Mary And The Giant Read online

  “This is shit,” the shipping clerk said. “You know it?”

  The welder grinned, nodded, and waited.

  “You done?” the shipping clerk demanded. “You want another table? Who the hell would have one of these tables in his house? I wouldn’t give them toilet space.”

  One gleaming leg slipped from his fingers and fell to the concrete. Cursing, the shipping clerk kicked it into the litter under his bench, among the bits of rope and brown paper. He was bending to pluck it back out when Miss Mary Anne Reynolds appeared with more order sheets ready for his attention.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, knowing how clearly he could be heard in the office.

  “The hell with it,” the shipping clerk said, as he got down a fresh leg. “Hold this, will you?”

  Mary Anne put down her papers and held the leg while he bolted it onto the chair frame. The smell of his unhappiness reached her, and it was a thin smell, acrid, like sweat that had soured. She felt sorry for him, but his stupidity annoyed her. He had been like this a year and a half ago, when she started.

  “Quit,” she told him. “Why keep a job you don’t like?”

  “Shut up,” the shipping clerk said.

  Mary Anne let go of the completed table and watched the welder fuse the legs in place. She enjoyed the sputter of sparks: it was like a Fourth of July display. She had asked the welder to let her try the torch, but he always grinned and said no.

  “They don’t like your work,” she said to the clerk. “Mr. Bolden told his wife that unless your work picks up, he isn’t going to keep you on.”

  “I wish I was back in the army,” the clerk said.

  There was no use talking to him. Mary Anne, with a swirl of her skirts, left the work area and returned to the office.

  At his desk was elderly Tom Bolden, the owner of California Readymade; and, at the adding machine, was his wife. “How’s he coming?” Bolden asked, presently aware that the girl had returned. “Sitting around loafing, as usual?”

  “Working very hard,” she said loyally, seating herself before her typewriter. She didn’t like the shipping clerk but she refused to involve herself in his downfall.

  “You have that Hales letter?” Bolden said. “I want to sign it before I leave.”

  “Where are you going?” his wife asked.

  “Up to San Francisco. Dohrmann’s says there’s defects in the last load.”

  She found the letter and passed it to the old man to sign. It was a faultless page she had done, but she felt no pride; chrome furniture and typing and the problems of a department store blurred meaninglessly into the clatter of Edna Bolden’s adding machine. She reached within the material of her blouse and adjusted her bra strap. The day was hot and empty, as always.

  “Should be back by seven,” Tom Bolden was saying.

  “Be careful of the traffic.” That was Mrs. Bolden, who was holding the office door open for him.

  “Maybe I’ll bring back a new shipping clerk.” He had almost left; in the girl’s ears his voice receded. “Ever seen out there? Filthy as a pigsty. Rubbish everywhere. I’m taking the panel truck.”

  “Go up El Camino,” Mary Anne said.

  “Whatsat?” Bolden halted, cocking his head.

  “El Camino. It’s slower but a lot safer.”

  Muttering, Bolden slammed the door. She heard the panel truck start up and move off into traffic . . . it didn’t really matter. She began examining her shorthand notes. The noise of the power saws filtered through the walls into the office; and there was a series of taps as the shipping clerk pounded at his chrome tables.

  “He’s right,” she said. “Jake, I mean.”

  “Who in the world is Jake?” Mrs. Bolden asked.

  “The shipping clerk.” They didn’t even know his name. He was a pounding machine . . . a faulty pounding machine. “There has to be litter around a shipping bench. How can you wrap without litter?”

  “It’s not for you to decide.” Mrs. Bolden put down her adding-machine tape and turned toward her. “Mary, you’re old enough to know better—talking this way, as if you’re in charge.”

  “I know. I was hired to take dictation, not to tell you how to run your business.” She had heard it before, a number of times. “Right?”

  “You can’t work in the business world and behave this way,”

  Mrs. Bolden said. “You’ve got to learn that. You simply must have respect for those above you.”

  Mary Anne listened to the words, and wondered what they meant. They seemed to be important to Mrs. Bolden; the heavyset old woman had become upset. It amused her a little, because it was so silly, so unimportant.

  “Don’t you want to know things?” she asked curiously. Apparently they didn’t. “The men found a rat in the fabric shed. Maybe rats have been eating the fabric rolls. Wouldn’t you want to find out? I should think you’d want somebody to tell you.”

  “Of course we want to find out.”

  “I don’t see the difference.”

  There was an interval of silence. “Mary Anne,” the older woman said finally, “both Tom and I think the world of you. Your work is excellent—you’re bright and you’re quick to learn. But you must face reality.”

  “What reality is that?”

  “Your job!”

  Mary Anne smiled, a slow, meditative glimmer. She felt light-headed, filled with a buzzing sound. “That reminds me.”

  “Reminds you of what?”

  “I think I’ll pick up my brown gabardine coat from the cleaner.” With deliberation, she examined her wristwatch; she was conscious of Edna Bolden’s outrage, but the old woman was wasting her time. “Can I leave early this afternoon? The cleaner closes at five.”

  “I wish I could reach you,” Mrs. Bolden said. She was troubled by the girl, and her distress showed. Mary Anne could not be appealed to; the usual promises and threats meant nothing. They fell on closed ears.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary Anne said. “But it’s so stupid and mixed up. There’s Jake out there hating his job—if he doesn’t like his job he should quit. And your husband wants to fire him because his work is sloppy.” She gazed up intently at Mrs. Bolden, distressing her even more. “Why doesn’t somebody do something? It was like this a year and a half ago. What’s the matter with everybody?”

  “Just do your work,” Mrs. Bolden said. “Would you do that? Would you turn around and finish your letters?”

  “You didn’t answer me.” Mary Anne continued to scrutinize her, without compassion. “I asked if I could leave early.”

  “Finish your work and then we’ll discuss it.”

  Mary Anne considered a moment and then turned back to her desk. It would take fifteen minutes to get to the cleaners, if she walked from the factory directly into town. She would have to leave at four-thirty to be sure of arriving in time.

  As far as she was concerned the matter was settled. She had settled it herself.

  In the tired brilliance of late afternoon she walked along Empory Avenue, a small, rather thin girl with short-cropped brown hair, walking very straight-backed, head up, her brown coat slung carelessly over her arm. She walked because she hated to ride on buses, and because, on foot, she could stop when and wherever she wished.

  Traffic in two streams moved along the street. Merchants were beginning to emerge and roll up their awnings; the stores of Pacific Park were shutting for the day.

  To her right were the stucco buildings that made up Pacific Park High School. Three years ago, in 1950, she had graduated from that school. Cooking, civics, and American history; that was what they had taught her. She had been able to use the cooking. In 1951 she had got her first job: receptionist at the Ace Loan Company on Pine Street. In late 1951, bored, she had quit and gone to work for Tom Bolden.

  Some job that was—typing letters to department stores about chrome kitchen chairs. And the chairs weren’t very well built, either; she had tried them out.

  She was twenty years old,
and she had lived in Pacific Park all her life. She did not dislike the town; it seemed too frail to survive dislike. It, and its people, played odd little games, and the games were taken seriously, as were the games of her childhood: rules that could not be broken, rituals that involved life and death. And she, with curiosity, asking why this rule, why that custom, and playing anyhow . . . until boredom came, and, after it, a wondering contempt that left her cut off and alone.

  At the Rexall drugstore she halted a moment and inspected the rack of paperbound books. Bypassing the novels—they were too full of nonsense—she selected a volume entitled Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. That, and a copy of the Pacific Park Leader, cost her thirty-seven cents.

  She was coming out of the drugstore when two shapes encountered her. “Hi,” one said, a young man, well-dressed. A salesman from Frug’s Menswear; his companion was unknown to her. “Seen Gordon today? He’s looking for you.”

  “I’ll telephone him,” she said, starting away. She disliked the odor of flowers that hung over Eddie Tate. Some men’s cologne smelled all right; Tweany’s was like the smell of wood. But not this . . . she had no respect for this.

  “Whatcha reading?” Tate asked, peering. “One of those sexy books?”

  She appraised him in her fashion: calmly, with no intention to do harm, merely wanting to know. “I wish I was sure about you.

  “What do you mean?” Tate said uneasily.

  “One day I saw you standing around the Greyhound terminal with a couple of sailors. Are you a fairy?”

  “My cousin!”

  “Gordon isn’t a fairy. But he’s too stupid to tell the difference; he thinks you’ve got class.” Her eyes widened; the sight of poor Eddie Tate’s dismay amused her. “You know how you smell?

  You smell like a woman.”

  The man’s companion, interested in a girl who would speak so, waited close by, listening.

  “Is Gordon at the gas station?” she asked Tate. “I—wouldn’t know.”

  “Weren’t you hanging around there today?” She didn’t let him go; she had the creature stuck.

  “I was by for a minute. He said maybe he’d drop over to your house tonight. He said he came around Wednesday and you weren’t home.”

  Tate’s voice diminished as she, collecting her coat, started off, not looking back at either of them. Not caring, really, about either of them. She was thinking about home. Discouragement set in, and she felt her pleasure, the lift that fairy-baiting gave her, fade.

  The front door was unlocked; her mother was in the kitchen fixing dinner. Noise clanged in the six units of the building: television sets and kids playing.

  She entered, and faced her father.

  In his easy chair Ed Reynolds sat waiting, muscular and small, with gray hair like strands of wire. His fingers gripped the chair and he half-rose, gurgling and blinking rapidly; a beer can fell to the floor and then he swept newspaper and ashtray aside. He wore his black leather jacket and beneath it his undershirt, his cotton undershirt, stained with sweat and dirt. Smears of grease crossed his face, his neck; by the chair were his heavy work boots, lumpy with grease.

  “Hello,” she said, startled as always to see him, as if she had never seen him before.

  “Just getting home?” His eyes glowed and his protruding Adam’s apple wallowed in brisk little quivers of skin and bristling hair. As she walked toward her bedroom he came after, close on her heels, treading in his sticky socks across the carpet.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t what? Why you just getting home?” He pursued her. “Stop off with some of your nigger friends?”

  She closed the bedroom door after her and stood. On the other side his breathing sounded: a low rattle, like something caught in a metal pipe. Not turning her back to the door, she changed to a white shirt and levis. When she came out he had returned to his chair. Before him the TV set radiated.

  Entering the kitchen, she said rapidly to her mother: “Did Gordon call?” She avoided the sight of her father.

  “Not today.” Mrs. Rose Reynolds bent to inspect the casserole steaming in the oven. “Go set the table. Be some help.” Back and forth, scurrying between the stove and sink. She was thin, too, like her daughter; here was the same sharp face, eyes that moved constantly, and, around the mouth, the same lines of worry. But from her grandfather—now dead, now buried in Forest Slope Chapel Cemetery in San Jose—Mary Anne had got her directness, the aloof boldness; and her mother lacked that.

  Mary Anne examined the contents of pots and said: “I think I’m going to quit my job.”

  “Oh, good Lord,” her mother said, tearing at a package of frozen peas. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “You realize Ed won’t be working a full week for the rest of the year. If it wasn’t for his seniority—”

  “They’ll always make pipe. They won’t lay him off.” She didn’t care; she wished him no good luck. Seating herself at the table she opened the Leader to the editorial page. “Want to hear what morons people are? Here’s a letter from somebody in Los Gatos saying that Malenkov is the Antichrist, and God will send angels to destroy him.” She turned to the medical column. “ ‘Should I be concerned about a painless sore on the inside of my lip that doesn’t seem to heal?’ He probably has cancer.”

  “You can’t quit your job.”

  “I’m not Jake,” she said. “Don’t make me a Jake.”

  “Who’s Jake?”

  “He’s been there five years.” She found the help-wanted columns and smoothed the newspaper flat. “Of course, I can always marry Gordon and sit home sewing while he fixes flat tires. Little soldier in a uniform. So obedient. Wave a flag, Jake. Gordon.”

  “Dinner’s ready,” her mother said. “Go tell Ed.”

  “Tell him yourself. I’m busy.” Absorbed in the help-wanted columns she reached about for a pair of scissors. The ad looked good, and it was the first time it had appeared.

  Young woman wanted for retail selling. Must be able to meet public and be personable in dress and appearance. Knowledge of music valuable but not essential. Joseph R. Schilling MA3−6041 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.

  “Go get him,” her mother was repeating. “I told you; can’t you help me a little? Can’t you be of some use?”

  “Lay off,” Mary Anne said nervously. She cut out the ad and carried it to her purse. “Get up, Ed,” she said to her father. “Come on, wake up.”

  He sat there in his chair, and the sight halted her with dread. Beer had leaked on the rug, an ugly stain that grew as she watched. She didn’t want to go close to him; at the doorway she stopped.

  “Help me up,” he said.

  “No.” She felt sick; she couldn’t imagine touching him. Suddenly she shouted: “Ed, get up! Come on!”

  “Listen to her,” he said. His eyes were bright, alert, fixed on her. “She calls me Ed. Why can’t she call me Dad? Aren’t I her father?”

  She began to laugh, then, not wanting to but not able to keep from it. “God,” she said, and choked.

  “Show your father some respect.” He was on his feet and moving toward her. “You hear me? Young lady. Listen to me.”

  “Keep your goddamn hands off me,” she said, and rushed back into the kitchen, by her mother; at the cupboard she took out plates. “If you touch me I’ll leave. Don’t let him touch me,” she said to her mother. Trembling, she began setting the table. “You don’t want him to touch me, do you?”

  “Leave her alone,” Rose Reynolds said.

  “Is he drunk?” Mary Anne demanded. “How can a man get drunk on beer? Is it cheaper?”

  And then, once more, he had hold of her. He had caught her by the hair. The game, the old, terrible game.

  Again Mary Anne felt his fingers against her neck, the very strong little hand at the base of her skull. His knuckles dug into her skin and smeared her; she felt the stain grow and spread and seep. She cried out, but it was hopeless; now the rancid beer
breath billowed into her face and he was twisting her around to face him. She, still holding plates, heard the crackle of his leather jacket, the stirring of his body. She closed her eyes and thought of different things: good things and quiet things, things that smelled nice, things distant and peaceful.

  When she opened her eyes he had gone; he was sitting down at the table. “Hey,” he said, as his wife approached with the casserole, “she’s getting nice little tits on her.”

  Rose Reynolds said nothing.

  “She’s growing up,” he said, and pushed back his sleeves to eat.

  3

  “Gordon,” she said. But it wasn’t David Gordon.

  It was his mother who opened the door, looking out into the night darkness and smiling vaguely at the girl standing on the porch.

  “Why, Mary Anne,” Mrs. Gordon said. “How nice.”

  “Is Dave home?” She had, in jeans and cloth coat, left her own house as soon as dinner was over. The sense of escape was strong in her, and she had the ad in her purse.

  “Have you had dinner?” Mrs. Gordon asked. Warm dinner smell drifted out. “I’ll go upstairs to his room and see if he’s still in.”

  “Thanks,” she said, breathing her impatience, hoping he was home because it made things more convenient; she could go to the Wren alone, but it was better to have somebody along.

  “Don’t you want to come inside, dear?” It seemed natural that her son’s fiancee should come in; the woman held the door open, but Mary Anne stayed where she was.

  “No,” she said. She had no time; she was hunted down by the need to act. Damn it, she thought, the car’s gone. The Cordons’ garage was empty, so Dave was out. Well, that was that.

  “Who’s there?” Arnold Gordon’s hospitable voice sounded, as he materialized with his newspaper and pipe, slippers on his feet. “Mary, come on in here; what’s the matter with you, standing out there?”