Return to Lesbos. Valerie Taylor
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in her; who might even, if they met again, actively dislike her. No reason she shouldn’t.
She put all the lists in her purse and picked her way back to bed. The radium dial of her clock said one twenty. She lay thinking about Erika’s greenish-gray eyes. Did they slant a little or didn’t they? Something gave her a slightly exotic look, piquant with that fair hair. She fell asleep trying to make up her mind.
Bill looked a little guilty at breakfast and a little resentful too, like a man who has been accused of something he didn’t do but would have liked to. He said, “It’s going to be a hot day,” and she said, scorning the weather, “I’m going downtown to look at some furniture. All right?”
“Better fix yourself some breakfast then.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You don’t need to diet. You women are all crazy when it comes to weight.”
“That’s right.”
He looked at her, unsatisfied but finding nothing to argue with.
She put on an old cotton skirt, plain shirt and loafers, office clothes left over from the days when she was Bake’s girl—not to be confused with Mrs. William Ollenfield. Pushing the hangers along her closet bar and looking with distaste at her wardrobe, she wondered what had ever possessed her to buy so many clothes she didn’t like. Mrs. William Ollenfield seemed to be the sort of woman who goes shopping in a hat and gloves, who wears little printed silks and puts scatter pins on the lapel of a suit. Sooner or later, she would want and get a fur coat. Frances faced herself in the long mirror.
She was no longer certain who she was or what she might hope to become, but she certainly didn’t intend to spend the rest of her life pretending to be Mrs. William Ollenfield, that smug little housewife. She didn’t even like the way the woman did her hair. She ran a wet comb through the lacquered curls, smacked down the resulting fuzz with a brush dipped in Bill’s hair stuff, and caught the subdued ends in a barrette. The plain styling brought out the oval shape of her face and the winged eyebrows, her only beauty. (Not quite the only one, Bake had argued, touching her lightly to remind her.) Now she was beginning to look like herself again.
She ran downstairs, relishing the freedom of bare legs and old shapeless loafers.
It was one of those lazy summer days that seem endless, with sunlight clear and golden over the world and great patches of shade under arching branches. Grass and trees still wore the bright green of early summer. People moved along with open, friendly faces, looking washed and ironed. She climbed aboard a fat yellow bus and handed the driver a dollar, not wanting to admit that she didn’t know what the fare was. He gave back eighty-five cents.
She saw now that at some point during the weekend she had ceased to take for granted the continued backing of the Ollenfield income. She felt free and self-reliant. She wasn’t sure why, but no doubt she would find out in time.
In front of the bookstore, however, she lost her courage. She stood looking into the display window, which was just as it had been on Friday except for a small ivory Madonna where her wooden cat had been. As long as she didn’t go in, anything was possible. But if she went in and Vince wasn’t there, or if he was cool to her or refused to tell her about Erika—well, she reminded herself, I won’t be any worse off than I was this time last week. Back where I started from.
But she knew she would have lost something important. A hope so new and fragile she dared not examine it.
She turned the knob and went in.
The fair girl was sitting on a folding chair at the back of the room, writing on a clipboard. She looked up as Frances came in, heralded by the little silvery bell. Several expressions crossed her face—recognition, surprise, terror. She stood up, holding the clipboard stiffly at her side. “Vince. Customer.”
A voice from somewhere in the back. “Don’t forget what I said.”
“Vince says that I owe you an apology. I’m sorry I was rude.”
“But you weren’t rude. You were terribly polite.”
“That’s what Vince said. There is a rude kind of politeness.”
“I know, you use it on people you don’t like. But there’s no reason you should like me,” Frances admitted. “You don’t even know me. I have no business going around asking strangers out for drinks—”
“I keep telling her,” Vince said, coming in elegantly from a back room, dirty hands held out in front of him, “you either like people or you don’t, and why wait for a formal introduction? Personally,” he said airily, “I always know the first time I meet somebody, and I hardly ever change my mind. I must say this is an improvement over that terrible dress you had on the other time, though.”
Frances was too embarrassed to answer. Vince came to a graceful stop between her and Erika. “It’s my day for apologies too,” he said nicely. “I didn’t get your name and address when you were here, or ask you what kind of books you were interested in. You left your packages, too.”
“Frances Ollenfield.”
“This is Erika Frohmann. Now you’ve been introduced. You can be rude to each other if you want to.”
He retreated into the back again. There was the sound of running water. Erika Frohmann seemed to be gathering up her courage. “I’m not very good at meeting people,” she said, looking not at Frances but at the floor. “And you reminded me of someone too. Not a parent.”
“I look like a million other people.”
Vince emerged again, drying his hands on a small grimy towel. “Don’t be modest, my dear. You have a lovely profile—now you’ve done away with those dreadful, horrible curls. If I didn’t give my customers a little shove they might never get acquainted. They’re such a small group I feel they ought to know one another.”
Frances said, “I like small groups.” Take off your mask, let me see if you know. They wouldn’t, of course. Even if they wondered, caution was an hourly habit. She asked, hot faced, “Is it all right if I look at the books?”
“Sure, go ahead. You can wash your hands when you get through.”
Erika Frohmann said defensively, “Paper gets so dirty.” She sat down again, but tentatively, propping her clipboard against the edge of a counter and plainly trying to think of something to write. Her apology made and accepted, if only tacitly, the conversation was apparently over as far as she was concerned.
Frances walked slowly to the shelves, conscious of the silent figure behind her. But the fascination of print took over. Bake had long ago introduced her to secondhand bookstores on Clark Street and Dearborn, a wonderful clutter of junk and treasure, with the three-for-a-dollar bins just outside their doors and tables of old tattered paperbacks just inside. She was still unable to pass a secondhand bookstore.
This place was small, but there was enough to keep her here all day. She walked slowly, picking up volumes as she went along, now and then putting one back, scrupulously, where it had been in the first place.
Here were the Ann Bannon books side-by-side with Jeanette Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature, North Beach Girl, and Take Me Home next to the Covici-Friede edition of The Well of Loneliness, dated 1928. Here, huddled together as though for warmth in an unfriendly world, were Gore Vidal and a tall thin volume of Baudelaire, translated by someone she had never heard of. Here were books in the field, for people with a special interest, a special orientation.
Her voice came out shrill with self-consciousness. “Are these for sale?”
Vince came to see what she was talking about. “That depends. Why do you want them?”
Now. Tell him. But she could only say, “I’ve read most of them, but there are some I don’t know.”
He looked at her. The right answer evidently showed on her face; he nodded. “I’ll ask Erika. A lot of them belong to her.