The Snare

5. THE SECOND ADDRESS

5. THE SECOND ADDRESS When Julia Garrett woke up, it was afternoon , and the girl who lived across the hall, Edith Williams, was standing in the door. "Oh, excuse me, I didn't know you were asleep." "Okay, it's okay. I must have dozed off." She sat up, shaking her tousled head. "The air is heavy." (Void venir les temps oil vibrant sur sa tige . . .) "I would have called you last night to say I wouldn't be home, but . . ." Salty waves of memory came spewing back into her head; she reached for her comb off the dresser, coming up out of the sea, reducing life to words of explanation. "But I went by the Squiremeisters'—you remember them, Bucky and Marie. No? Well, they were married when they were in school and nobody knew it, they just assumed they were sharing, but it was marriage all the time. They had a little place over a garage where we all used to drop in. Now they've a house out near the Lake. Marie called me about a week ago for a shrimp recipe I had. I went to drop it by and there were some other people there, from out of town, and then one or two others, and somebody called somebody, so in the end . . ." She trailed off. "It's okay,"said Edith Williams—"Edie" was what they all called her. "I just thought I'd hear you at the door if you came. I locked up about twelve or so. Miss Louise is sick, you know." Julia found her hair so badly matted she could have been a skunk fresh from the swamp, she remarked. She 58 Elizabeth Spencer 59 hunted her brush. The small, plain girl talking with her in the doorway had something anonymous and pleasant about her. She always looked like clean cotton blouses, scrubbed brown hair dried in the sun—a stubby, intelligent female creature, with neither vanity nor pride. "Oh, Edie," said Julia, Tm too sleepy to think. Are you going out or coming in? In? Then do put a record on and leave the door open so I can hear. Ill come to in a minute." "Is the Prokofiev okay?" Edie collected records, one of her mild, pleasant habits. With the help of her boyfriend, a student physicist, she had rigged up a small hi-fi for these singular quarters. She had also put cheap but colorful rugs on the floor, had enameled white an old wrought-iron bedstead scrolled in two dividingfan shapes. Shehad even got curtains up and refinished a second-hand rocking chair. This was all beyond Julia, who had looked on these rooms from the time she had seen them as being all the more what she had in mind because they were not pretty but rough, old, and bare. She herself had nothing but a mattress with springs beneath set on peg legs, shoved in the corner and surrounded by cushions pushed back against the wall. She had one chair, bought second-hand from the Salvation Army, with a bright Mexican-printed throw draped over it, and one straight chair at a card table for eating, though generally she ate her breakfast standing up at the refrigerator in the hall, and shared her dinners with Edie at a lawn table the old ladies they rented from had caused to be put on the back gallery. Edie lived at the end of the hallway in a small room, but Julia's room overlooked a fine old garden now returned to seed and semi-jungle because the ladies downstairs could not afford to keep it up. As they could not actually see it unless they went out on a back porch they never used any more, they had probably not thought of its existing for many years. (At least, this is what Julia wouldhave said. It was the opinion she held them in. Edie had the ladies much more firmly in mind than that. She knew that they knew more about 6 0 T H E S N A R E that garden, overgrown though it was, than she and Julia together would ever know, and she knew that she herself was better informed about both garden and ladies than Julia would ever care to be. Can people be everything? Edie would have asked, making it clear she did not want to criticize. Her name...