Free Hilda and Pearl by Alice Mattison Page B

skirt in dark green and Pearl wondered whether Mike had noticed it.
    The man dropped them off at a drugstore in town (“My girl has to pick up some hairpins,” said Mike), but it carried hairpins only in black. “They’d look like ants in my hair, going around my braid,” Pearl said. Mike laughed at her but accompanied her down Main Street until they found a second drugstore, and there hairpins came in gold as well as black. “Fourteen carat,” said Mike. “No doubt about it.”
    She liked being teased. “I’ll buy you an ice cream cone,” he said then, and they walked back to the first drugstore, which had a fountain. He paid for the cones and then, without talking about whether they were going to do it, they walked all the way back to the hotel, scuffing their feet in the brown pine needles at the edge of the road, or walking on the road itself when the brush came right down to it. A few cars passed them, but they didn’t try to flag them down. After his cone was gone, Mike smoked, or he broke off a twig and peeled it as he walked.
    That night Pearl had a blister and her feet ached. She soaked them in Epsom salts, which she found in the bathroom she shared with the manager and his wife and the chambermaids. She sat on her bed with her feet in an enamel basin, looking out the window and watching the light sift away from the trees and from the lake, which she could just glimpse from her room. She took down her hair, putting her hairpins one by one into an ashtray on her dresser—still careful, though now she had plenty, as though the hairpins were small souvenirs of the day.
    Mike liked to take walks, and he began to show up when Pearl was just ready to leave the desk at night. They’d walk partway to town, slapping at mosquitoes. As the summer progressed it began to be dark by the time they’d gone a little way, but they walked a bit anyway, facing traffic, turning their faces away from the headlights when, every once in a while, a car came along. Or they went down to the lake. He stood with his arm around her, not saying much. Then he walked her to the main building of the hotel, where she lived. The band lived in a cottage on the grounds. He walked her home three times before he ever kissed her, but once he began, he kissed her every night.
    On weekends she’d sit alone at a table in the lounge, listening to the band. She’d never paid attention to jazz before and at first she didn’t like it. It seemed disreputable: it made her sad in a way that scared her. Mike said he didn’t know what she meant, jazz was beautiful, and after a while she began to pick out songs she liked, at first those that seemed most like what she called “just plain songs.” Gradually she began to like others, the songs with low, wailing notes. It surprised her when Mike played these songs. It was like hearing him speak in a foreign language, and sometimes she imagined that if she could read his shorthand notes, they would also sound like great cries and strange muted calls.
    At the end of the summer Mike said they should get married. “What else will you do?” he asked bluntly, when she claimed to be astonished, although she’d had the same idea herself.
    â€œI could go home and look for a job,” she said. “We can’t afford to get married.”
    â€œYou don’t want to go home.”
    â€œNo.” Her father would make her work in the candy store, and make her brother, who belonged there, look for a job. Pearl thrust her feet out in front of her and noticed how the sun made patterns on her open-toed shoes. She and Mike were sitting on the wooden steps of the cottage where he’d been living all summer with the other musicians. They’d been talking in low voices because the other two men were asleep.
    â€œ You’ll be fine in September, whatever we do,” said Pearl. The owner of the music store had said he might