Estelle could hardly see the words on Mrs. Macmillan’s letter for the tears in her eyes. She had taken the letter out, and read it again, to try to understand what kind of a woman Mrs. Macmillan was. She hadn’t the time to think of her before now.
The letter itself did not explain any more about Mrs. Macmillan. Dear Ess, I did not give this to you personally, or leave it on your dresser when I was leaving, because I wanted you to have it just as you were leaving the hospital (“because she knew she was lying like hell, and she couldn’t face me, that’s why!”), I wanted you to have something to read on the long trip from Toronto to Timmins (“This woman’s crazy as hell! Something for me to read?”). Estelle skipped the next few useless pages of the letter, folded it, and tried to sleep. She left the light burning because she was scared of the strange house and of the old woman mumbling in her sleep next door …
One afternoon, as Estelle was dragging her feet in the dead leaves of autumn and Bedford Road, about six days after she moved into the rooming house, she all of a sudden got the idea that she should write Sam Burrmann, and tell him she needed some money for rent. Rent was due the next day. She had left the money which Mrs. Macmillan had given her in the teapot in her kitchen in North Bay, and now she had very little left. In her new condition of having to take care of herself, of having to supply the immediate and essential means of her livelihood, she was a bit inexperienced. For example, that first night, six nights ago, she had overspent: but it was nothing more than hamburgers which she hated, potatoes and a little milk. Sometimes, she had to use one teabag more than twice the same day. And very often she had to drink her tea without milk or cream. She was worrying about her health. The sugar she had brought from the hospital in little sacks which advertised the name of the hospital on them. These little thefts she had been talked into committing and encouraged into continuing by Mrs. Macmillan, who, with her, had made tea every night when the nurses weren’t looking from the hot water tap in the washroom. It was a good thing, Estelle now realized, that she had met Mrs. Macmillan. A simple thing like a teabag, a teabag which normally Estelle would have walked over, had she met one of them on the street; and sugar sacks, such as she was served on the plane coming up from Barbados; in restaurants when she went out with Bernice, she had never imagined that a sugar sack would come in so useful. But now it was time to live above the sugar-sack level. Sam Burrmann would have to give her money. As she walked in the dead leaves, she wondered how she would ever reach him.
There was little strength and fewer vitamins to be got from her daily diet of hamburgers and potatoes. Her pride made her refuse five invitations to go for a coffee with the student who lived on the first floor, and who had been pestering her for a date: “A wha’? Date? At my blasted age, and in my condition, you asking me for date? I am a pregnant woman! I don’t want no date, boy, I looking for a man to father my child,” she told him once.
“Or can I take you to the movies?” he pleaded. “There’s a party a Wessindian is holding tomorrow night. You want to go? Would you like some coffee — in my room?”
With these things on her mind this afternoon, she walked with her head down, consciously looking and hoping to find money. But it hadn’t happened. And she was starving. Her hate for the old woman, who she had seen only once, slipping out of the smelling washroom, increased every night when she smelled the hamburger meat she was cooking, and it did not matter that she herself was reduced to eating the same hamburger. Once she told herself that the smell had changed to that of frying pork chops; and this caused her to remember the way her mother used to fry them back home, with lard oil running out of them when you put a piece in your mouth, and with the fat burned, but not too much, turning into crackling, and the sting of black pepper and the cloves and the onion. The old woman’s food was driving her crazy.
She had thought many times of writing Sam Burrmann a letter. But she ruled out the wisdom of the letter since Bernice might see it when it arrived. It was better to telephone him. And arrange to meet him some place. Or should she threaten him? “Should I scare the bastard? Who am I kidding? Me? Trying to scare a lawyer?”
Estelle was walking back through the dead leaves on her way back from the phone booth at the corner of Bedford Road and Bloor Street, wondering whether the secretary who answered the call had told her a lie: “Mr. Burrmann is away from the office, ma’am.” When Estelle raised her voice, in frustration, the secretary explained that Mr. Burrmann was fishing in northern Ontario. She felt now that she should have been strong enough to have written Mr. Burrmann the letter.
The first day Old Man Jonesy showed Boysie the job at the Baptist church house, Boysie was sorry he had taken it. Jonesy lectured him about cleanliness, saying, “This is a important job you doing here, Boysie. It is a responsible job, too. There is gentlemen and ladies working downstairs on the first floor,
