“Pie, James,” Ida said, emerging with a cup of coffee and a huge wedge of lemon meringue. It reminded Charlotte of her mother saying, to practically every guest they’d ever had on Thanksgiving, that when the industry standard was to cut a pie into six pieces, the Harvey House cut theirs in four. Ida had clearly had the same training. “Let me clean off the table for you,” Charlotte said, folding up the edges of the pink pongee.
“Please, no,” Mr. McNamara said. “Don’t spoil your work. I’m happy as I am.” He set the coffee cup on the buffet beside him and rested the plate of pie on his knees. The meringue looked two inches thick.
“Charlotte’s a brilliant girl,” Ida said. She was one of those women who always wore makeup and perfume, and she had moved off the conveyor belt at the packinghouse and into the office, where pay was higher. Hurd was a supervisor, so between them both, Charlotte was pretty sure that they had more money than their junk-collecting hobby would suggest. Ida never let her permanent grow out too far, but even as Charlotte admired her, she saw, with fear, that she would have big arms like that, too, one day, and shop from the pages in the catalogue marked for the Mature Lady. Mr. McNamara was a fastidious eater—a small bite, subtle chewing, napkin daubed to the corners of his lips—which suggested a degree of culture past any experience she’d had in Kansas. She remembered Aunt Ida telling her that she’d met Mr. McNamara at a Rotary supper, which had led to dinner at Ida and Hurd’s, and after a tour of Ida’s bottle garden, he said he would give her his blue Milk of Magnesia bottles straight after he finished dosing himself and save her the trip to the dump. She had laughed and said, “Oh, but I live for the search, James, the search for buried treasure.” Charlotte wondered if he’d brought her a sapphire bottle today, and sure enough, when she went into the living room to find her pincushion, there on the table where her aunt generally set a vase of flowers was a clean, empty Magnesia bottle big enough to dose a horse.
“You should see how many novels Charlotte reads a week,” Ida went on.
She could feel his eyes settle on her. “So how old are you, Charlotte?”
“Eighteen,” she said. “Well, next month, anyway.”
“And what are your plans?”
“College,” Charlotte said at once, then added: “Though I guess that’s more a hope than a plan.”
“Mmm,” he said. He wore a constant half smile that she took for inner peace (annoying) or amusement (even more annoying).
Ida sat down opposite Mr. McNamara, took a sip from her own cup of coffee (black with two teaspoons of sugar), and said, “She can’t make real plans until her family’s good and settled. Then she’ll probably go to normal school or university. Things are different now for women, don’t you think?”
He nodded mildly. “That’s why we built the Practice House. So many girls now are not learning what they need to learn at home.”
The Practice House had been on Charlotte’s tour of the high school: a cute little cottage at the top of a hill where girls could learn to dust and iron and mop. Charlotte had been incredulous at the time; what were the girls doing at home, then, she wanted to know? Did they all have servants, or were they just slow learners, or what? It was the craziest idea she’d ever heard, like building a barn at the school and filling it with cows.
Ida smiled warmly at Charlotte. “Charlotte made the curtains in my kitchen. Also that skirt she’s wearing.”
Charlotte didn’t like to think that Mr. McNamara would now be looking at her skirt. She kept her eyes on the pattern and sat down—unbearable to bend over now—to measure the distance from the selvage to the long black line on the pattern that helped you determine straightness of grain, then immediately forgot how many inches and eighths of inches it was.
“Have you seen the sewing and cooking labs, Charlotte?” Ida asked. “They’re nicer than most homes!”
“I did see them,” Charlotte said. “They’re awfully nice.” As if the Practice House weren’t enough, there was a huge building with a high ceiling like the great hall in a castle, and in that building were black-and-white-tiled mini-kitchens, each one with a stove and a porcelain sink, and two rows of sewing machines and four big tables for cutting out patterns. The machines were brand new, with ruffling attachments that Charlotte had never seen in person, and they smelled intoxicatingly of machine oil.
Ida collected the plate and took it off to the kitchen and did not immediately return.
“What else did you like in school?” Mr. McNamara asked. It seemed to Charlotte that he was giving her the same beatific smile he’d given his lemon meringue pie.
“Astronomy,” she said, and then—why, she wasn’t sure—she looked right at him. “I liked that a lot.”
His eyes seemed to dilate, or readjust, or did she just imagine it? At any rate, his gaze shifted into the emptiness of his hat. This first tingling hint of her own powers was shocking to her, and strangely exhilarating. When he again looked up, he asked in a soft voice, “Have you ever looked at the night sky through a telescope?”
“Once,” Charlotte said, remembering the cold night, the spray of stars, squinting at Jupiter.
“And did you enjoy it?”
“I did.” She’d never in her life flirted with an adult, but she had a sudden comprehension that she was doing it now. “Very much.”
“Well, then, you’ll have to come and look through mine.”
Charlotte took this in, looking at him, then stretched the tape measure from the grain line to the edge of pink pongee and stared at the numbers. “Thank you,” she said, and she knew the polite thing would be to say, That would be nice, but she decided not to say it. She wondered whether she would be alone when she looked through this telescope.
“Do you know your constellations?” he asked.
“Some,” she said. (A lie. She knew a great many.) “But I’d like to learn more.”
He smiled his small smile and looked at her again, and suddenly she had it. The way he was looking at her was a knowing way. But what did he know? She had the peculiar, not unpleasant feeling that he knew something about her that she herself didn’t yet know.
Mr. McNamara stood. “I’m sure I’ll see you again,” he said quietly.
“Mmm,” Charlotte said. “Why wouldn’t you?” She added a shrug and a smile. “It’s a small town, after all.”
He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen to say his good-byes to Aunt Ida. He left that way; she heard the back door open and close. It was a warm day and she could see Aunt Ida’s bottle tree from the window, the smallest of the cobalt decorations no wider than her pinkie, the largest like a quart of milk. She’d discovered one day that the bottles had rainwater inside them, rainwater that, when she tipped one of the small bottles upside down, felt warm on her fingers and dripped prettily from her fingertips. She’d tipped one bottle after another, letting the sun-warmed water touch different parts of her bare arm until, suddenly conscious that someone might be watching her, she stopped.
55