house where I boarded and my landlady told me they were always looking for canteen staff for the night shift, which suited students, long as they didn’t need much sleep. Well, I’ve never been a bed-bug, three hours a night does me and anything extra I can make up by cat-napping.
I started in the kitchen but soon I was waiting on tables. They looked after their people at A-P and that canteen was like a good-class diner, with the execs using it as much as the line workers. Not so many of the suits around at night, of course, but always some.
The man in charge of the whole corporation was Joe Proffitt. His grandfather had started the business way back. Like Maciver’s it had grown, but much faster and further, and the Proffitts had kept a controlling interest through all the development. He moved in pretty rarefied circles so we didn’t see much of him though I got to know him later. His man on the spot was Tony Kafka, still young but definitely the kind of guy stopped you talking when he came into a room. He often dropped into the canteen at night. I was told exactly how he liked his coffee served.
Funny in view of what happened later, but to start with I didn’t care for him much. He was friendly enough, but not really seeing me as anything but a skinny waitress. He used to make jokes about my figure, saying someone ought to feed me up, how did I expect to keep a man if I didn’t give him something to get a hold of?
The one I liked was Frank Phillips. He was a computer whiz in Accounts, so not much cause for him to be around nights, but soon he started showing pretty regular.
He wasn’t much older than me, still in his early twenties, but a real high-flier and he seemed to know everything. The word cocksure was made for him in any and every sense. Gorgeous to look at and I guess he knew it. Never short of admirers so when he started admiring me, I was flattered. He seemed genuinely interested in me the way I was, asking about my family background and what I was doing at college. Deception’s habit- forming and I’d got used to answering family questions vaguely. But when he said, “Dickinson, from Massachusetts… not related to Emily by any chance?”-instead of telling him I wasn’t really from Massachusetts and spelt it with an “e” anyway, I heard myself saying, “Distantly, I think. But we don’t exchange Christmas cards.”
I don’t know why I said that. Yes, I do. I was a skinny no-account waitress and I wanted to make myself interesting.
We’d looked at some of Emily’s poems in the American Literature module on my course, but after that I really started to get into them. Stupid, eh? All because of something some cute guy says.
To cut to the chase, what was always going to happen happened. We went out a couple of times. He said he was crazy about me, I was certainly crazy about him. When we went to bed he produced a skin. I took it off him and threw it aside. He said, “You sure?” I said, “No problem.” I guess he thought I meant I was taking care of things. What naive little me meant was, this is for life, isn’t it? What need to take precautions?
And when I found I was pregnant, I really believed the news would have him lighting cigars and jumping for joy.
Well, the only thing he jumped for was the door and the only thing he lit was out.
I didn’t see him for a week and when he did make contact with me it was to offer to pay for a termination.
I told him, no way. By this time I’d learned he was the company stud, but it made no difference to the way I felt. I just thought that once he got used to the idea of being a father, he’d see it was time to settle down.
Days of complete silence followed, became weeks. Finally after a month I sank my pride and made enquiries. That’s when I learned he’d got a transfer to one of A-P’s overseas subsidiaries.
I was devastated. Then I thought, To hell with him! I can do this alone.
Maybe I could have done, but I didn’t have to find out. This was where Tony came in. I’d have expected him to come on hard with heavy jokes about how he was pleased to see I’d decided to put on some weight after all. Instead, as my waistline thickened he seemed to start seeing me as a real person, not just some part-time waitress passing through. Could be he felt responsible when he found out it was one of his own people who got me in this fix. I heard later that he put it around that after Frank left Hartford they found he’d had his hand in the till, with the result that not only did he get dumped from A-P but he was going to find it hard to get work anywhere serious.
So my time came. I even got maternity leave under the A-P welfare scheme, not something I was entitled to as a part-time casual, but Tony had given the nod. When my time came it was hard. You name a complication, I had it. By the time they finished with me, I wasn’t in a state where I was going to be able to have any more kids, but that didn’t bother me, not then, not when I found myself nursing my little girl.
She was enough for me. She was my world, my meaning, my future.
If that sounds big for a little girl, let me also say that she was lovely in the most conventional ways-big blue eyes, blonde hair already growing at birth and blossoming into a mass of curls within a couple of weeks, and a skin white as a pearl touched with the pink of a new day.
Maybe that’s why I called her Alba. The dawn.
The next few months were the happiest of my life. Money was tight but sufficient. With my own little bit, plus (thanks to Tony) my maternity leave “entitlement” from A-P, I was able to look after Alba and even keep my college work ticking over. Eventually I had to commit myself fully to my course, and also get back to earning some money. Fortunately there were good creche facilities at the college and even better ones at A-P, so wherever I was I was never far from Alba.
In the canteen, Tony treated me like a friend and I noticed that all the other execs were polite and courteous. No wisecracks or jokey flirting. I didn’t know then that Frank’s career had suddenly gone into a tailspin, but I guess word had already reached the A-P executive locker room, making everyone aware I was somehow under Tony’s protection. Not that he ever came on. It was like having Pa around to look out for me. Pa without the suddenness. Pa as he might have become.
At college I was doing OK, considering I was getting even less sleep now than before. Like I say, thank God I don’t need much! When I thought of Frank I couldn’t feel bitter. Hadn’t he given me the best thing in my life, my daughter?
Also, indirectly, he’d given me Emily Dickinson.
For my main course project I’d opted to do a study of her. A fine poet, odd, weird even, but she spoke directly to me. Sometimes I felt I was eavesdropping on my own thoughts. All those tiny poems. Reading them was like dipping my fingers into a casket of gems; I never knew what I was going to come up with but I knew it would be precious. Sometimes more than precious. Prophetic. For when the mood came on me, I even started using them as a kind of Sortes, opening my collection at random and rarely being disappointed in my expectation that something on the page before me would speak to me in a special way.
But the casting of lots is not always a source of solace.
I was working on my paper in the college library one day when I felt the urge to delve.
I opened the volume casually and read the first poem my eyes lit on. Good Morning-Midnight I’m coming Home Day-got tired of Me How could I-of Him?
And as I read that first stanza, a bitterness filled my mouth like I’d bitten on a suicide ampoule and I felt a paralysing numbness coursing along my veins.
“Miss Dickenson,” said a voice behind me.
It was the librarian, his face a blank more expressive than concern. He said, ‘Just had the creche on the phone. Could you get down there?’
As I ran along the corridors, my feet beat out the rhythm of the second verse Sunshine was a sweet place I liked to stay But Morn-didn’t want me-now So-Goodnight-Day!
In the creche I found alarm and confusion centred on Alba. She had had some kind of seizure and was now breathing shallowly, her face flushed, her eyes open but unfocused. An ambulance was on its way.
As it bore us to hospital, the last two verses of the poem beat through my mind. They sounded at the same time valedictory and menacing: I can look-can’t I When the East is Red?
The Hills-have a way-then That puts the Heart-abroad- You-are not so fair-Midnight I chose-Day But-please take a little Girl He turned away!
And that was it. The next few hours were filled with nurses and doctors and I could quote you every syllable of every sentence they spoke to me. But from the start, no matter how desperately I riddled their words, I could find nothing in them to show me a prospect more hopeful than that which Emily’s poem had already laid out. Good morning-Midnight
