his raport says poor reeder Home Manuel reeds good or else—

Dear teacher please excuse Annie from being absent as she had to go to the circus. And oblige, Mrs. Mendel.

Dear Miss Kane: I must say I was extremely surprised when Lillian Mae told me she was not chosen for the Christmas Pageant. Lillian Mae has been taking private dancing lessons for a whole year and her teacher says she is as graceful as a bird. I certainly am mystified as to why Lillian Mae was not chosen for the Pageant. Your truly, Katherine C. Robinson, (Mrs. John H. Robinson, Jr.)

Miss Kane Chews Nails.

Dear Miss Kane: Would you drop into my office tomorrow at four, as there are several matters, pertaining to your grade, which must be discussed.

I think you need a rest, Miss Kane.

Miss Kane splashed water into her eyes and the grit from the playground and the dust raised by the cruel children plunged down the drain.

She emerged from the bathroom, red-eyed and composed.

Hazel was sitting on the edge of her bed. She had her shoes off and she was rubbing her instep where the pump had cut into the skin. The dog, Wendy, had picked up one of the discarded pumps and retired under the bed to chew at the heel. With perseverance and lack of human interference, she could, within an hour, demolish the heel entirely, grinding the lift off with her molars and then peeling the leather away bit by bit with her tiny sharp front teeth.

“She’s got your shoe,” Ruth said.

“Take it away from her, will you?”

Ruth got down on her knees and pulled up the bedspread. “You bad dog. Bring it here.”

“You were so crying,” Hazel said.

“Don’t be silly. Bring it here, Wendy.”

“You never admit anything. Maybe if you did, well, people might be able to help you.”

Ruth raised her brows exaggeratedly, repudiating the idea that she was in a position where people could help her. The dog squeezed out from under the bed, wagging her tail to indicate that the whole thing had been an accident. She pressed against Ruth’s apron, burrowing her nose in the pocket.

Ruth laughed. “There, she didn’t mean it. Look, Hazel, she’s apologizing, did you ever see the like? There, there, her mother knows she didn’t mean it.”

“The hell she didn’t,” Hazel said.

“Anyway, I don’t believe in burdening other people with my troubles, even if I had any.”

She rose to her feet, and the dog quietly and with great caution returned to the shoe under the bed.

“I am tired,” Ruth said, “and hot. That’s all. My goodness, when I see those children over there playing so hard all day and getting so dirty... It’s a wonder their mothers don’t look after them.” She went to the front window of the bedroom. Four o’clock, the peak of the day, when the children were dirtiest and noisiest. Their shouts were shriller and their movements had a frenzied quality, as if they knew their hours of play were numbered and they must crowd everything they could into every minute that was left.

“Some people should never have children.”

“Tell it to God,” Hazel said, rubbing her foot, “not to me.”

“I had one little girl in my class... It was almost funny how dirty she was, and without realizing it. I often had to wash her ears, they were so dirty you’d wonder how she could hear out of them. She had beautiful hair, that red-gold color, and naturally wavy. I bought her a little comb to keep in her desk, and whenever she washed her own ears and face I gave her a penny.”

My goodness, how nice you look this morning, Margaret. Here’s your penny.

Thank you, Miss Kane.

Margaret never used the comb or the pennies. She hoarded them in a corner of her desk. On Valentine’s Day Miss Kane received a paper penny valentine, “To a Cross Patch Teacher,” bearing the picture of an old witch in spectacles riding a yard ruler. When Miss Kane took the valentine out of the valentine box, the other children watched in silence while Margaret sat at her desk, snickering behind her hand.

Thank you for the valentine, Margaret.

I didn’t send you no valentine, Miss Kane.

Any valentine.

I didn’t send you any valentine.

I was under the impression, Margaret, that you did.

I wouldn’t have no money to buy one.

Any money.

I wouldn’t have any money to buy one.

“I bought her a little comb,” Ruth repeated. “She was an odd child, I could never get close to her.”

“You took your job too seriously.”

“I hoped, I wanted to give her some pride in herself. It was impossible, I see now. The home factor is so much stronger than the school factor. I couldn’t make up for poverty and neglect and brutality. Years and years—”

The years were numbered, like the hours of the children’s play, and into the last one she had crammed frenzied activity. The last year brought the angel-eyed Mexican boy, Manuel, who never talked.

Thank you, Lucy. And now it’s Manuel’s turn to read. Begin at the top of page 79, Manuel.

Manuel sat mute, unmoving.

Manuel, it’s your turn. Now see if you know what the first word is. It’s a hard one.

Manuel looked weary and innocent while the children giggled, and whispers fluttered in the air like invisible moths.

Is there anybody who can help Manuel with the first word? Janie? That’s right — gradually. There now, Manuel, you have the first word, gradually, can you go on from there?

The book lay unopened on Manuel’s desk.

Home Manuel reeds good or else—

Manuel didn’t play with the other children. As soon as the recess bell rang he dashed across the school yard and swung himself up to the top bars of the jungle gym. There he sat all during recess, with his legs twined around the bars and a faint smile on his face, as if he enjoyed the sensation of being high up, above the other children.

Once he had, without being seen, shinnied up the trunk of the old pepper tree beside the swings, and hidden himself in the feathery leaves. When the time came to return to class Manuel remained in the tree, plucking the pepper berries one by one and letting them slide out of his hand to the ground. He counted them in a whisper — “thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight” — and as they bounced and rolled in the dirt like tiny marbles, Manuel followed each one with his eyes, dreamily. He was Dick Tracy and the berries were drops of his life’s blood. He was Superman and the berries were atom bombs. He was Manuel and Miss Kane was calling him. He heard her calling him and he watched her looking for him, but he made no move to get out of the tree. He would have liked to stay there forever shedding his blood and dropping his bombs, high up above the other children.

Miss Kane knew that Manuel liked to climb, and so she looked first on the roof of the Boy Scout shack, and then on the roof of the kindergarten sandpile. Re-crossing the yard she saw the falling berries, and looking up into the pepper tree she saw Manuel. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be asleep, entwined gracefully among the boughs. In sleep his right hand dropped the berries, one by one, and the delicate leaves slid over his wrist like lace. He looked so beautiful, so innocent, that she couldn’t say the ordinary words: You know the rules about climbing that tree, Manuel... The bell rang some time ago... The principal wouldn’t like... The bell rang...

“It’s time to come to class,” she said quietly.

Manuel slid down the trunk of the tree and followed her across the yard.

She never again asked him to read, but one afternoon she kept him in and tried to talk to him and to make him talk to her. She tried too hard and Manuel was puzzled and a little contemptuous. When he was gone Miss Kane put her head down on her desk and cried because she had failed. All her failures came back to her and gathered like cysts inside her head and her breasts and her throat. Her tears did not dissolve these cysts, but they altered their substance. The benign I have failed became the malignant They have failed me, and the Mexican boy, Manuel, became the crux and the symbol of this change.

When the janitor came in to sweep the room and collect the waste baskets he found Miss Kane sitting behind her desk, swollen-eyed, reckless.

“As you can see, I’ve been crying, Mr. Thursten. No, don’t go away. It doesn’t matter. We all have our moments.” As she talked she scratched one spot on her head, near her left temple, over and over again. “I do my best. Everyone knows that. I’ve always done my best, without any help from anyone least of all from the ones I’m trying to help. There’s this one boy, Mr. Thursten. It was funny, he climbed the pepper tree, and you know he looked so odd up there, as if he belonged. I didn’t want to bring him down. Perhaps I ought to have left him. It’s difficult, difficult to make decisions all the time. Some of the African tribes live in tree houses to protect themselves from the wild animals.”

She saw Manuel in his tree house, surrounded by the yapping snarling faces of the little human animals. Manuel, I will help you. Manuel spat into the dirt.

Mr. Thursten shuffled up and down the aisles, pushing his brush ahead of him, gathering up the litter of the day. He knew Miss Kane was speaking but he didn’t hear her words. He was immune to noise and engrossed in his passion for cleaning up. All his aggressive and destructive instincts had been channelized into this one great passion. He loved to collect little piles of rubbish and thrust them savagely into the incinerator. At home he burned his mail as soon as he had read it. He was a bachelor, and did his own housework, and when he cooked his own meals he always washed and dried the dishes from one course before he began eating another course. After the meal he emptied the garbage on a newspaper, squeezing and compressing it into a small neat satisfying bundle. Nearly every day he hung all his blankets and his rugs on the clothesline and beat them into submission. He cleaned the mirrors and windows until they squeaked in protest, and he scrubbed his kitchen with chlorine water until the linoleum peeled and his hands were raw. Mr. Thursten was fortunate. His peculiarities accorded with his job and were misinterpreted as virtues.

“Mr. Thursten—”

The brush paused.

“Mr. Thursten, I wonder if — I feel quite giddy — is there, could you fetch me a glass of water?”

Mr. Thursten brought her some water in a paper cup. When she had finished the water, he took the cup and folded it over and over into a tight, tiny rectangle. Mr. Thursten took particular care of this rectangle. He put it into the incinerator separately, and as it snuffled and expired he had a nice loose feeling inside.

Mr. Thursten, Margaret, Manuel, they had all been a part of the last year. When the year ended Miss Kane ceased to exist. She became Ruth again, and it was Ruth who stood at the bedroom window looking out at the playground of another school, watching the anonymous children whose faces seemed so familiar.

“You took your job too seriously,” Hazel repeated.

Ruth turned from the window, wiping the palms of her hands on her apron. “I guess I’ll start the meat loaf.”

“You never admit anything. If you won’t tell people things they can’t help you.”

“My goodness, as if I—”

“Why were you in there bawling?”

“I tell you I wasn’t, Hazel.”

“Has it anything to do with the Mexican?”

“What—?” Ruth stopped, on the point of asking, what Mexican? She had been thinking of Manuel, but she realized at once that Hazel didn’t know about the boy in the pepper tree and that she must mean Mr. Escobar. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“I just wondered,” Hazel said carefully. “I just thought maybe he’d been rude to you or something. I mean, sometimes you get ideas in your head about certain people, you imagine things.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you do. And I just thought — oh well, skip it. Where’d he go?”

“He said he had to go home and get something; a sprayer. He says the eugenia hedge has some disease called scale.”

“It doesn’t look diseased to me.”

“He showed it to me himself. You know that part at the end where you thought the hedge was just dirty? It isn’t dirt at all. The sap has been sucked out. He showed me some of the things that do it. They’re like little bumps on the wood, hardly noticeable. He scraped some of them away with his thumbnail to show me. I told him, I said, why show me? I’m not the lady of the house, I just work here. And do you know what his answer was? He said he thought I’d be interested. Me, interested.” Ruth laughed, and color splashed across her cheeks. “I said—”

“Little bumps,” Hazel said bitterly. “Jesus Murphy, I thought we had everything, gophers, snails, sowbugs, ants, and now we got little bumps besides.”

“They can be sprayed.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with this damn place.”

“Neglect is the matter.”

“Or maybe it isn’t the place, maybe it’s just me. I attract things, that’s all there is to it. I’m like Millie, I’ve got a jinx.”

Ruth looked blank. She didn’t know Millie or the nature of her jinx. “He said if the hedge is sprayed now the other things in the yard won’t catch the disease. He says it’s very catching.”

Like measles, Escobar had said, scraping the little bumps away with this thumbnail while Ruth watched him with fastidious distaste. She did not want to be out in the garden with a Mexican laborer, and she experienced a sense of shock and unreality at finding herself there, and even more strongly, the feeling that a cruel fate had driven her there. I did not come, I was driven.

Persecuted by fate, she stood beside the eugenia hedge and watched Escobar’s thumb. It was thick and blunt, the nail heavy with dirt and every crack in the skin outlined as if in charcoal. The thumb moved, bent on destruction, but without hurry, without savagery.

Like measles, Escobar said.

She jerked her eyes away, she laughed nervously, without mirth, she put her hand in the pocket of her apron and shifted her weight to her other foot. She coughed to clear her throat, and when her throat was cleared she had nothing to say. The rays of the sun pelted her face and she thought of the dark house with the blinds drawn and she could not believe that she had left it to come out here. I was driven.

Still she couldn’t force herself to return to the house, and in the end it was Escobar who left. He said, “I have a hand spray at home. I will go and get it. It is not far.”

She moved with quick jerky steps toward the back door, her head ducked as if to avoid a blow.

Escobar wheeled his bicycle out of the garage. A bicycle was a delicate and expensive vehicle, and Escobar lavished great care on his. It was over four years old now, but there wasn’t a single dent in the mudguard or a nick in the red and green paint. Throughout the years he had equipped it with several pounds of gadgets. It had two headlights, one reflector (plain) and a larger one bearing the words “Watch My Speed!” On the handlebars there was a bell, a horn, a speedometer, a basket and a rabbit’s foot, and from the end of the carrier at the back dangled a skunk’s tail. The original seat was softened with a lamb’s wool cover, and between the seat and the cover a St. Christopher’s medal was hidden.

Escobar adjusted the pedals and swung his right leg over the bar. He rode away, moving his feet up and down in a proud, ponderous, dignified manner. The reflectors winked behind his back, “Watch My Speed!”

From the kitchen window Ruth had seen him pedaling down the street like a grave and happy child.

“It’s a jinx,” Hazel said. “We’re a pair, Millie and me. Where’s my other shoe?”

“I thought you had it.”

“I haven’t.”

“I thought you took it away from her.”

The shoe was located under the bed with the lift flapping loose from the heel, but the dog Wendy had disappeared.

“Jesus Murphy!”

“She didn’t mean it,” Ruth said anxiously. “It can be fixed. Look, it’s easy as pie to fix.” She held the lift in place. “All it needs is a nail or two. I’ll pay for it, naturally. I’m going over to the Fosters’ tonight to sit with the children, and I’ll have the money.”

“Oh nuts, forget it.”

“Very well.”

From outside came a rhythmic hissing sound. A pulse began to beat in Ruth’s temple and the spot of color reappeared at the base of her throat.

“The Mexican’s back,” she said.

She went out into the kitchen and stood at the screen door.

Escobar was spraying the orange tree. She could see his face, among the leaves. It was beautiful and innocent, like Manuel’s face looking down at her through the green feathers of the pepper tree.

Some of the African tribes live in tree houses to protect themselves from the wild animals.

I think you need a rest, Miss Kane.