The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

He wandered over to the dressing table, with bottles and tubes and little jars of makeup scattered on its top and dance cards and tickets and mementoes stuck into the mirror frame. He noticed a couple of photographs, one of Rona Jean and a man he didn’t recognize, the other of Rona Jean and Violet. The photograph with the man had the name Lamar written on the back, and a date in the previous month. He took both and put them into his notebook.

A few moments later, he found Rona Jean’s red leather diary in the bottom bureau drawer under a blue cardboard box of Kotex. He felt himself blushing as he picked up the box. One end was open and something fell onto the floor, a long and narrow white rectangular pad covered with gauzy stuff with long flaps on both ends. He picked it up quickly and stuffed it back in the box, then noticed a narrow pink elastic belt lying on the floor, probably also fallen out of the box. He picked it up, fingering it curiously and noticing two little cloth tabs with tiny brass safety pins. He had seen ads for Kotex, of course, but he’d had no clear idea what they looked like, or that a girl pinned them on. The rig must be pretty damned uncomfortable, he thought. Then, feeling suddenly that he had no right to be looking at something so intimately female, he dropped the belt back into the box and put the box in the drawer and pushed it shut.

After the Kotex and belt, the small red leather diary did not seem all that personal, and he sat down on the bed and began to leaf through it. The cover bore a gilt-embossed 1934, and there was a separate lined page for each day, with the day’s date and the day of the week printed at the top. The pages carried the scent of Rona Jean’s perfume, and she wrote in purple ink, in a loopy feminine script with a flourish of capitals and small circles for the dots over the letters i and j—the same ink and the same script in the letter she had sent him.

Unfortunately, Rona Jean had not been a dedicated diarist, and only about half of the pages were filled, mostly with rambling complaints about her work at the Telephone Exchange and her irritation with her roommate, who was (as Rona Jean put it) “not a very fun person to live with and as bad to nag as my mom about keeping things picked up.” He would study it in detail later, but he thought he should give it a quick once-over, in case there was something immediately useful. And besides, he was curious, especially about (admit it, Norris) what she had written about him.

He went back to April, when he had first taken her out, and found notations of their dates on three consecutive weekends. The first was headed, Buddy Norris, church pie supper. On that day, she wrote that she had worn her green dress and green felt hat—he’d forgotten about the dress. Likes to have me laugh at his jokes, kissed me good night (not a very good kisser). Buddy squirmed, feeling his face redden. What the hell was wrong with the way he kissed? Other girls had never objected, and she had certainly seemed to be enjoying it at the time.

The following weekend, it was, Buddy, CCC dance, not a very good dancer (which was undeniably true: he didn’t know his right foot from his left) but got to dance with lots of guys. He hadn’t minded her dancing with lots of guys. In fact, he had thought it was swell that she was having so much fun. Afterward, they’d sat on the back porch where he’d kissed her and a little more, but she didn’t write anything about that, whether she thought it was good or bad or just plain indifferent.