A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

She hadn’t changed much. The even-all-around cut might have been missing from her hair, but I can’t be sure, for I didn’t look up at it, just looked at her. She had on a fresh, summery little dress, orchid in color, that much I seem to remember. It was both gauzy and crisp at the same time, most likely what they call organdy.

But there was one thing I did notice clearly, as we looked straight into one another’s eyes, one thing that hadn’t been there before. There was a little diagonal crevice, like a nick or slit, traced downward from the inside corner of each eye, slanted like an accent mark and just as brief as one. It couldn’t have been called a crease, for she was too young to have creases yet. It wasn’t a furrow either, it wasn’t deep enough for that.

Studying her, I wondered what had caused it. Tear-tracks, maybe, from excessive crying? No, not tears alone. Tears maybe, but something else as well. Long, sleepless nights of brooding, of frustration and rebellion.

If they grew longer, deeper, I sensed somehow they would change the expression of her face, give her eyes a hardened, crafty aspect. But it was too soon to do that yet. All they were so far was a mark of hurt; they gave her eyes an apprehensive, reproachful look.

I don’t know what we said first. Probably I said her name, and she said mine.

Then she moved her mouth upward toward me a little, and we kissed.

“It’s been an awful long time I last saw you,” I said, skipping the “since” in the hurry of my speech. Tactless, without meaning to be. But what else could I have said? I hadn’t seen her just yesterday.

“I’ve been away,” she said reticently.

I wondered if she knew I knew. I hoped she didn’t. I would have liked to tell her that I didn’t know, but I couldn’t figure out a way that wouldn’t tell her that I did know.

“Working,” she added even more reticently.

“You still live here on the block?” I asked her.

She answered that with less constraint. “Not anymore,” she said. “I just came around tonight to see what the old neighborhood looked like.”

Then, as if to break the chain-continuity of questions, she suddenly suggested: “Dance with me. It’s too hard to try to talk with all that noise they’re making.”

I stepped down to the asphalt roadbed she was standing on, which had been powdered over with something to make it less abrasive to the dancers’ feet.

We moved a few steps, a few steps only, and then even that was taken away from me.

A girl came jostling and thrusting her way through the mangle of dancers, someone I had never seen before. She touched Vera on the back or something, I couldn’t see what it was, to attract her attention.

“What’re you doing?” she demanded in a tone of urgency. “Don’t you know they’re waiting for us?”

“I just met an old friend,” Vera told her happily, and she indicated me with her head, about to introduce us.

The other girl brushed that aside, as if to say: This is no time for that now. She didn’t even look toward me.

“This is the second time they’ve sent me out to look for you,” she went on rebukingly. “How much longer you going to be? You must have seen everything you wanted to by now. What’s there to see around here, anyway? They won’t like it if you keep them waiting much longer.”

“All right, I’m coming,” Vera said with a sort of passivity, as though she were used to being told what to do.

“I guess I have to go now,” she said, turning to me, with a regretful little smile that, whether she meant it or not, was a pleasant balm to my feelings.

She turned aside from my still-upheld arms and followed the other girl back through the crowd. And after a moment, I went after the two of them, more slowly.

Once up on the sidewalk and in the clear, they broke into a choppy little quick-step that girls sometimes use, not quite a run but more than a walk, Vera still a trifle in back of the other one.

“But when am I going to see you again?” I called out after her, bewildered by the rapidity with which I’d found her, only to lose her again.

She turned her head around, but without breaking stride in the little jogging trot she was engaged in, and called back reassuringly: “Real soon, Con. And that’s a promise.”

Then they both made the turn of the corner and whisked from sight. I went down there after them, not to try to stop them, for I knew that wouldn’t have worked, but simply to see if I could get a look at who it was they were hurrying so to join.

As I put my head around the corner, a pale-stockinged after-leg was drawing from sight into a car that was standing there, and then the car door cracked shut with that flat sound they always have.