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[...] But some days he didn't drink any coffee. He forgot, or else he just didn't feel like coffee. One morning he woke up and promptly fell to eating crumb doughnuts and drinking champagne. There'd been a time, some years back, when he would have laughed at having a breakfast like this. Now, there didn't seem to be anything very unusual about it. In fact, he hadn't thought anything about it until he was in bed and trying to recall the things he'd done that day, starting with when he'd gotten up that morning. At first, he couldn't remember anything noteworthy. Then he rembered eating those doughnuts and drinking champagne. Time was when he would have considered this a mildly crazy thing to do, something to tell friends about. Then, the more he thought aobut it, the more he could see it didn't matter much one way or the other. He'd had doughnuts and champagne for breakfast. So what?
[...] "[...] For a while, my wife and I loved each other more than anything or anybody in the world. And that includes those children. We thought, well, we knew that we'd grow old together. And we knew we'd do all the things in the world that we wanted to do, and do them together." He shook his head. That seemed the saddest thing of all to him now - that whatever they did from now on, each would do it without the other.
[...]
[...] he backed up and started at the beginning, back when Eileen was eighteen and he was nineteen, a boy and girl in love, burning with it.
[...] "Once, when I was in high school, a counselor asked me to come to her office. She did it with all the girls, one of us at a time. 'What dreams do you have?' this woman asked me. 'What do you see yourself doing in ten years? Twenty years? I was sixteen or seventeen. I was just a lump. This counselor was about the age I am now. I thought she was old. She's old, I said to myself. I knew her life was half over. And I felt lie I knew something she didn't. Something she'd never know. A secret. Something nobody's supposed to know, or ever talk about. So I stayed quiet. I just shook my head. She must have written me off as a dope. But I couldn't say anything. You know what I mean? I thought I knew things she couldn't guess at. Now, if anybody asked me that question again, about my dreams and all, I'd tell them.
[...]
[...] "'I'd say, 'Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.' That's what I'd say." [...]
t came to him that he didn’t want to see the boy, after all. He was shocked by this realization and for a moment felt diminished by the meanness of it. He shook his head. In a lifetime of foolish actions, this trip was possibly the most foolish thing he’d ever done. But the fact was, he really had no desire to see this boy whose behaviour had long ago isolated him from Myers’ affections. He suddenly, and with great clarity, recalled the boy’s face when he had lunged that time, and a wave of bitterness passed over Myers. This boy had devoured Myers’ youth, had turned the young girl he had courted and wed into a nervous, alcoholic woman whom the boy alternately pitied and bullied. Why on earth, Myers asked himself, would he come all this way to see someone he disliked? He didn’t want to shake the boy’s hand, the hand of his enemy, nor have to clap him on the shoulder and make small-talk. He didn’t want to have to ask him about his mother.
She came back with the pot and poured coffee for him and for the two men. Then she picked up a dish and turned to get some ice cream. She reached down into the container and with the dipper began to scoop up the ice cream. The white skirt yanked against her hips and crawled up her legs. What showed was girdle, and it was pink, thighs that were rumpled and gray and a little hairy, and veins that spread in a berserk display.
The two men sitting beside Earl exchanged looks. One of them raised his eyebrows. The other man grinned and kept looking at Doreen over his cup as she spooned chocolate syrup over the ice cream. When she began shaking the can of whipped cream, Earl got up, leaving his food, and headed for the door. He heard her call his name, but he kept going.
At home he had Doreen take off all her clothes and get on the scale. He frowned when he saw the veins. He ran his finger the length of one that sprouted up her thigh.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Nothing," he said.
He looked at the scale and wrote the figure down on a piece of paper.
He read the classifieds. He went to the state employment office. Every three or four days he drove someplace for an interview, and at night he counted her tips. He smoothed out the dollar bills on the table and stacked the nickels, dimes, and quarters in piles of one dollar each. Each morning he put her on the scale.
In two weeks she had lost three and a half pounds.
"I pick," she said. "I starve myself all day, and then I pick at work. It adds up."
But a week later she had lost five pounds. The week after that, nine and a half pounds. Her clothes were loose on her. She had to cut into the rent money to buy a new uniform.
"People are saying things at work," she said.
"What kind of things?" Earl said.
"That I'm too pale, for one thing," she said. "That I don't look like myself. They're afraid I'm losing too much weight."
"What is wrong with losing?" he said. "Don't you pay any attention to them. Tell them to mind their own business. They're not your husband. You don't have to live with them."
"I have to work with them," Doreen said.
"That's right," Earl said. "But they're not your husband. "
so many themes to dissect here: him controlling her as a substitute for his lack of control in the labour market, workers' lack of power during this time in general, his role of "husband" really being an empty vessel for channeling the perceived judgment of other men ...
She stood in the doorway and turned the knob. She looked as if she wanted to say something else. She wore the white blouse, the wide black belt, and the black skirt. Sometimes she called it her outfit, sometimes her uniform. For as long as I could remember, it was always hanging in the closet or hanging on the clothesline or getting washed out by hand at night or being ironed in the kitchen
She worked Wednesdays through Sundays.
inspo maybe (pano)
"Morning," I said, offering the letter.
He took it from me without a word and went absolutely pale. He tottered a minute and then started back for the house, holding the letter up to the light.
I called out, "She's no good, boy. I could tell that the minute I saw her. Why don't you forget her? Why don't you go to work and forget her? What have you got against work? It was work, day and night, work that gave me oblivion when I was in your shoes and there was a war on where I was ..."
[...] She touched the ewdding band on her ring finger with her thumb. She turned onto her side and then onto her back again. And then she began to feel afraid, and in one unreasoning moment of longing she prayed to go to sleep.
Please, God, let me go to sleep.
She tried to sleep.
"Mike," she whispered.
There was no answer.