Free Rich Friends by Jacqueline; Briskin Page B

wildly. How could she, Em Wynan Reed, be shrilling this? She was small, drab, female. Sheridan, her husband, male, God’s surrogate on earth. I must be out-of-my-head tired, she thought. She focused again on that angry-prune bruise mounding her Vliet’s forehead. “You don’t understand, do you, Sheridan? Well, my sons will. They’ll understand. Every single thing that they start, they will finish.”
    She held a hand to her terrified heart. He’s going to hit me, she thought. Instead, he was moving backward, away into the dark. She was safe from punishment.
    So why should she have this pang of loss, this overwhelming sense of disappointment?
    The evening after her six-week checkup, Sheridan arrived home with a small bottle of Je Reviens. Her spine was ready to snap in two. Lack of sleep made her bilious. Down there hurt from Dr. Porter’s speculum. Yet she pulled on her good satin nightie, unworn since the third month of their marriage, dotting her new cologne in the teaspoon-size hollow at the base of her neck. Sheridan waited in bed. His arms circled her, one hard leg pinioning her down, and he didn’t say an encouraging word, her name, even. All the time she kept weighing on her personal scales her pain versus his deprivation. He won. Poor Sheridan, months it had been.
    He rolled onto his side. She held still until that involuntary jerk which meant he’d fallen asleep, then—quietly—she slipped out of bed, pulling off the torn gown, standing under scalding water until she turned crimson from her neck to her thickish ankles. Through steam she glimpsed a can of Bon Ami. She poured the powder into her washcloth, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing every inch of her small body.
    4
    Thursday mornings Caroline had no classes.
    â€œI’ll sit, luv, and you go run your housewifely errands.”
    Mornings the babies napped. Em gratefully hugged her tall younger sister. “You’re true blue,” she averred, and hurried off.
    Sheridan needed a shirt. In Thompson’s Menswear she was torn between the Sanforized Arrow at $3.75—Em had faith only in name brands—and the one for $2.50, which was unlabeled but within her budget. She was holding a shirt in either hand when she happened to look to her left, into clear, hot morning. Strolling along Colorado Boulevard was Sheridan.
    Sheridan and a girl.
    As they passed the display window, Sheridan’s hand crept up on the tight blouse. He fingered yellow rayon. Cheap, was Em’s first coherent thought. Oh, cheap. They had passed from her range of vision before she recognized the elaborately curled red hair. It was the cosmetics girl from Cambro’s Drugstore. Violet or Viola? Did she choose my cologne? Violette, that’s it. Em left both shirts on the counter, moving into daylight, squinting after the tall, wide-shouldered man and the redhead with swinging hips. They turned toward one another, smiling, and it seemed to Em those smiles were impersonal and explicit as rutting animals. Dark crew cut dropped toward dyed red hair. An old lady slowed, gazing curiously at Em. Em realized she was weeping right on the sidewalk of Colorado Boulevard.
    She managed to get home. As soon as Caroline left, Em poured Je Reviens down the toilet, jerking at the handle. Be fair, she thought, there’s no proof. A sharp vision of dyed red hair stung her, and her emotions whirled like the scented water disappearing down the trap. I always let him no matter how tired I am, she thought. And flushed the toilet again.
    Roger began to cry, hungry.
    She fastened both boys in their low Babee Tendas (purchased with Artie Van Vliet’s check), sitting on the ottoman, porringers of Pablum at her side. The twins had reached the plump, neckless stage. Roger held onto his spoon as she fed him, according to Gesell and Ilg extremely advanced behavior. When it was Vliet’s turn (his tow hair she’d brushed over her finger into a