“They’re not going to believe that I saw you! They told me you were in Kansas, but they said Loam County. They don’t know Kansas, I guess.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Aldine said. Glynis was removing soiled tablecloths and shaking out fresh ones, but Aldine noticed she was sticking to the nearer tables. Aldine resumed polishing silverware, but Elder Lance was not one for subtleties. He went on talking.
His mother had been pretty darned ill, he said, squeezing a lemon over the white ruffled flesh of his fish, down in Olpe. She was all right now. She was a corker. He was studying to be an engineer at Brigham Young University, which was a beautiful place—she ought to see it. It was just over the mountain pass from where Leenie and Will lived in Salt Lake.
Aldine had only an image from Leenie’s moth-brown photo of the Salt Lake temple, the spires like masts, the windows like portholes. She wondered if Will and Leenie had gone there and done the magic things that would keep them together even in death, and if they had done the magic for her parents.
“I thought Leenie said you were working as a teacher here, living with a Mormon family.”
Glynis was smoothing out a cloth and pretending not to listen. Aldine hadn’t told Glynis that she lived with a family at all. On the windowsill the snow was rounding into the corners, the way you might find them in a cozy holiday card. She wished she were out in it, catching the lacy formations you could see for an instant if you caught one on your sleeve.
“How was that, with the Mormon family?” Elder Lance said, bringing her back.
“They had to leave their farm because of the dust storms,” Aldine said and kept her eyes on the silverware. “Their little girl had what they call dust pneumonia.”
Elder Lance forked a bite of haddie, dragged it through sauce, and popped it in his mouth.
“Why’d you stay here, then?” he said, still chewing.
“Seemed for the best. And I’d heard this could be fun.”
“Is it?”
“Aye. Sometimes. I love the big room.”
“Luve the big rroom!” he said with shocking loudness, rolling his tongue to sound, as he imagined, like her. “I do miss those accents! You know, where you oughta be is Brigham Young. Lots of girls go there, you know, and the boys would go for that accent.”
Aldine didn’t look him in the eye as she frowned and said, “Aye.”
“Hey, why don’t you come back with me!”
“What?”
Glynis dropped a fork onto the table and looked up.
“I bet Will and Leenie’d be ten times happier to have you with ’em, and this way you don’t have to make the trip all by yourself.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”
“Right,” he said, forking another bite of haddie, his pink face rosier yet with embarrassment. “Of course not.”
She didn’t know why he thought she could buy train tickets on impulse and enroll in university. She studied his suit for signs of money, but it wasn’t the best wool. The lining of his overcoat sagged, his scarf had been knitted by a mother or sister from cheap yarn, and his hat had been rubbed smooth along the brim. “It isn’t that,” she said, meaning it wasn’t that she thought he was being forward. She tried to think, as Glynis walked toward yet another table with an armful of linen, of how to say that she, like most people, couldn’t afford to quit her job.
“I have to stop talking or I’ll lose my place,” she said, flashing him an apologetic smile and walking away. She didn’t want to go to Salt Lake City. She didn’t want boys to “go for” her accent. What she wanted most of all when she carried a tray of empty cups to the window booths was to look out the window and see Ansel Price coming up the way to fetch her, magically free of Ellie and his marriage so he could hold her and be as he was in her dreams, when the warmth of him was like the sun through closed eyelids.
Elder Lance (she could never think of him as anything else) left a good tip, especially for a counter customer, and his good cheer was unassailable. He would tell Leenie where to write her, he said, and he wished he had a camera so he could take a photograph, and it sure was good to see her once again.
53
That evening, when Aldine could find no more reasons to stay locked in the bog, she came back to find Glynis waiting cross-legged on her bed in a pair of man’s pajamas, gluing a picture of Clark Gable into her scrapbook. The radiator was warm and ticking, so the boiler was working. It wasn’t always. Glynis would glue anything in her scrapbooks—a drawing of a little boy she said looked just like her brother Charlie, an Easter poem from the Ladies’ Home Journal, a picture of a red-cheeked girl doing Highland dances in a green plaid kilt. Beneath this she had written, in her girlish print, Like my dear friend Scottish Aldine. Glynis looked up now, checked the tightness of a hairpin, and said, “What a day, huh?”
“It was,” Aldine said. She leaned against the radiator and yawned. She was ready for rest and silence and hoped Glynis saw it.
But Glynis merely nodded at their shared tin of scavenged cigarette remnants and said, “Butt me, will you, kid.”
This was a surprise. House rules forbade smoking in the rooms, and Glynis was not the type to invite trouble. Aldine hoisted up the window and the cold night air rushed in. The roofs were layered with snow, all white except for a large circle of amber under the streetlight. It was startlingly pretty.
“Well?” Glynis said once they’d lit and inhaled.
“Yes?”
“The funny-looking one with the tragic smile.”
“I met him in Scotland,” she said. “He was a missionary there.” She wanted to stop right there, but she knew Glynis would hector until she told the story through, so she did tell the story, but only in the barest outlines.
“So you never joined?” Glynis asked when she was done.
Aldine tweezed a bit of tobacco from her tongue and said no, she never did.
The room was small and plain. They weren’t supposed to put anything on the walls, though holes in the pink plaster were evidence that other girls had made themselves more at home. She had thought more than once that she’d like some photographs on the walls, of Ayr and of Leenie and Will, and of Neva and Clare and, truly, before all others, of Ansel, though she had none of him or, for that matter, any of the Prices, and he was married so of course she couldn’t. Aldine removed her apron and hoped Glynis was done talking.
“I guess your sister’ll send for you now,” Glynis said, pressing down on Clark Gable’s forehead.
“I doubt it. She has no money.” It was cooler now in the room with winter stealing through the open window. Aldine rested her hands on the embossed curves of the radiator and breathed in the heat. The thick iron ribs smelled like scalded milk, and the steady warmth was one way that her life had improved since becoming a Harvey Girl.
“What did he mean about a Mormon family you were living with? You didn’t tell me you were a schoolmarm.”
“They weren’t Mormon,” Aldine said.