Page 26

“Why?”

Claude took a long, slow swallow of his beer, eyes also fixed on the bar crowd. “Not doing a thing wrong.”

A florid-faced man in a checked suit pushed his way toward the end of the bar, backed by a couple of beefy policemen, and started haranguing the restless, milling crowd. Fliss couldn’t hear his words, but she saw some of the rowdy drinkers toe the floor and reach for their jackets, especially when the police started smacking the bar with meaty palms and jerking thumbs toward the door. The man who’d asked Fliss to dance slunk out with a half-dozen friends, and Fliss could feel the tension start to seep out of the room.

Then came the high, splintering sound of glass breaking.

She was never sure afterward which came first: the beer glass being swept off the bar and hitting the floor, or the shatter of the front door being kicked in. The roar of cursing and name-calling surged at once, drowning out Kay Starr crooning “Wheel of Fortune,”

and the men at the bar heaved like a single massive organism, shoving and punching. More men were thrusting in from the street—one had a baseball bat , Fliss saw with horror, and he promptly brought it overhead in a short arc and smashed a pinball machine. The man who had been trying to restore order at the bar legged it for the street, followed by jeers and a flying beer bottle.

Claude and Grace were on their feet, no smiles now. “The kitchen,”

Grace said, “get out through the back—”

and Fliss found herself pushing after them through a crowd of dancers who all seemed to have the same idea. Her heart hammered sickly, then stopped altogether as the lights went out. Grace’s fingers locked around her wrist, yanking her so hard through the blackness that she nearly stumbled out of her kitten heels. Flashlight beams bounced across the walls and ceiling; Fliss caught a roar of Police! Somewhere a woman screamed. A man swore. Her hip bounced painfully off a stove’s edge; they were in the kitchen now; she smelled old frying oil and grease. “ Fuck ,”

escaped very clearly from Claude up ahead, along with a meaty thud as though he had been hit. The lights came back on and Fliss saw two white men tussling with Claude, pulling him to the ground. A police sergeant manned the door out into the alley, pushing the white customers through; Fliss fell toward him shouting, “Get those men off Mr.Cormier, he’s down—”

The sergeant pushed her away, hard-faced.

Grace ignored the policeman altogether, grabbing one of the fellows aiming a kick at Claude and winding her hand deep into the man’s hair. A jab of her other fist to his throat and a swift yank of her arm, and she’d brought the side of his head down on the corner of the nearest counter. Fliss caught the cool shield of her face: no fear at all as she hammered her elbow down on the man’s temple, just a kind of rageful composure. He fell at her feet like a load of bricks. That brought the policeman in, scowling, but Grace turned her smile on like a switch as she collapsed soft and helpless against his arm. “Officer, if you might escort us to safety, this is just terrifying—”

Reaching down to pull Claude to his feet, her lips trembling. Reluctantly the officer corralled the three of them, as well as the other mixed couple who’d been dancing earlier—a white man and his dark-skinned girlfriend, now crying—and escorted them out toward the alley.

Fliss had never said the words Bloody hell in her life, but she whispered them now. The crowd outside was shouting, surging, slinging firecrackers that lit the night up like a ghastly Fourth of July. The word COMMUNIST had been daubed across the club’s windows in dripping red letters—for a split second, before she realized it was paint, Fliss thought it was blood. A Chevrolet coup with a cluster of Black passengers slowed in the street, seeing the commotion, and received a hail of beer bottles. The windshield shattered in a starburst of glass; the car veered with a smash into a parked Packard, and Fliss had a crazily clear image of a young girl raising a hand to a cut on her brown cheek, blood running through her fingers. Police pushed in around the car before the crowd could swarm it.

“There’s one of ’em, get him—”

A red-faced man pointed at Claude, who stood groping for his missing fedora and swearing in Louisiana French around a bloody nose, and Fliss and Grace yanked him back into the mouth of the alley behind the Chickland Club. He crouched hastily and Fliss fluffed out the big skirts of her dotted swiss frock to hide him from sight. “Nothing to see here, my good man,”

she sniffed as the men came round the corner, hauling out her Queen of England tones again, blood throbbing so hard in her temples she wondered if her veins would burst. Two of the men veered off, running toward another car that had paused at the ruckus, but one kept coming and Grace seized him by the collar and hit him three times straight under the shelf of the jaw, three stinging little jabs, and Fliss thought she saw the gleam of something metallic in Grace’s fist before the man doubled over with a scream, blood pouring down his shirt.

“Let’s go,”

Claude said, low voiced. “Police are getting out the tear gas and the hoses, go —”

and the three of them pelted down the alley, around the corner, any direction they could find as long as it was away .

“Shoes off,”

Grace panted, running out of her pumps and collecting them in a scoop in the next stride, and Fliss did the same with her kitten heels, struggling in her stocking feet to keep up with Grace’s and Claude’s longer strides, until they rounded a corner and the ruckus was behind them: the sound of police sirens just a distant hooting.

“Shoes back on,”

Grace told Fliss. “Smooth your hair, catch your breath. Claude, pop your collar, face down. Fliss, take his other arm. Just three people out for a nighttime stroll, nothing to see here...”

And they walked along more sedately, putting distance between them and the club. Fliss could feel Claude’s arm tense at every flash of light, every siren.

Finally the commotion faded out of earshot and they stopped on a street corner, well-lit, traffic whisking past in orderly lanes. Fliss’s galloping heart caught up with her and she nearly vomited, but she held herself back from whimpering as she saw Claude’s swollen nose and set face. She wasn’t the one who had been punched and kicked tonight; she could bloody well keep from falling apart.

“May I see that nose, please?”

she asked Claude, rather surprised to hear her all-business nurse voice come out, and he must have heard it, too, because he nodded. She pinched the bridge, took the handkerchief Grace handed her, cleaned away the blood as best she could without hot water. “Not broken,”

she judged. “Ice it when you get home. I’m more worried you have a cracked rib or two.”

She saw the way he’d run with his hand at his side.

“Not broke,”

he said briefly.

“If I could take a look—”

“I’ve been kicked by an angry drunk before,”

Claude said sharply. “They’re not broke, and I don’t want a white woman feeling me up on a street corner, all right? Took enough chances tonight.”

Fliss fell back, chastened. Grace laid a hand quietly on Claude’s, fingers linking with his in the shadow between their bodies, not saying anything. He gave a squeeze back, jittering like one of his cymbals, nearly throwing off sparks of anger and energy. “You ladies better get a cab,”

he said finally. “I’ll catch a different one, next block.”

“Your car—”

“I’ll come for it in the morning. Not heading back in that direction now.”

With a tip of his lost hat to Fliss and a last squeeze of Grace’s hand, he turned abruptly and headed around the corner.

Fliss opened her mouth, but Grace touched her arm. “He’d rather hail a cab in a district where more people look like him. Besides, he doesn’t particularly want to be around a couple of white women right now.”

“Because the taxi won’t stop for the three of us?”

“And because he’s worried we’ll start wailing about what we’ve been through , and let’s be honest—”

Grace’s smile was tilted. “We haven’t been through a thing, comparatively.”

Fliss shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. She’d managed to keep hold of her handbag, but lost her wrap. “Why... why did someone paint COMMUNIST over the club windows?”

she found herself asking inanely. “It wasn’t a socialist club.”

“Because Communist is the ugliest insult we Americans seem to know right now,”

Grace said. “Thank you, Senator McCarthy.”

She shook her head, and Fliss looked up at her suddenly. “What did you have in your fist? When you hit that man under the jaw?”

“Nothing.”

Grace looked puzzled, showing her empty hand. “I know how to throw an uppercut, that’s all. Bless my older brothers, growing up.”

Fliss thought of that little metallic point she could have sworn she saw between Grace’s knuckles. “I have brothers, too, Grace. Men don’t start gushing blood just from a jab or two.”

“There wasn’t any blood. Just shadows.”

Fliss looked at the cuff of Grace’s dress, stained dark past the wrist. Grace saw her gaze, but just calmly drew her handbag strap up and looped her other arm through Fliss’s.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”

It was nearly two in the morning by the time they got back to Briarwood House. Angela was long asleep in her crib, Nora dozing on the couch. “Your little goblin was good as gold; hope you had a nice night out,”

she said and gave Fliss a hug before trudging off yawning. Grace had gone upstairs to her green-walled room, but Fliss wasn’t entirely surprised to hear her knock softly on the door twenty minutes later, holding a bottle of rye.

“I thought we could both use another drink,”

she said as she padded around Fliss’s little kitchenette in her dragon-embroidered wrapper, making two hot toddies. “I feel I should toast the end of an affair—I doubt I’ll be hearing from Claude for awhile.”

“It wasn’t your fault that—”

“No, but a man like him takes his life in his hands, tangling with a woman like me. That’s a high price for a little fun. He may be thinking right now that it feels a bit too high.”

Grace handed Fliss a mug. “And I don’t blame him a bit.”

“Is that all it was for you? Fun?”

Fliss supposed she sounded like a dreadful prude, but Grace didn’t look offended.

“What’s wrong with fun? Claude’s lovely, and we had a lovely time. He’s been talking about the jazz scene in New York lately; I have a feeling he might head out of town and check it out. Whatever he does, I wish him well.”

Grace raised her mug to her absent lover. “I like taking things lightly, Bubble and Squeak. You’ve made a very nice nest for yourself, but not every woman has the nesting urge. Though I might change my mind someday for the sheer luxury of having more space than a broom closet,”

she added, looking around Fliss’s immaculate two-room apartment.

“I’d never have gotten this place if Dan hadn’t met with Mrs.Nilsson and convinced her I really did have a husband. Until then she didn’t quite believe me. Woman alone with a new baby...”

Fliss trailed off, listening to Angela’s soft sleepy sounds coming through the half-open bedroom door. Abruptly she heard the meaty thud of a man’s boot going into Claude’s ribs and flinched. “I hate this country sometimes.”

“I love it dearly.”

Grace sighed. “But we are dreadfully backward and wrongheaded in some ways.”

“I don’t really hate it,”

Fliss amended, feeling rather ashamed. It was here in the States that she’d found her calling, after all. Found her career, her husband, her home... “It’s just that—since I wasn’t born here, sometimes I notice things that stop me in my tracks, things no one else here seems to blink at. I mean, if Claude Cormier came to England, I’m not saying he wouldn’t hear ugly things, but...”

There was plenty of ugliness in England—just remember the nasty comments about Aunt Beth and her Ay-rab . “But he wouldn’t hear the kinds of things he hears every day here,”

Fliss finished.

Grace looked thoughtful. “I sometimes think this country is an eternal battle between our best and our worst angels. Hopefully we’re listening to the good angel more often than the bad one.”

She sighed. “We do that, and change will come.”

“Not fast enough.”

They both took a slug of their hot toddies. This time Fliss didn’t flinch at Grace’s heavy pour on the rye—maybe it was the whiskey, but she heard herself saying out loud: “Dan wants another baby, but I don’t want to bring one into this.”

“Into what?”

Grace curled up in Fliss’s desk chair.

“ This. ”

Cafés going up in a riot of broken glass and tear gas because a few mixed couples had dared dance to Kay Starr; mushroom clouds blooming like hideous roses over Nevada test sites as tourists sipped Atomic Cocktails. “ Any of this.”

“Does Dan know that?”

“No.”

Fliss closed her eyes tight, burning. She didn’t mean to say it, but somehow it came out. “He doesn’t even know I didn’t want Angela.”

BAD MOTHER BAD MOTHER BAD MOTHER. The words were shrieking inside her skull this time, not whispering.

It was as if Grace could hear them. “You’re a good mother, Bubble and Squeak. Far better than you think you are.”

Fliss huddled on the edge of the narrow bed, hands folded tight around her mug. “I loved her the moment she came out”—rushing to say that, rushing to get past the fact that all she felt now when she looked at Angela was blankness—“but I wasn’t ready . We were going to wait until we were more settled. We were careful, only...”

A broken sheath, one night. Just one time. “I was going to keep working,”

Fliss whispered. “I wanted to keep working. I loved my job.”

“I know. You should go back to it.”

The mere thought required so much energy it made Fliss want to fold on the floor and weep. “I can’t.”

Even for Uncle John and his beguiling offer to help with the patient trials of the new miracle pill, the one that prevented ovulation. “I had to stop because of Angela, and now...”

And now this: endless exhausted days, sleepless nights. Maybe it would have been better if Dan were here to share the load. Maybe it would have been better if her mother were still stateside to share the load. But they weren’t. Dan, I miss you...

“You’re a nurse.”

Calmly, Grace sipped at her mug. “Surely you knew a way to take care of things, early on. Were you tempted?”

Fliss didn’t even pretend not to know what she was talking about. She should have been shocked, but somehow she wasn’t. “No, I wanted her. Just not yet . I tried saying that once—before I was pregnant, to my doctor in San Diego. Asking if there was something a bit more fail-safe than a diaphragm, or rubbers.”

Something like Uncle John’s proposed pill, something she could take and forget about without worrying. “But the doctor just gave me a lecture that I’d have to take whatever God sent me. Why? ”

Fliss burst out. “Women have to plan out every moment of their lives, from wash on Monday , iron on Tuesday all the way through to rest on Sunday . So why aren’t we allowed to plan this ? Something that derails our whole lives, all the other plans...”

Her eyes swam. She fixed them on the floor, breathing unsteadily, focusing on Angela’s dreamland tossing and turning in the next room. “And now Dan wants another,”

she said softly. “ Orton Baby Number Two. ”

She gulped down the rest of her hot toddy, then rose. “I need to cook something,”

she muttered and headed into the kitchenette. A small pot, a wooden spoon, sugar—she threw things on the tiny counter, hardly knowing what she wanted to make, or even if she was hungry. It hardly mattered if she was hungry or not. Mothers always had to be feeding people. Their children, their husbands, their families, always before themselves.

Grace came to lean against the counter, hands cupped around her mug, Chinese dragons whispering about her legs. “My mother had a change-of-life baby,”

she said, sounding reflective. “My, wasn’t she mad about it. I was already grown; she didn’t want to start all over again with diapers and bottles. Kitty came along, and I ended up doing most of the mothering for a while. Mama just sank into a haze—staring into space, couldn’t hardly look at the baby.”

Fliss flinched, covering it with a quick turn to switch on the burner. Watched the pot warm.

“It lasted awhile, Mama not being able to deal with the baby. Felt like a long time to me. Probably felt like an eternity to Mama.”

Grace sipped. “But she came out of it eventually, and Kitty didn’t remember. Why would she? Didn’t hurt her any. Babies don’t remember when their mothers aren’t perfect.”

Fliss fumbled in the icebox for the cut-up strawberries Angela refused to eat. Dumped them into the pot, threw some sugar in after.

“She wasn’t a bad mother, my mama. Just tired.”

Fliss turned the heat down, stirring the mixture of softening strawberries. Stirring, stirring. She realized the tears had started up, pouring gently down her cheeks as if a spigot had turned on. Grace didn’t comment on them. You can be so kind , Fliss thought. In fact, you’re always kind. But she couldn’t help but think of Grace’s focused, rageful face as they fled the club, when she caught a man’s hair and slammed his head with a crack on the corner of a countertop.

You frighten me a little , Fliss thought. But when Grace put the mug down and laid an arm around her shoulders, Fliss closed her eyes and sank into the hug as though she were drowning. Because the hug said I will not let you drown .

“What are you making, Bubble and Squeak?”

Grace asked eventually, handing Fliss a handkerchief.

Fliss stared down at the pot, mopping her eyes with one hand and stirring the bubbling fruit with the other. “Strawberry fool,”

she said once she could trust her voice to stay steady.

“What on earth is strawberry fool ?”

“Stewed fruit folded into custard or whipped cream... It’s an English thing.”

“You don’t say.”

Grace watched Fliss fumble in the icebox for cream.

“I lose time,”

Fliss heard herself say, taking the strawberries off the heat, finding a mixing bowl, dumping the cream in. “I look up in a daze and twenty minutes have gone by. Or an hour. Or more.”

Grace said nothing, just sipped at her mug.

“I don’t feel anything.”

Fliss found her hand mixer and began turning the crank over the cream. Beat until soft peaks form, the cookbooks always said. Beat until your arm falls off , that was what they should say. “I don’t feel anything. I look at her when she sleeps, I look at her when she’s screaming, I look at her when she smiles at me and it doesn’t matter. I just don’t—I don’t—I—”

Silence.

Turning the crank. Turning, turning. Cream splattered. “...What if I don’t love her?”

Fliss whispered. “ What if I don’t love my daughter? ”

“Would you die for her?”

Grace asked.

Fliss blinked. “Of course.”

“Well.”

A tilted smile, gently downturned. “Why on earth doesn’t that count as love?”