Eleven Kinds of Loneliness Read Online Free PDF Page A

her differently, that she couldn’t marry him because she knew him too well, and either way it left her badly shaken, vulnerable to all the things that Martha, her roommate, had said from the very beginning.
    “Isn’t he funny?” Martha had said after their first date. “He says ‘terlet.’ I didn’t know people really said ‘terlet.’” And Grace had giggled, ready enough to agree that it was funny. That was a time when she had been ready to agree with Martha on practically anything—when it often seemed, in fact, that finding a girl like Martha from an ad in the Times was just about the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her.
    But Ralph had persisted all through the summer, and by fall she had begun standing up for him. “What don’t you like about him, Martha? He’s perfectly nice.”
    “Oh, everybody’s perfectly nice, Grace,” Martha would say in her college voice, making perfectly nice a faintly absurd thing tobe, and then she’d look up crossly from the careful painting of her fingernails. “It’s just that he’s such a little—a little white worm . Can’t you see that?”
    “Well, I certainly don’t see what his complexion has to do with—”
    “Oh God, you know what I mean. Can’t you see what I mean? Oh, and all those friends of his, his Eddie and his Marty and his George with their mean, ratty little clerks’ lives and their mean, ratty little … It’s just that they’re all alike , those people. All they ever say is ‘Hey, wha’ happen t’ya Giants?’ and ‘Hey, wha’ happen t’ya Yankees?’ and they all live way out in Sunnyside or Woodhaven or some awful place, and their mothers have those damn little china elephants on the mantelpiece.” And Martha would frown over her nail polish again, making it clear that the subject was closed.
    All that fall and winter she was confused. For a while she tried going out only with Martha’s kind of men—the kind that used words like “amusing” all the time and wore small-shouldered flannel suits like a uniform; and for a while she tried going out with no men at all. She even tried that crazy business with Mr. Atwood at the office Christmas party. And all the time Ralph kept calling up, hanging around, waiting for her to make up her mind. Once she took him home to meet her parents in Pennsylvania (where she never would have dreamed of taking Martha), but it wasn’t until Easter time that she finally gave in.
    They had gone to a dance somewhere in Queens, one of the big American Legion dances that Ralph’s crowd was always going to, and when the band played “Easter Parade” he held her very close, hardly moving, and sang to her in a faint, whispering tenor. It was the kind of thing she’d never have expected Ralph to do—a sweet, gentle thing—and it probably wasn’t just then that she decided to marry him, but it always seemed soafterwards. It always seemed she had decided that minute, swaying to the music with his husky voice in her hair:
“ I’ll be all in clover
And when they look you over
I’ll be the proudest fella
In the Easter Parade . …”
    That night she had told Martha, and she could still see the look on Martha’s face. “Oh, Grace, you’re not—surely you’re not serious . I mean, I thought he was more or less of a joke —you can’t really mean you want to—”
    “Shut up! You just shut up, Martha!” And she’d cried all night. Even now she hated Martha for it; even as she stared blindly at a row of filing cabinets along the office wall, half sick with fear that Martha was right.
    The noise of giggles swept over her, and she saw with a start that two of the girls—Irene and Rose—were grinning over their typewriters and pointing at her. “ We saw ya!” Irene sang. “ We saw ya! Mooning again, huh Grace?” Then Rose did a burlesque of mooning, heaving her meager breasts and batting her eyes, and they both collapsed in laughter.
    With an effort of will Grace resumed the guileless,