Free The Bobby-Soxer by Hortense Calisher

had brought her along.
    The hat sat grotesquely, vying with the bobby-soxer’s belly. Neither seemed hers.
    After a while I said, “Keep it on if you want to. But let’s get out of here. We’re out of beer.” Her Volkswagen convertible, new when she married, shone through the window. “Put on a coat and we’ll go to a bar. I know one near.”
    She didn’t move.
    “How long is it—since you left the house?” I said. “I know it’s hard. You get stir-crazy, yet you can’t.” I got that way myself sometimes, down in Greensboro, I told her. When you are in an inharmonious environment, I said.
    Or sometimes when the old one comes up in your throat. I didn’t tell her that. It hadn’t happened yet.
    But finally I wormed an answer out of her.
    “Since the night everybody saw me. At the station. And—and saw you.”
    Us. She couldn’t say it.
    “Does he know why?”
    She wasn’t sure. She’d never said. Nor had he asked. “But he usually knows everything.”
    I thought of him in the hayloft, working away at Bill Wetmore’s great-grand-uncle’s rolltop desk, which was too big for the house. Working on us, the town.
    While Phoebe’d got away, all the time quicker than me. With less to go on. Nor did I have to think hard on how the girl here had learned what she had, when there was Phoebe to talk to, with her lip rolled back.
    After a while I said: “If you’re thinking of wearing that thing until he comes, he never saw it, that day. Or us.”
    “He sees what he wants.” But she took the hat off.
    Now it was I who was staring at it.
    After a while she said: “You must look like your father. I never—got to see him.”
    “He goes away. He always goes away … Yes, I do look like him, they say. In Greensboro especially.”
    She didn’t ask what Greensboro intended by that. She was deep in.
    So was I. I had come at seven, to stay until twelve. Soon their cuckoo clock would strike. Nine. Her crowd had sent it to her, from the Tyrol. Far places.
    “He’ll not come back, I think. My father.” I stole a look at her. We were both so hemmed in.
    The clock did strike.
    “Please, could we go out?” I said. “I’ve never driven in a Volks before.”
    So we made it, the both of us. I got her dressed, pointing to a sweater and skirt out of the many that hung in her closet, when she stood mute. She really hadn’t gained that much weight. Getting into the car, we even marveled at that. She drove.
    Nobody was in the little bar near my mother’s garage. The factory hours were long over. We sat at a table. Two men came in, salesmen by their talk, from the nearby motel. Soon they sent us drinks by the barman, who set the whiskies down with a flourish. We had ordered beer, as the men could see.
    “What’ll we do?” I whispered to her.
    “Accept it.” She smiled. “And if they get porky, I can just stand up.”
    I looked over at the two men, who were well-dressed but dumpy. “And so can I.”
    When they started over to our table—after all, we had drunk their whisky—we did just that, exiting without a look behind us, she with her stomach grandly before her, I rearing my neck. I was now taller than her by far. I drove the car back. I had left the hat in the bar.
    Entering that house again was a downer for both of us, but I could afford it; I’d decided I wasn’t coming back. Almost having a friend gets to you. Maybe she thought so, too. It’s different from having a crowd.
    “I’ll walk back on my own.” I still had on my jacket. We were in the tiny vestibule.
    She nodded, slipping off her coat. Absentmindedly, she began to pull off the yellow sweater, too.
    “Oh no you don’t,” I said. “Please.”
    “Okay—” she said, after a minute. “Thanks.” The fire in the inglenook was out. She poked it, leaning over with her skirt hiked up. If you don’t exercise, the pregnant behind sometimes gets as big as the front. But she was still strong, only nineteen. She reached over, tipping the heavy