Free Nora Jane by Ellen Gilchrist Page A

mother’s
     best friend. Nora Jane didn’t think it was all that great. It lacked danger, that aphrodisiac, that sugar to end all sugars.
    “We have to get married,” he told her in the morning. “You’ll have to marry me.” He walked around a ladder and picked up a
     kimono and pulled it on and tied the belt into a bowline. The ladder was the only furniture in the room except the bed they
     had been sleeping in. Freddy was in the process of turning his bedroom into a planetarium. He was putting the universe on
     the ceiling, little dots of heat-absorbing cotton that glowed in the night like stars. Each dot had to be measured with long
     paper measuring strips from the four corners of the room. It was taking a lot longer to put the universe on the ceiling than
     Freddy had thought it would. He turned his eyes to a spot he had reserved for Aldebaran. It was the summer sky he was re-creating,
     as seen from Minneapolis where the kits were made. “Yes,” he said, as if he were talking to himself. “We are going to have
     to get married.”
    “I don’t want to get married,” she said. “I’m not in love with you.”
    “You are in love with me. You just don’t know it yet.”
    “I am not in love with you. I’ve never told you that I was. Besides, I wouldn’t want to change my name. Nora Harwood, how
     would that sound?”
    “How could you make love to someone like last night if you didn’t love them? I don’t believe it.”
    “I don’t know. I guess I’m weird or abnormal or something. But I know whether I’m in love with someone or not. Anyway, I like
     you better than anyone I’ve met in San Francisco. I’ve told you that.” She was getting dressed now, pulling a white cotton
     sweater over a green cotton skirt, starting to look even more marvelous than she did with no clothes on at all. Freddy sighed,
     gathered his forces, walked across the room and took her in his arms. “Do you want to have a priest? Or would you settle for
     a judge. I have this friend that’s a federal judge who would love to marry us.”
    “I’m not marrying you, Freddy. Not for all the tea in China. Not even for your money and I want you to stop being in love
     with me. I want you to be my friend and have fun like we used to. Now listen, do you want me to give you back that car you
     gave me? I’ll give you back the car.”
    “Please don’t give me back the car. All my life I wanted to give someone a blue convertible. Don’t ruin it by talking like
     that.”
    “I’m sorry. That was mean of me. I knew better than to say that. I’ll keep that car forever. You know that. I might get buried
     in that car.” She gave him a kiss on his freckled chest, tied a green scarf around her hair, floated out of the house, got
     into the blue convertible and away she went, weaving in and out of the lanes of traffic, thinking about how hard it was to
     find out what you wanted in the world, much less what to do to get it.
    It was either that night that fertilized one of Nora Jane Whittington’s wonderful, never to be replaced or duplicated as long
     as the species lasts, small, wet, murky, secret-bearing eggs. Or it was two nights later when she heard a love song coming
     out an open doorway and broke down and called Sandy Halter and he came and got her and they went off to a motel and made each
     other cry.
    Sandy was the boy Nora Jane had lived with in New Orleans. She had come to California to be with him but there was a mix-up
     and he didn’t meet her plane. Then she found out he’d been seeing a girl named Pam. After that she couldn’t love him anymore.
     Nora Jane was very practical about love. She only loved people that loved her back. She never was sure what made her call
     up Sandy that night in Berkeley. First she dreamed about him. Then she passed a doorway and heard Bob Dylan singing. “Lay,
     lady, lay. Lay across my big brass bed.” The next thing she knew she was in a motel room making love and crying. Nora