Rock Island Line. David Rhodes
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My light burned all night.”
Della began to shake her head.
“No,” Sarah continued. “The more despairingly I tell it, the more accurate. I lived for years like that. At first I tried to withstand the temptation of talking to myself, but gave in when my thoughts became much like talking themselves and the only way I could keep from saying little things endlessly to myself, like ‘What are you going to do tonight?’ was to say them out loud. So I conversed with myself about the daily routines of my life. Then two months after starting this the bus driver of the bus I took to work in the morning asked me while handing back my change if I wouldn’t go to a movie with him that weekend. I looked at him and he smiled. I was frightened, but, looking into his face while he smiled, I felt like I had never seen what a smile was before, or what it meant. It meant simply, I am happy, and wish you to be.’ It’s a wonderful thing to smile—showing one’s teeth. It’s a guarantee that the world is what we make it, and not by definition ugly. He saw that I was frightened. . . . I’d never looked at him before. That will show you how I was those years. Three years of riding that bus and I’d never looked at the driver. He said I could tell him the next morning and his mustache twitched. So all that night I thought about nothing else. I talked it over with myself after Mrs. Wokey went to bed. I didn’t go to work the rest of the week, so that I wouldn’t have to answer.
“Sometime after my twenty-first birthday (birthdays have always been important to me) I did go out with him. He owned his own automobile, and after the movie (which made me laugh and picture myself as the heroine) we drove out into the country, and the wind came in the windows, and I could put my head out and watch the night reel by, my hair blowing back against the rear window. I was nearly delirious with private joy, and I was afraid he would see it on my face and would think it meant something. It seemed like we were flying. I know at one time he said we were going fifty miles an hour. That seems slow now, but nothing will ever be so fast. My mind was secretly racing. I imagined myself flying recklessly, casting all caution to the wind, putting my life on the line for a few moments of mad, frantic thrills. I had never felt like that before. I thought if Mrs. Wokey were to see me she would be shocked and scold me and tell me to get out of her house, though that would hurt her very much because she loved me and desperately wanted to keep me close to her old, quiet ways. I felt they were evil thoughts. Cecil drove me home and I rushed inside, ran upstairs to my room and watched him drive away. I sat by my little table until I was sure I had my pounding heart under control, and went downstairs. Mrs. Wokey was reading one of her magazines and I went out and got a bowl of ice cream and ate the whole thing. I thought what it would be for me to flip out a cigarette and light it—what she would think.
“ ‘Thing’s are mighty quiet around here tonight,’ I said to Mrs. Wokey.
“ ‘Well, yes they are,’ she returned and looked at me from over her magazine.
“ ‘Very quiet,’ I said. ‘Of course there’s no reason for anything to be really jumping.’ And I ran upstairs, feeling her eyes following me, went into my room and looked at my merry self in the mirror. But the next night, Sunday, I could not fall asleep before the footsteps came by the door, and the fear returned.
“Two years later—two years of falling back into my old fears and dreaming ways, and rising up above them for moments of happiness, only to fall back again, and finally leveling out—Cecil and I were married.
“The first several weeks of living with him, I remembered Bill and wondered if I shouldn’t run away. But that was mostly when I was alone, and when Cecil came home I felt better, and then I didn’t remember Bill any more.
“Cecil had a terrible temper, and though he was never violent around me, and tried to hide it, I could tell when he would bump his head or see something he didn’t like that his true reactions, if he didn’t keep them hidden and falsify them, would be abnormally brutal. Sometimes he would even look at me like an animal when I’d done something he didn’t like. Yet those times were very rare. . . . It’s just that he lived in sort of a set way. He always sat in the same chair, slept on the same side, approached any problems with the same attitude, wouldn’t eat certain foods that he had decided long ago were distasteful regardless of the way they were fixed, listened to the same programs on the radio, went to bed within a half-hour of the same time every night and generally planned out every waking hour according to a long schedule.
“After a year they put him on night shift. He was very angry about that, and said there were plenty of other drivers with less seniority, and that there were only two night buses. So he had to work Saturday nights, which was his bowling night, and there was no end to the pain that caused him. I tried to get him to quit driving, and even offered to go back to the factory while he found another job, because after two months he still resented it as much as he had when he’d first been notified of his shift change. But he said he wouldn’t let me work, and for some reason refused to look for another job in the afternoon after he had gotten up. It became frustrating, because he seemed so miserable, yet didn’t seem to want to do anything about it. . . .
“Maybe I better stop.”
“No, no,” said Della, “go on. I can’t tell you how interested I am.”
“You’re so kind. I knew she would be wonderful,” she said to John, and put out her arm. He turned to her, away from watching his sleeping father, and smiled as though he’d been listening. On the horizon, an exhausted rim of pink was all that remained of the daylight, which stretched, yawned and finally slid unannounced below the dark line of the ground.
“Then after leaving home on a Saturday night at a little before eleven so that he could be at work at a quarter after and have a cup of coffee at the station before beginning the eleven-thirty run, he didn’t come home. I waited clear through Sunday, Sunday night and Monday morning. Monday afternoon I became frantic and telephoned Bart Lewis, a bowling friend of his. But he hadn’t seen him, and sounded like he resented being called—as though my husband’s business shouldn’t concern him. At eleven thirty I called the station. The man from the bus company, in a voice like a radio announcer, told me that Cecil had not driven a bus since over six months ago. He elaborated to say, ‘It was December and Cecil was upset about the shift change. We explained to him that it was only for a reorganizational period of two weeks while the new drivers and new routes were worked out. He got angry, demanded his money for the last week and quit, so soon that he never learned that because of so much protest the reorganization plan had been discontinued and the company agreed to have the training period of the new drivers be completed on the night buses. But he’d got his money and left, and never came back. Who did you say was calling?’
“I set the phone down into its cradle and looked at the floor. The green specks in the linoleum swirled around. I felt like I was drowning. December. For over three months Cecil’d been leaving home every night at ten minutes to eleven and coming home at seven thirty in the morning, sometimes as late as eight, but never as late as eight thirty. Every week he gave me money for the groceries, my own allowance, and paid the bills. Nearly every night he would complain about having to go to work just as the rest of the folks were beginning to have a good time.
“It was more than a betrayal or a lie. It had no explanation that I could discover. It was like someone saying to you, ‘What you know isn’t true.’ And when, in indignation, you turn to your storehouse of undeniable facts to prove yourself, you find they’ve shifted just enough to make you out to be a fool.
“Then the shame: trying to find out what one’s husband has been doing every night of the week, and Saturdays too, for three months. The bowling was a ruse as well, and alleged friendships . . . everything. His mother’s address in St. Louis belonged to a trucking company. The high-school ring in his drawer turned out to be authentic, but the few years he’d spent there twenty-five years ago were gone from the memory of the teachers and only dimly remembered by others, who were able, however, to point out where he had lived with his parents. So I stood there and looked at the house, and realized how foolish I must have seemed to them, and to the people inside looking out the windows.
“I did everything in my power to discover the long circumstances that brought about the disappearance of my husband,