The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Read Online Free PDF Page A

What?” She tried to sound excited, but it wasn’t easy.
    â€œA bonus. Fifty dollars.” She could almost see the flattening of his lips as he said “fifty dollars” with the particular earnestness he reserved for pronouncing sums of money.
    â€œWhy, that’s lovely, Ralph,” she said, and if there was any tiredness in her voice be didn’t notice it.
    â€œLovely, huh?” he said with a laugh, mocking the girlishness of the word. “Ya like that, huh, Gracie? No, but I mean I was really surprised, ya know it? The boss siz, ‘Here, Ralph,’ and he hands me this envelope. He don’t even crack a smile or nothin’, and I’m wonderin’, what’s the deal here? I’m getting fired here, or what? He siz, ‘G’ahead, Ralph, open it.’ So I open it, and then I look at the boss and he’s grinning a mile wide.” He chuckled and sighed. “Well, so listen, honey. What time ya want me to come over tonight?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know. Soon as you can, I guess.”
    â€œWell listen, I gotta go over to Eddie’s house and pick up that bag he’s gonna loan me, so I might as well do that, go on home and eat, and then come over to your place around eight-thirty, nine o’clock. Okay?”
    â€œAll right,” she said. “I’ll see you then, darling.” She had been calling him “darling” for only a short time—since it had become irrevocably clear that she was, after all, going to marry him—and the word still had an alien sound. As she straightened the stacks of stationery in her desk (because there was nothing else to do), a familiar little panic gripped her: she couldn’t marry him—she hardly even knew him. Sometimes it occurred to 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.
    â€œIsn’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.”
    â€œOh, everybody’s perfectly nice, Grace,” Martha would say in her college voice, making perfectly nice a faintly absurd thing to be, 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?”
    â€œWell, I certainly don’t see what his complexion has to do with—”
    â€œOh 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