Nine Women by Shirley Ann Grau Read Free Book Online Page A

were there, and his two brothers and their wives, and his sister and her husband and their grown son, and his unmarried sister who’d flown from Milwaukee especially for the ceremony.
    In the rectory parlor that afternoon there hadn’t been a single person of her blood.
    I minded that most, she thought.
    Stirring restlessly in her chair, Mary Margaret said, “You know, I never knew why you called him the Slob.”
    (She felt disloyal saying the word aloud.)
    Her father laughed, her mother chuckled. Her father said, “The way he just sat there, mealy-mouthed, like he was ready to cry. He just plain looked like a slob.”
    Oh, she thought wearily, oh oh oh oh.
    “We didn’t care about him one way or the other,” her mother said. Which was a very long speech for her.
    And me, Mary Margaret thought, did you care nothing for me? You’re my parents and you raised me and you sent me to school and you bought my clothes and took me to catechism classes. But there’s got to be more than that.
    “You want to watch the evening news?” she asked, abruptly changing the subject.
    “Enough news in the paper,” her father said.
    So she crossed the room and watched by herself.
    “If you gotta watch, keep it low,” her father said.
    She watched the flickering images, conscious now of something happening within her, of a pain that was not quite that, of a loneliness that was near to happiness.
    She was not used to thinking about her feelings. They were just there, they were part of things. No more to be studied than the sky when it rained or the wind when it blew. If you worked hard and were good, there’d be nothing to trouble your thoughts.
    But that didn’t seem to be so.
    Lately she’d started thinking about herself, she could even see so clearly.… The small child: black plaits down her back and skinny legs covered with half-healed scabs. The older child: the plaits crisscrossed on top her head, the scarred knees covered by longer skirts. Her Communion: white dress and veil and a crown of white flowers on the thick coil of hair. Then her hair was short and curly and there were boys and movies and high school and her first paycheck and the first clothes she had ever bought without her mother’s help. Then she was nineteen and finished business school and a full-time employee of the Consolidated Service Company. She was neat and reliable and worked very hard to increase the speed and accuracy of her typing and shorthand. (She practiced every evening at home, after supper, dating only on Friday and Saturday.) She was careful to learn everybody’s name and to be smiling and deferential and never never gossip. By the time she was twenty-three she was secretary to the senior vice-president. Soon she would have a fancy title like Executive Assistant and a very nice salary and she would really be somebody. When she was twenty-four she married Edward MacIntyre. He was twenty-eight, a CPA who worked in the same building. They met in line at the building’s cafeteria, and they married a few months later.
    They drove to work together and parted in the elevator with a kiss. In a few years they’d buy a house and later she’d take leave for a child or two and maybe even give up full-time work. For now they had a two-room apartment that was all yellow and white and green with heavy curtains to pull tight across the windows at night. She vacuumed twice a week and polished the furniture so often that the rooms always smelled of wax. She even washed the windows once a month. It was a way of quieting the restlessness that surged up in her now and then.
    On Saturdays she and Edward shopped and went to a late afternoon movie, had supper at a fast-food place, and came home to bed. On Sundays in summer they went to the beach, though they didn’t swim. In winter they drove out into the country where the snow was white and untouched. They never skied or skated. They were content to look at the immense shivering whiteness. And once every