Where You Once Belonged(17)

When she had begun to earn money as a secretary after she had graduated from high school, she had moved out of her mother’s home and had rented a tiny one-bedroom house of her own. It was over there on Chicago Street on the east side of town where there are mainly small one-story frame houses painted white and yellow and sometimes pink, with little gray slap-sided toolsheds in back along the alleys and vacant lots between the houses, with here and there an old wheelbarrow or an old car, a DeSoto or a Nash Rambler, say, rusting on blocks among the pigweed and redroot under the stunted elms. She worked steadily, efficiently, at the telephone office every day, and she kept her little house clean, mowed the lawn on summer evenings, shoveled the snow off the walks in winter, and for two years while Jack was gone she composed letters to him, following him from El Paso to San Francisco and then to Germany, all by mail, by letters—letters which Jack himself only rarely answered and then only to allow, as he would, I suppose, that he was in California now or that he had arrived in Germany, or perhaps (and this is more likely, knowing Jack) simply to complain that he had lost his weekend pass for some minor infraction of military rules and so had nothing better to do with his time than to scribble her a brief note on Army paper while he waited for the other men to come back so he could begin to play cards again.

But finally in the winter he had returned to Holt once more and it was all right again. Or perhaps for Wanda Jo it was better than all right, since for the next eight years she continued to go out with him, believing all that time that he would marry her yet.

Well, it was an abject kind of love. And it took many forms. But clean socks was at least one of them.

I think it must have been a matter of barter to Wanda Jo, a kind of romantic transaction. It was as if she believed that washing his socks and laundering his shirts was not only the obvious and logical progression from making crib sheets for him when they were in high school, but that now doing his laundry each week was also the fair means of exchange for the privilege of going out with him on Saturday nights. Because for eight years, Jack would park his car in front of her house on Chicago Street, on those Saturday nights, and then he would get out and saunter up to her house and under his arm he would carry to her front door a brown paper bag—a bag which would never contain roses or carnations or even a handful of daisies but which instead would always be stuffed to overflowing with another week’s accumulation of his dirty clothes, his dirty socks and his greasy shirts. Then Wanda Jo would open the door to him and take that paper bag from his hands. It was as if she thought he’d brought her a gift, a present, a romantic offering, as though she believed he’d given her something which was actually valuable and considerate. And of course in return she’d have something to give him too; she’d hand him that other paper bag, the one with his clean clothes in it—his sour socks and his old work shirts and his soiled jeans transformed now, sweet-smelling, washed and tumble-dried and still fragrant of soap, as though in the intervening week she’d managed to perform some miracle or magic. And in truth she had: she had accomplished a kind of domestic and loving alchemy.

Then Jack would say: “Thanks, Wanda Jo.” Or he might even become extravagant; he might say: “Thanks a lot, kid.”

So they’d leave her little house on Chicago Street then. They’d walk out to his car together, with Jack’s big arm draped over her smooth silky shoulder under her strawberry hair, and at the car Jack would throw the sack of clean clothes into the backseat. Then they’d go out for the night, to drink at the tavern on Main Street or to drink and dance at the Legion on Highway 34. It was all a weekly occurrence; it happened every Saturday night. And afterward, after the bars had closed and after Jack had told his last joke to the last man still there in the bar who was still sober enough to laugh in the right places, they would usually go back to Wanda Jo’s house again. Then for an hour or two there would be another kind of exchange in the back bedroom where, we understood, Jack would teach her the tricks he himself had paid to learn while he was in the Army. And none of us doubted that Wanda Jo was obliging about that too. Because she loved him. Because she still thought of him as a big black-haired man with a good sense of humor. She was willing to wait for him for all those years—for him to make up his mind about marrying her—because she still believed he would eventually. She hadn’t anything else in mind for herself. Jack Burdette was the sum total of what she hoped for in life. She told me that once.

It was on one of those Saturday nights. It was in March or April, toward the end of winter, after Jack had been back in Holt for six or seven years.

I had been working late at the Mercury rather than going home to Nora and a silent house. Nora would be reading as usual, wrapped up in an afghan in the front room, and Toni, our little girl, who was two or three then, would already be asleep in her bed upstairs under a white comforter. So I had gone back to the office after supper to try to work on an editorial I was writing for the next week’s issue of the paper, and afterward I had walked up the block to the Holt Tavern on Third and Main streets. I wanted noise and laughter; I wanted to drink a beer among friends before going home again. At the tavern I stood at the bar talking to Bob Sullivan for a while.

Bob Sullivan was a semiretired farmer who had moved to town recently, and at the moment he was seriously disappointed in his granddaughter Amy. She had married a local boy named Jerry Weaver six months earlier. “And the kid wasn’t any good for her,” Sullivan said. “I told her so. Here she’s just a year out of high school and then this Weaver kid talks her into a church wedding before she even has time to turn around good and see what else there might be in the world waiting for her.”