Tuesday, with no job and no idea where to get one, I had a job, money in the bank, a living room that was decent again, gas, light, and phone—and had to do something about it. I mean, I wasn’t a thing, I was living. I took a cab to Woodies, the big store at Prince George’s Plaza, and bought Tad a tricycle, a blue one, more than I could afford but I wanted him to have the best in the store. And on Sunday I took a cab over to Ethel’s and came in with a smile on my face.
Not that she acted so friendly toward me. She protested against the tricycle, seeming to resent that anyone but her might buy Tad toys while he was under her roof, and really being objectionable when I took out my checkbook to pay her, a week’s board for Tad already boarded out and another week in advance, plus extra toward a new prescription for his pain pills. At first she refused to take it, but Jack Lucas, her husband, got in it, wanting to know: “When did we get so rich we don’t need fifty bucks? Take it and thank her, Ethel, and stop acting silly with her.”
So, she took it.
They lived in Silver Spring, perhaps six miles from me, in a house up on a terrace, and when I got there Tad was out back, with two other children, splashing in a backyard wading pool, a rubber thing with red stripes, that they’d filled with a garden hose. But of course the tricycle was news, and they all rolled it out front, where they took turns riding in it. Then Ethel, Jack, and I sat in the backyard, on recliners, and Ethel tried to be agreeable, unsuccessfully—and I tried, successfully. I felt positively angelic, even to her. Once, there were screams from the street, and I raced around the house to see what was going on. The little girl, who was a bit older than the two little boys, had ridden the tricycle off, so she was down at the corner with it, while the boys were screaming their heads off to her. Ethel, who followed me out, denounced the girl as a pest, explaining that she was always muscling in on what the other children had. But I knelt down, took her in my arms, and asked if she’d like a pair of skates. When her face lit up I promised to send her one. I promised the little boy a ball and glove, and Tad a new hat. Then everyone was happy, and I was the fairy godmother.
So, when we resumed our seats out back, I felt happy and pleased with myself. However, that didn’t last long.
Ethel asked, her voice like ice: “Where did you get the money you’re spreading around so generously to every child in sight? Working at your cocktail lounge?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t realize a waitress gets tipped so well, just for waitressing. Or are you doing more now, on the side?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“My customers have been generous with me, and I choose to share it. I won’t apologize for it.”
“It’s not the generosity you should apologize for, but what you have to do to make it possible.”
Her husband had a trapped looked on his face, as though he wished he could have been somewhere else, not watching his wife light into me.
Suddenly Tad was there, sidling up to Ethel. “What is it, darling?” she asked him.
He pulled her head down, and whispered.
She patted him, picked him up, and carried him into the house.
“You got to go, you got to go,” said Jack.
He rode me home after that, very sociably, and I felt grateful to him. But for some reason my day wasn’t nice anymore. Not because of what Ethel had said to me—she’d said as much before, and I could overlook it. But all because my son had gone to his aunt when he had to go to the bathroom, instead of me, his mother.
8
Whether the need to do something about it was vividly in my mind when Mr. White next came into the bar would be hard to say. But I certainly lost no time in making myself agreeable to him, offering him the cocktail list as always but adding: “But perhaps you don’t really need it, if you’re
April Angel, Milly Taiden