So she left St. Louis. It wasn’t just that one thing. It was her whole life. She had told herself that she went to the movies just to see people living, because she was curious. She’d more or less decided that she had missed out on it herself, so this was the best she could do. And it wasn’t so bad. The women at work would talk about their children who used to be so sweet when they were little, and now they’d rather drink than eat, the boys and the girls, and they couldn’t keep their mitts out of their mother’s handbag. She’d be thinking how strange it was in that movie Dorian Gray that when the man’s picture turned ugly from all his wickedness, the pants in the picture turned baggy, too. She couldn’t make much sense of it. Half the people in the movie were dressed like Fred Astaire and the other half looked like they’d been sleeping in their clothes their whole lives. When that man goes off into the poor part of the city, he turns evil and ends up looking like he’s been sleeping in his clothes. The more he goes there, the worse he is. Warts all over him. Maybe somebody stole his hat and the rest of it. Swapped with him. That could happen. Or somebody saw him there stripped naked and took pity on him, since every inch of that town he lived in was always soaking wet. What was she thinking about? It was the painting that changed. She couldn’t remember if the man died in his good clothes and only the rest of him was ugly. Him lying there and the others clucking their tongues. Too bad he happened to have a knife to kill himself with. Then he was too dead to use it to make them stop staring, and that was a shame. She was wearing Doll’s knife in her garter the day she saw Mack, but she probably wouldn’t have used it even if it hadn’t meant putting herself in reach of him, probably looking into his face. That damn face. Well, her life just rose up on her, and before she even knew quite what was happening she was walking away, struggling to keep from making a fool of herself, her heart beating in her ears. The life she’d decided she would never have was there the whole time, trapped and furious, and in that minute she knew that if a man she ought to hate said one kind word to her, there was no telling what she might do. Come along, Rosie. Give me a little smile, come along. He’d forgotten he ever saw her, and she was up in her room with the window shade pulled down, stuffing everything she had into her suitcase.
She walked over to the bus station to see where she could get to with the money she had. Wherever she went, she’d get there after the stores were closed, and the rooming houses. To get out of the city would take all her money, and then she’d have no place to spend the night and no supper. She went outside to sit on a bench and think about it. A car pulled up to the curb, and the driver, a young woman, called to her to ask her where she was going. Lila said, “Iowa,” and the woman said, “Me, too!” as if she had been hoping to hear that very word. “Get in. I saw you sitting there with your suitcase and I thought, I’d sure appreciate some company. That’s really why I came by here. It’s not on my way.” Lila wasn’t sure what to think about sitting for hours beside someone who might expect her to talk or to give her more money than she had, but the woman said, “It’ll save you the price of a ticket. I’ll be driving all night, and I’d rather not do that alone.” She was a tidy, freckly little woman with her hair in a knot. She was wearing a starchy white blouse she must have spent an hour ironing, it was so perfect. At the movies you could find yourself sitting next to anybody at all, some man with polished shoes and creased pants, some woman with rings on her hands, hugging her purse. They might tip their bags of popcorn toward her, she would hear them breathe and sigh as if they were sharing a pillow with her. Sometimes she could feel them looking at her, but she never looked at their faces or said anything to them. She’d just wait until the show began and they could forget each other. Now she would probably be sitting beside this stranger for hours with no way to stop thinking about her, which meant there was no way she could stop thinking about herself. Still, it would make some things easier.
The woman said, “Where you going?”
Lila thought she might try to get to Tammany, but the woman had never heard of it, so when she asked if it was near Des Moines Lila said yes, thinking that must be where the woman was going herself. It turned out she was going to a town called Macedonia, off somewhere in the cornfields, so she left Lila at a gas station in Indianola, which wasn’t too far from Des Moines. Lila had no reason to be in Des Moines. In fact, she didn’t want to be in any town that was big enough for anybody to know where it was. She had
