“Just do,” Joyce said. And then she told her.
So I suppose bad news can be lethal for some people. Especially if it is sudden and unexpected. That is, if you are not used to it, if you have gone along passively, hoping for the best despite all the evidence to the contrary, if you are twenty-nine years old and still believe that a man will marry you simply because you have washed his dirty socks for eight years and have slept with him on Saturday nights during all that time, then I suppose bad news can kill you. In any case it was something like that for Wanda Jo Evans. Because, in a way, Wanda Jo Evans did die that Thursday morning in April. I do not mean that she slit her wrists with a lady’s razor that she happened to be carrying in her purse, nor that she did anything so suicidal as to stab herself with a fingernail file. I simply mean that she stopped caring what happened to herself anymore.
It began immediately. For the rest of that morning she sat in the telephone office rest room, staring at the tiled floor, wiping her nose on cheap toilet paper, crying quietly, her recently curled strawberry blonde hair fallen forward about her abashed and stricken face and her slim white neck bowed and exposed as if she were waiting for some final blow of some Holt County inquisitor’s ax. All of that—that dreadful individual remorse and despair and submission—while the fan overhead went on making its maddening little noise and while the other women out in the front office continued to talk about her and to send a representative from among themselves every fifteen minutes or so to check on her. She stayed in the rest room all that morning. Then at noon one of the women drove her home.
For the rest of that spring she drank. In the evenings she went home after work and sat in front of the television, drinking cheap wine or vodka until she fell asleep. And on the weekends that spring she went out to the bars in town, going out alone now to the same places where previously she and Jack had gone together. Invariably she drank until the bars were closed. Then, in time, she began to take someone home with her too. She brought them back to that little bedroom in the house on Chicago Street, and the bed wasn’t even made anymore and the sheets smelled of sweat and the stale smoke of old cigarettes. But none of that was important to her now. It was only important to her that he—whoever he was, and there were a lot of them during those months of late spring and early summer, and even occasionally more than one at the same time—it was only important that he do his own laundry. She insisted on that.