Free The Collected Stories by Grace Paley Page B

first-class card in the Teamsters and owns an apartment house in California. They asked his two brothers in Jersey to help me. They have large families. Rightfully they laughed. Then they wrote to Thomas, the oldest, the smart one (the one they all worked so hard for years to keep him in college until his brains could pay off). He was the one who sent ten dollars immediately, saying, “What a bastard! I’ll send something time to time, Ginny, but whatever you do, don’t tell the authorities.” Of course I never did. Soon they began to guess they were better people than me, that I was in trouble because I deserved it, and then they liked me better.
    But they never fixed my refrigerator. Every time I called I said patiently, “The milk is sour …” I said, “Corn beef went bad.” Sitting in that beer-stinking phone booth in Felan’s for the sixth time (sixty cents) with the baby on my lap and Barbie tapping at the glass door with an American flag, I cried into the secretary’s hardhearted ear, “I bought real butter for the holiday, and it’s rancid …” They said, “You’ll have to get a better bid on the repair job.”
    While I waited indoors for a man to bid, Girard took to swinging back and forth on top of the bathroom door, just to soothe himself, giving me the laugh, dreamy, nibbling calcimine off the ceiling. On first sight Mrs. Raftery said, “Whack the monkey, he’d be better off on arsenic.”
    But Girard is my son and I’m the judge. It means a terrible thing for the future, though I don’t know what to call it.
    It was from constantly thinking of my foreknowledge on this and other subjects, it was from observing when I put my lipstick on daily, how my face was just curling up to die, that John Raftery came from Jersey to rescue me.
    On Thursdays, anyway, John Raftery took the tubes in to visit his mother. The whole house knew it. She was cheerful even before breakfast. She sang out loud in a girlish brogue that only came to tongue for grand occasions. Hanging out the wash, she blushed to recall what a remarkable boy her John had been. “Ask the sisters around the corner,” she said to the open kitchen windows. “They’ll never forget John.”
    That particular night after supper Mrs. Raftery said to her son, “John, how come you don’t say hello to your old friend Virginia? She’s had hard luck and she’s gloomy.”
    â€œIs that so, Mother?” he said, and immediately climbed two flights to knock at my door.
    â€œOh, John,” I said at the sight of him, hat in hand in a white shirt and blue-striped tie, spick-and-span, a Sunday-school man. “Hello!”
    â€œWelcome, John!” I said. “Sit down. Come right in. How are you? You look awfully good. You do. Tell me, how’ve you been all this time, John?”
    â€œHow’ve I been?” he asked thoughtfully. To answer within reason, he described his life with Margaret, marriage, work, and children up to the present day.
    I had nothing good to report. Now that he had put the subject around before my very eyes, every burnt-up day of my life smoked in shame, and I couldn’t even get a clear view of the good half hours.
    â€œOf course,” he said, “you do have lovely children. Noticeable-looking, Virginia. Good looks is always something to be thankful for.”
    â€œThankful?” I said. “I don’t have to thank anything but my own foolishness for four children when I’m twenty-six years old, deserted, and poverty-struck, regardless of looks. A man can’t help it, but I could have behaved better.”
    â€œDon’t be so cruel on yourself, Ginny,” he said. “Children come from God.”
    â€œYou’re still great on holy subjects, aren’t you? You know damn well where children come from.”
    He did know. His red face reddened further. John Raftery has had