She has eaten every bite of the food he put in front of her. The plate barely needs to go in the dishwasher. Who eats like that and has a figure like hers?
He finds himself thinking of the folktales his mother liked to tell him. Greek and Roman mythology wasn’t enough for Lillian Bosk. She had studied Slavic languages, written a dissertation on Eastern European folktales. She loved to tell him about the ala and Baba Yaga, and what happened when young women came to visit them. The stories differed in key parts—the ala wore a horse’s head while delousing her “human” head; Baba Yaga, in her heyday, was almost a goddess.
But the stories always ended the same way, with the demon devouring her nosy visitor in one bite.
6
The Saturday of the auction is hot, but not humid. Adam’s truck has air-conditioning, but when he asks if they can drive with the windows open, she says yes. Polly always plays the good sport, the girl—woman—who doesn’t mind if her hair gets tousled. Being a good sport sounds like such a good thing, but there’s no good thing that can’t become bad for you. Polly looks at the skies, remembers some tiny shred of poetry from grade school, something about blue skies arching. She never got that. How can a sky arch? It doesn’t touch the ground.
“What do you need?” he asks her.
“Everything.” She doubles down on that one word, gives him a quick glance, but level, not through the lashes. She hates women who do that, peer through their lashes.
“You got a budget? Easy to get carried away at an auction. There’s something about someone else trying to get what you want, even if you don’t want it that bad, that can make you crazy.”
Tell me about it. She’s been clocking Cath clocking Adam.
She’s wearing a sundress that she found in the Purple Heart on Main Street. In a vintage shop back in Baltimore, this same dress might cost $50, $75. Here, it was $12. Her body is made for clothes like this—fitted through the bodice, then a big swirl of a skirt, patterned with bright fruits. She found a pair of earrings—purple glass grapes that dangle from her lobes. A little matchy-matchy, but it works. She wears flat sandals and when she starts roaming the dusty rows of furniture and housewares at the auction, it feels as if something is nibbling at her ankles. What kind of bug can live in such dry dust?
More than once, she feels his gaze on her shoulders. She knows she has a beautiful back, her bones clearly visible, but not in a way that makes her look underfed or scrawny. Her shoulder blades look like wings. Or so she’s been told, by more than one man. Two, to be exact. Both husbands.
This one says nothing, though. Today, he seems determined not to compliment her.
Focus on what you need, she tells herself, not what you want.
She shouldn’t be buying anything, but she did the math: The motel, at $220 a week, was $880 a month. So she’s saving $580 by taking the apartment, which means she can get out west by September, wrap things up mid-October. But she can’t live in a completely empty apartment for two months. She needs utensils, a kitchen table, a couple of chairs.
She wants an iron bed, a full set of jadeite, a quilt in the log cabin pattern.
Right off the bat, she finds a little deco table—white-and-black metal top, painted white base, no matching chairs, so it will go cheap, and it does, only $65. Now to find two chairs. There are two white painted ones made of cane, but she passes on those. No man will want to sit on those chairs. Why is she thinking about men, anyway? Then she has the brainstorm of buying only one chair, a lonely wooden chair from some old schoolhouse, which gets his attention.
“Not planning to entertain?” Adam asks.
“I never entertain.”
She has the resolve to pass on the jadeite; she’s not much for cooking and, as she just told Adam, she doesn’t entertain. But she can’t say no to the quilt. It’s so much like one that was on her frau-frau’s spare bed when she was a child. Hot chocolate and strudel for breakfast, making a tent with cousin Annie, playing War by flashlight. Even though Polly is not planning to spend a single winter’s night in Belleville, she has to have it.
Then an iron bed comes up. Oh, it’s a beauty. White, with gold details. Polly has a tricky back, prone to going out. Sleeping on a mattress without a box spring isn’t good for her.
“Looks awfully small,” Adam says.
“You don’t often find them larger than full,” she says. “People didn’t used to think they needed so much room in bed.”
“I like a king myself,” he says.
“Then you’ll probably never have an antique bed.”
She has set her limit at $150, which is $150 too much. She tries to put up her paddle as if she couldn’t care less, but she feels her heart thrumming in her chest as the price rises. Another woman is bidding—a little older than her, definitely richer. Polly sees the flash of jewels on the other woman’s hands, at her throat. She hates her, she wants to kill her. They are at $175, $200, $225. She wants this bed so bad.
“Do you have any cash on you?” she asks Adam.
“Don’t get carried away.”
“Did I ask your advice? Do you have any cash on you? You know I’m good for it.”
“You can’t spend more on a bed than you do on your rent.”
“Don’t tell me what I can do.”
The choice has slipped away during their argument and the other woman has won the beautiful bed for $275. Polly’s so angry she has to stalk away, fuming. She’s not sure who she’s angrier with—the woman who got her bed or the man who argued with her over what she could afford.
Or herself, for caring so much about a damn bed.
But in her mind’s eye, she already owned that bed, covered with the quilt, and, maybe, thrown over the foot, a man’s silk bathrobe that she bought at the Purple Heart. It’s purple, covered with dragons. Too big for her and too hot for the current weather, but it makes her feel like royalty when she pulls it over her naked body, walks around her empty rooms.
She cools down, returns to the auction. When he raises his eyebrows in a question—You OK?—she raises hers as if she has no idea what he’s asking. She doesn’t bid again, but when they go to collect her purchases at the end of the auction, there’s the bed, waiting with her table, chair, and quilt.
“What the—?”
“I asked the lady if she wanted to make a quick profit.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Two hundred twenty-five.”
No way she let it go for fifty less than she paid.
He answers her unvoiced skepticism. “She thought she could come back and get it later. But this auction is strictly cash-and-carry. Would have cost her at least fifty dollars to haul it away and that’s assuming she could find someone with a truck who wanted to drive all the way to Oxford today. And it’s strictly no refunds, so getting two twenty-five from me meant losing only fifty bucks. Pricey mistake for people like us, but she didn’t bat an eye.”
Polly doesn’t believe a word of it, but it’s not the first time someone has gone out of the way to pay her tribute. Men have always done things for her. People. And she never asks. That is, she never seems to ask. He won’t even remember that she hit him up for a loan. He won’t want to remember. He’s her savior, Mr. Magnanimous. It’s a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all. There are talents she would prefer to this one, because favors often carry a hefty penalty when it’s time to return them, but it’s the skill she was given, the hand she has to play.
So he bought her a bed. It’s funny, when she was mad at him, she was thinking that she just might get him to make a move tonight. Tonight or on the drive back home. All it would take is a hand on his thigh, about halfway up. But now that he’s bought her a bed, she’s going to have to deny him a little while longer. It would seem too much like commerce, tit for tat, quid pro quo. Bed for bed.
He bought her a bed. On the drive home, she keeps her face turned toward the cornfields and those arching blue skies, not wanting him to see how wide her grin is.
7