“You two are the only ones I know here,” I said.
“For now,” she instantly retorted. “Any young lady as pretty as you will soon have a trail of young men coming to the door. We permit socializing in the living room during decent hours, of course, and you can offer anyone tea or coffee and biscuits during the visit if we know about it in advance.”
She took a deep breath and looked around the room with the expectation that I would follow her gaze.
“As you see, there is no television or radio in your room,” she continued, “nor is there a telephone. This is what I meant when I said we run a very quiet rooming house. There is, of course, a television set in the den downstairs. So, unless you have any questions . . .”
“No, everything is wonderful,” I said.
She smiled. “Mrs. McGruder will bring your towels and washcloths shortly. As we said, you’re sharing a bathroom on this side with Naomi Addison.”
“She’ll be surprised,” Mrs. McGruder muttered. “She’s had it all to herself up to now. That’s a woman who is used to her own personal comfort and not used to sharing anything except her troubles and unhappiness.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure you will not monopolize the bathroom, nor will she,” Mrs. Winston said firmly. “As in any good rooming house, we are all dependent upon everyone else, respecting everyone else, Mrs. Addison included.”
Mrs. McGruder grunted with some skepticism. Mrs. Winston glanced at her, thought for a moment, and then turned back to me.
“Mrs. McGruder is of the opinion that Mrs. Addison . . .”
“Soon to be ex–Mrs. Addison,” Mrs. McGruder corrected.
“That ex–Mrs. Addison has her sights set on my nephew, Ken Dolan, and that this was her true intention when she came here to stay until her matters are settled. Ken’s wife left him soon after she gave birth to their son, Liam. Ken had a daughter with her, too, four years earlier, Julia. Liam is twenty-one, and Julia is twenty-five. Neither of them is at all fond of Mrs. Addison—I mean, the soon-to-be-ex–Mrs. Addison—but men are blind when it comes to the wiles of coquettes.”
I couldn’t help smiling. The wiles of coquettes?
“Amen to that,” Mrs. McGruder said. “My husband made an absolute fool of himself whenever he was confronted by a bubbling bosom or a seductive wisp of a smile to accompany a wiggling hip.”
Mrs. Winston cleared her throat and gave Mrs. McGruder a chastising look. “Yes, well, I wasn’t going to turn her away. How would that look? A woman in the midst of a bitter divorce left out in the cold. But I’m not worried. Ken won’t fall for a woman who resembles his first wife. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
“Amen to that, too,” Mrs. McGruder said.
“One of our current two other guests is Mr. Jim Lamb, a twenty-four-year-old man who teaches English in the Adams School for Girls,” Mrs. Winston said. “It’s a private secular school for grades six to twelve. He mostly teaches the high school students. He’s a very serious young man. And our other guest is Mr. Martin Brady, a man in his fifties who is a dental supply salesman. You’ll meet everyone at dinner, if not before. Do you have any questions, dear?”
“No. I’ll just settle in, as you say,” I said.
She nodded. “I’ll let you know what my nephew says.”
They both left and closed the door behind them, their looks and voices fading quickly, like breath in very cold air. The resulting silence felt heavy.
Everything that had happened to me and everything I had done had gone by so quickly that I hadn’t paused long enough to think about it all and fully contemplate the possibilities that loomed on the horizon. Now that Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder had left me alone, it all came flooding back at me. The reality was that this was the first time I was really on my own, the first time I was away from whatever family I had known, and the first time I was totally responsible for myself.
As it would for any older teenage girl, that prospect filled me with mixed emotions tugging against one another, especially excitement and concern. For a few moments, I thought only of my freedom to do whatever I wanted. The rules Mrs. Winston had described were restraints that applied only in the house. Out there, I could dress, say, and do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I didn’t have to worry about what my father would think or say, what Mrs. Fennel would think or say, or what Ava would think or say. The only one I had to please was myself. If I wanted to get drunk and make a fool of myself, I could. I didn’t have to be careful about whom I spoke to and what I said, as long as what I said had nothing to do with the life I was fleeing.
I wasn’t afraid of my freedom, either. I had always had great self-confidence, even though there were times when I doubted or questioned it. In my heart of hearts, I knew that I could compete with any other girl my age or older in any way on any field. None of them was as well equipped for life’s normal challenges as I was.
Now, on my own, I was even more grateful for my extraordinary intelligence, the speed with which I could master any new subject, the breadth and depth of my memory, and the perception I possessed, a perception that for other girls came only after years and years of experiences and acquired wisdom and that wasn’t guaranteed. Mine was inherited. There was no ordinary human being I couldn’t handle, master, and defeat if I had to. Look at what I had just been through with that fiend who had pretended to be an attorney. I smiled to myself, imagining how Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder would have reacted at lunch if I had described those events in any detail.
How silly and insignificant their concerns for me were. My biggest problem should be sharing a bathroom with a divorcée who was full of herself.
All of this filled me with optimism, but when I gazed out of my bedroom windows and looked down at the bright, Norman Rockwell streets reeking of peace and contentment, imagining the happy families that occupied the other houses, with their manicured front lawns, their sparkling driveways and walks, their potted flowers and sprawling old trees that had quietly witnessed the birth of a nation, I could imagine the creeping, crawling, dark shadows seeping in and over it all, finding the cracks in the perfection, slipping through any tiny opening, oozing over the immaculate streets and sidewalks, embracing the houses and darkening the hearts of parents who would suddenly fear for their teenagers as much as for themselves.
Was Daddy ever far away? Had I been deluding myself?
I opened the window and listened to the breeze tiptoeing over the tops of houses and trees until it circled the house to dance a ballet in the sunlight. On the right side of a house across the street, a tree of metal butterflies jingled. Down toward the west end of the street, a car door slammed. Someone called out to someone. There was a trickle of laughter. High in the sky above, a twinkling star metamorphosed into a commercial jet. I suddenly could hear Mrs. Winston and Mrs. McGruder below discussing the dinner menu and then dropping their voices into whispers, surely to talk about me. How quickly they had begun to care and worry about me.
What a wonderful choice I had made. Life here was surely a breath of fresh air. I told myself that Ava, Daddy, and the others most likely expected that I would flee to some darker sanctuary, a place where my inherent nature would feel more at home. They’d search for me in urban alleyways, large, busy cities where someone like me, and like them, would have an easier time disappearing. For a frightening moment, I wondered if they weren’t right to assume that and if I wasn’t wrong to ignore it. Would my true nature be too obvious in a place like this? Would these people take second looks at me, see the veil of darkness that was always beside me, step away, and
then choose to avoid and ignore me? Would they, in short, become afraid of me?