Mrs. Alexander took a drink of air and spun to accuse the house. “Two years! One hundred sixty-five bottles of throat molasses! Ten pounds of sulphur! Twelve boxes of sleeping pills! Five yards of flannel for our chests! How much mustard-grease? Get away!” She pushed at the house. She turned to the spring day, opened her arms. The sun made teardrops jump from her eyes.
They waited, not yet ready to descend away from two years of nursing one another, falling ill time and again, accepting but never quite enjoying the prospect of another evening together after six hundred of seeing no other human face.
“Why, we’re strangers here.” The husband nodded to the shady streets.
And they remembered how they had stopped answering the door and kept the shades down, afraid that some abrupt encounter, some flash of bright sun might shatter them to dusty ghosts.
But now, on this fountain-sparkling day, their health at last miraculously returned, old Mr. and Mrs. Alexander edged down the steps and into the town, like tourists from a land beneath the earth.
Reaching the main street, Mr. Alexander said, “We’re not so old; we just
They flew apart, rid of each other at last.
NOT HALF a block away, passing a dress shop, Mr. Alexander saw a mannequin in a window, and froze. There, ah, there! The sunlight warmed her pink cheeks, her berry-stained lips, her blue-lacquer eyes, her yellow- yarn hair. He stood at the window for an entire minute, until a live woman appeared suddenly, arranging the displays. When she glanced up, there was Mr. Alexander, smiling like a youthful idiot. She smiled back.
What a day! he thought. I could punch a hole in a plank door. I could throw a cat over the court house! Get out of the way, old man! Wait! Was that a
Mr. Alexander was inside the shop.
“I want to buy something!” he said.
“What?” asked the beautiful saleslady.
He glanced foolishly about. “Why, let me have a scarf. That’s it, a scarf.”
He blinked at the numerous scarves she brought, smiling at him so his heart roared and tilted like a gyroscope, throwing the world out of balance. “Pick the scarf you’d wear, yourself. That’s the scarf for me.”
She chose a scarf the color of her eyes.
“Is it for your wife?”
He handed her a five dollar bill. “Put the scarf on.” She obeyed. He tried to imagine Elma’s head sticking out above it; failed. “Keep it,” he said, “it’s yours.” He drifted out the sunlit door, his veins singing.
“Sir,” she called, but he was gone.
WHAT MRS. Alexander wanted most was shoes, and after leaving her husband she entered the very first shoe-shop. But not, however, before she dropped a penny in a perfume machine and pumped great vaporous founts of verbena upon her sparrow chest. Then, with the spray clinging round her like morning mist, she plunged into the shoe store, where a fine young man with doe-brown eyes and black-arched brows and hair the sheen of patent leather pinched her ankles, feathered her in-step, caressed her toes and so entertained her feet that they blushed a soft warm pink.
“Madame has the smallest foot I’ve fitted this year. Extraordinarily small.”
Mrs. Alexander was a great heart seated there, beating so loudly that the salesman had to shout over the sound:
“If madam will push down!”
“Would the lady like another color?”
He shook her left hand as she departed with three pairs of shoes, giving her fingers what seemed to be a meaningful appraisal. She laughed a strange laugh, forgetting to say she had not worn her wedding band, her fingers had puffed with illness so many years that the ring now lay in dust. On the street, she confronted the verbena squirting machine, another copper penny in her hand.
MR. ALEXANDER strode with great bouncing strides up and down streets, doing a little jig of delight on meeting certain people, stopping at last, faintly tired, but not admitting it to anyone, before the United Cigar store. There, as if seven hundred odd noons had not vanished, stood Mr. Bleak, Mr. Grey, Samuel Spaulding and the Wooden Indian. They seized and punched Mr. Alexander in disbelief.
“Alex, you’re back from the dead!”
“Coming to the Lodge tonight?”
“Sure!”
“Oddfellows meet tomorrow night?”
“I’ll be there!” Invitations blew about him in a warm wind. “Old friends, I’ve
“One week from tonight,” cried Mr. Alexander, “open house. My wife and I invite you all, good friends. Barbeque! Drinks and fun!”
Spaulding crushed his hand. “Will your wife mind about tonight?”
“Not Elma.”
“Fine!”
And Mr. Alexander was off like a ball of Spanish moss blown on the wind.
AFTER SHE left the store Mrs. Alexander was discovered in the streets of the town by a sea of women. She was the center of a bargain sale, ladies clustering in twos and threes, everyone talking, laughing, offering, accepting, at once.
“Tonight, Elma. The Thimble Club.”
“Come pick me up!”
Breathless and flushed, she pushed through, made it to a far curb, looked back as one looks at the ocean for a last time before going inland, and hustled, laughing to herself, down the avenue, counting on her fingers the appointments she had in the next week at the Elm Street Society, the Women’s Patriotic League, the Sewing Basket, and the Elite Theatre Club.
The hours blazed to their finish. The court house clock rang once.
Mr. Alexander stood on the street corner, glancing at his watch doubtfully and shaking it, muttering under his breath. A woman was standing on the opposite corner, and after ten minutes of waiting, Mr. Alexander crossed over. “I beg your pardon, but I think my watch is wrong,” he called, approaching. “Could you give me the correct time?”
“John!” she cried.
“Elma!” he cried.
“I was standing here all the time,” she said.
“And I was standing over there!”
“You’ve got a new suit!”
“That’s a new dress!”
“New hat.”
“So is yours.”
“New shoes.”
“How do
“Mine hurt.”
“So do mine.”
“I bought tickets for a play Saturday night for us, Elma! And reservations for the Green Town picnic next month! What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”
“What’s that cologne
