reach me, write to me care of my sister Rose. I’ll check with her later. Don’t forget to ask the college for scholarship money. Bye for now. Mommy.” The
She rinsed the dishes and put them in the sink with very hot water and detergent to soak a bit while she went outside to pick up the Sunday newspaper from the sidewalk. She had always done that to keep the neighbors from noticing that her mother stayed out late and slept for the first half of the day. It was a warm, sunny morning, and there were flowers blooming in the neighbors’ yards. She went back inside, closed the door, and locked it.
She was halfway through the dishes before she really felt what had happened to her. She was as alone as a person in a raft in the middle of the ocean. She spent a few minutes thinking about how it must have happened.
Her mother had been in one of her depressions lately, because of her most recent boyfriend, Ray. About two months ago, Ray had hit her and then left. The next day she had pretended that she had gotten tired of Ray and made him leave, then bumped into a kitchen cupboard in the dark because she’d been trying to get a glass of water in the middle of the night without waking Charlene. But Charlene had awakened and heard her sobbing, pleading with Ray not to leave: “Ray, I wasn’t even interested in him that way. It just happened. It didn’t mean anything. Please don’t leave. I’ll never do it again.” Her mother’s voice had been the shrill kind that carried, but Ray was a mutterer, with a deep voice, so Charlene couldn’t make out anything he was saying. She hadn’t needed to.
Charlene’s mother had hated being alone. It wasn’t clear to Charlene from the contradictory stories she told when she had ever been alone, but the experience must have been terrible, because she was willing to do anything to keep from being alone again. Some of the time when a boyfriend moved out, she had heard her mother saying, “I’ll do anything,” and known that she meant it. Charlene was sure she knew what the opportunity in the note had been. Somebody had offered her a chance not to be alone.
It struck Charlene at first that since her mother was so scared of being alone, it was odd that she would abandon Charlene. But she always had been that way. If the weather was hot, then she was hotter than other people. If there was only one piece of meat left, then she was hungrier than anyone else. Charlene should have seen this coming, from the moment when she had received her letter from the college. Her mother had read the letter on the wall too, and to her it had meant that Charlene was going away.
Charlene didn’t like her mother very much, but she missed her in some deep, awful way. After another day, however, she realized she still had to get herself through the rest of June and graduate, then find a way to survive July and August on her own and get to college. The remark about a scholarship in her mother’s letter had been her only mention of money. That had been her way of saying that she had not left Charlene any.
That morning, as soon as Charlene was showered and dressed, she went to the only place she could think of in Wheatfield to find work. It was the Dairy Princess on Highway 19. It looked almost exactly like a Dairy Queen place, but it actually wasn’t. It was a transparent counterfeit, relying on the notion that people would see what it was imitating and then pull over, exactly as though it were a Dairy Queen. They would realize that it wasn’t, but they would forgive the small imposture.
The summer manager was a boy named Tim she remembered from high school; he was two years older than she was, and was already off for the summer. There was a line at the order window, so she waited until it was her turn. She said she wanted to see Tim.
When he came to the window, he said, “Hi, Charlene. What can I get you?”
“I need a job, thanks. Do you have one that’s open?”
Tim looked at her for a long time. She could see him trying to calculate, and he actually looked worried, as though he couldn’t figure out the answer. “If you’re willing to work hard, there’s one left.”
“Okay,” she said.
She started right away. At first she worked only on weekends, because that was when most people wanted ice cream and hamburgers. When graduation came and summer began, she worked six days a week, from twelve until nine. She got minimum wage, which wasn’t much, but she ate something during her break each night that served as dinner, and once in a while some man would give her a tip.
She took her mother’s advice and wrote a letter to the admissions office at the university, informing them that she was going to need a scholarship. She told them that the reason she had not applied before was that her mother had never managed to fill out the Parents’ Confidential Statement about her finances, but that her mother’s finances no longer mattered because her mother had moved on. Two weeks into the summer she received a gently worded letter that said it was too late for this year, and included some application forms for federal loans.
Charlene remembered sitting in her empty house at the kitchen table reading the forms and feeling absolutely bereft. The next two nights she came home tired and worked on the forms. The third night, she finished at midnight and walked to the letter box outside the post office to mail them.
Charlene made a friend at the Dairy Princess named Alice. She was a woman of about twenty-nine who had a little boy but lived with her parents not far from where Charlene lived. At seven each night they went outside, away from the heat and the smells, and while Alice smoked, they talked. She had seen Charlene staring at Tim when he wasn’t looking.
Charlene had not let her thoughts about Tim get beyond the speculation stage, where she felt a small tingle when he was near her in the narrow, hot kitchen and they accidentally brushed against each other as she was carrying food to the pickup window. She didn’t have any room in her life for another person. But Alice had caught her looking at him, and from that day she spoke to Charlene about her crush on Tim.
One night when Charlene left at her usual time, Alice offered to close the store so Tim could go too. Charlene noticed him walking along the street twenty feet behind her, so she slowed and gradually they began to walk together.
He said, “Alice told me you’re having a hard time saving the money you need to start at college.”
She was alarmed, humiliated. She had not formed close relationships with other girls in high school, because they always seemed to turn any confidence into gossip. Alice was so much older that Charlene had assumed she wouldn’t behave that way or betray her. She fought the panic and answered, “I guess it’s true. I’ve got to pay my own living expenses, because my mother is away right now.”
“I heard that too. It must be hard.”
“I don’t miss the company. I’m out most of the time anyway. It’s just that I got used to having her pay for things.”
They walked along the dark streets toward her house. They talked about the day’s customers who had looked strange, or acted superior, and about the pressure Tim felt to keep the receipts at the Princess high so the owner, Mr. Kallen, wouldn’t give him a bad recommendation when he left in the fall. He knew he wouldn’t be fired in the middle of the summer, and his parents had enough money to pay his tuition at Purdue whether he worked or not, but he was convinced that a bad recommendation in his first supervisory job would ruin his future.
Charlene walked along beside him, most comfortable while he was talking but feeling something like stage fright whenever a topic had been exhausted and another hadn’t replaced it. She became ashamed of the fact that the items that occupied her mind weren’t theories or ideas, only the personal obsessions and problems that consumed her—the fact that she wasn’t paying the rent on the house or the utility bills, just trying to ignore the increasingly ominous late notices and not answering the telephone in the hope that she wouldn’t be evicted before September, the fear that people would know she was alone in the house and too young to have any rights—and she didn’t want him to know any of them.
When they reached her house they stood for a moment in silence on the porch in the dark, and he kissed her. It was a shock for her, a soft, sweet moment in a life that had turned into an emergency. She had come to expect days full of sweat and the smell of burning grease and overflowing, fly-swarmed garbage cans. As he held her, she seemed to be floating, her eyes closed. When he released her, she stood motionless for a few seconds.
He said, “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I watch you in the Princess.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. You’re the best-looking girl in Wheatfield.”
“Of course, Wheatfield is so huge. There must be twelve girls. And I’m not, anyway.”
“I’m serious. Everybody knows it. I remember when you came into high school. I was a junior. Everybody was blown away.”
She looked down, afraid that she might be blushing and that he could see it, even though they were under the porch roof, so the moonlight didn’t reach them. She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she said, “Thank
