Chapter 11: Summer of Her Discontent

Connie Steffano was looking for work for the first time and looking for an apartment for the first time. Just to increase the stress, she was doing it in Springfield, Wisconsin, which was -- although she’d lived there for a while -- much less familiar than Hartford had been. She’d mostly hung around campus rather than exploring the town. She wore one of the skirts she’d brought from home, almost the first time she’d worn it. Slacks were for the university; skirts were for the business world.

She could stay in the dorm for only one more week before it closed. So, since she had some money in the bank, she looked for an apartment first. These should be easier to find in the summer in a college town. “We rent it out to college girls every year,” the woman told her on Saturday about one of the apartments she’d seen advertised. “One of the girls is staying over for the summer, and we have more bedrooms. There is a shared kitchen and a bath. I have to stay in the office, but Dwight will be back soon. He can show it to you.”

Connie thought the woman shouldn’t be walking around showing apartments anyway. She was pregnant and looked to be due any day. “My situation is a little iffy,” she explained. “I’m looking for work around here, and I’ll need a place within walking distance of the job I get.”

“Hmm?” the woman said. “Type?”

“Yes. Know of anybody looking for a typist?”

“College typing or real typing?”

“I’ve used it for college work, but I learned beside women who were going into office work.”

“And you go back to school after Labor Day?”

“Yes.”

“Here, type me a copy of this.” She handed Connie a letter and got up to give her a place at the typewriter.

Connie typed the letter out just as it was written.

“Dwight,” the woman called to footsteps on the stairs, “I think we’ve solved both problems.”

“What problems?” the man who came through the door asked. He was fat, bald, fortyish, and smoking a cigar.

“This girl wants a room and a summer job. She can type, if not very fast. Why not hire her as my replacement and rent her one of the rooms over on Pine Street?”

“Damn it, Gloria, I can hold off ‘til after the Fourth.”

“That’s nice. I’ll return after Labor Day. And I mean the federal holiday, not when I go into labor.”

“You don’t need that much time.”

“It’s real generous of you to give me your medical opinions for free, Dwight. But I’ll still depend on Doctor Brandon. Don’t let Dwight bother you, hon. His bark’s worse than his bite.”

“Does she know anything about real estate?”

“Nope. You have the license; you’ll have to tell her. Why don’t you walk her over to Pine Street. You’ll see, hon, it isn’t that far.”

“Get in the car,” Dwight said when they were downstairs. He drove them to a large house. It had once been a mansion, but not recently. “Smoking or not?” Dwight asked as they went up the stairs. It was rather late to ask that question, as he’d been puffing away in the car.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Well, that girl does. Let’s look at this apartment.” He unlocked a door. “Kitchen,” he said with a gesture. It was larger than the living room and furnished with a table and chairs. “Bedroom, bedroom, bedroom, bedroom, bath. The bedrooms’ll be cleared out tomorrow.” The bathroom contained a tub, but no shower. Fairly clearly, the original bathroom on this floor had been divided into one for this apartment and one for the other apartment. The dividing wall cut diagonally across the original room.

“You pay $200 a month, for one of the bedrooms and access to the kitchen, living room, and bath. During the school year, we rent out the apartment to one person who finds the other roommates. You pay phone, electric, and gas; how you divide the utilities between the four of you is your business. You pay one month’s deposit and the last month’s utilities are taken out of it before you get it back. Interested?”

$200 a month sounded high to Connie, although a room of her own sounded attractive. And she didn’t have a job yet. “I might be interested. Let’s walk back and see how long it would take me to walk to your office.” He gave her directions, instead. It was a shorter walk than it had been a drive; Springfield was full of one-way streets.

She accepted the job and the apartment. The job’s hours ran from 11:00 to 7:00 Monday through Saturday. She got an hour off for lunch; just when depended on when Mr. Williams -- which was what she would call the man whom Gloria called ‘Dwight’-- got back. She’d be paid $5 an hour. Gloria would stay on to show her the ropes.

Sunday, she went back to St. Matthew’s, which was closer to the place she’d be living now than it was to the dorm.

She bought a shopping cart Monday morning, and moved her stuff to the new apartment over the next few days. Her new bed was a single; she checked all of the rooms, and they were all the same. The dorm room bed had been a twin, which meant that the fitted sheets weren’t. She bought sheets. She found herself going to the bank in the morning before work. She wasn’t hurting, but a lot was going out -- the expected roommates hadn’t appeared, and she paid a month’s utility bills -- before her first paycheck came in.

She took the room whose air conditioner looked least likely to break down, which wasn’t saying a lot.

Gloria filled her in on the job. Not all that much of it involved typing; there was a good deal of filing, but there was a good deal of sitting around and getting to know Gloria, too. They added new girls to the apartment and the other one on the floor, adding them by offering a lower rent than Connie was paying. Professor Franke would have appreciated the slope of the supply curve, certainly appreciated it more than Connie did.

The first roommate was Michelle Kurek. Then there were two girls who smoked and went into the other apartment. The apartment on the ground floor was rented to men during the school year but would be empty for the summer. The second roommate was Wendy Toffler.

She still had a mailbox at the University. When she visited it one Monday morning after ignoring it for a while, she found several letters. She had the grades for the last quarter both from the University and from Helen who’d forwarded them. She had an ‘A’ in English 103 and a ‘B’ in the Jeffers course. She got ‘B’s in economics and Phys-ed, and a ‘C’ in geology.

She had 43 hours towards the graduation requirement of 150, and a GPA of 3.12. If her calculations were right, that didn’t include gym. Considering that she had more than half the distribution she’d need out of the way, that GPA rocked.

Wednesday of her second week in the office, a boy ran up the stairs. “Where’s dad?” he asked.

“He’s showing a property,” answered Gloria. “Drew Williams, Connie Steffano. He’s not always this rude; sometimes he’s worse.”

“Dammit, Gloria. Linda-Sue broke up with me.”

“What is this, the twelfth time?”

“This may be permanent. She’s going off to Madison in the fall.”

Gloria took him back into his father’s office, leaving Connie to handle whatever business came in. “I’ll be there if it’s an emergency, hon.”

Connie could handle almost everything which came in by then. She had learned to get to the office just before 11:00. She would unlock the doors, having bought new keys as one of her first tasks as an employee, and get to her desk on the dot of 11:00. Her leaving times weren’t that fixed. “You have to see,” Mr. Williams said, “real estate is all about service. When people are here thinking about buying a house and it turns seven, they don’t want you telling them to go home.”

And, when he was in the middle of telling a joke when it turned seven, he didn’t want her telling him to go home, either. Nor did he stop abruptly when he was complaining about his family. Connie knew enough about the ways of the world to ignore his comments that his wife didn’t understand him, but he might just have been blowing off steam. He was as full of complaints about his son. “You go to the University, don’t you?” he asked the Friday after Drew had looked for him. “And you come from the East?”

“Hartford.” She vaguely resented his implication that Savannah was about the same.

“Wish you would talk to Drew. He thinks he has to go to New York University.” Connie thought he meant SUNY but wasn’t sure.

“I can’t help you there. One reason I came to Benson was to get experience in an entirely different environment. Benson satisfies me that way; it would hardly satisfy Drew.”

She took to eating breakfast at the apartment, lunch and dinner at diners near the office. There were three diners within easy walking distance, and cooking in the apartment after you’d got off work at 7:00 (or, occasionally, 7:30) didn’t appeal. Then, too, although each of the roommates had her own shelf in the refrigerator, Connie had noticed that some of the food on hers disappeared. So she could get back at 7:45 with a meal planned only to find that she had to go to the store for an ingredient before she could cook it.

Gloria didn’t show up for work on Monday, June 13. She called in that afternoon. “Williams real estate,” Connie answered the phone.

“Connie?”

“Gloria! How are you doing? I was worried when you didn’t show up.”

“I’m doing great! Pete was born early Sunday morning. Seven pounds, three ounces.”

“Congratulations! I’ll tell Mr. Williams.”

The fourth girl, Candy Burke, moved in Wednesday, June 15. She was a local girl who had just got out of high school and was at war with her parents. She clerked in the local hardware store. Sometimes Connie would get back from work to find her with Carl, her boyfriend, in the living room or the kitchen. The living room wasn’t a problem; Connie hadn’t used it much when she’d had the apartment to herself. Michelle and Wendy watched TV there. She regarded the kitchen, however, as a workspace rather than a social center.

Connie’s gross pay for the first two weeks was $420. She was shocked at how much came out of it. “Everybody is surprised,” Mr. Williams said, “damned government sucks all the money out of the economy.”

Connie had thought that the damned government required Mr. Williams to pay her $215 for 42 hours work a week, to say nothing of the times she stayed late. She dropped over to visit the university office which helped students get jobs to check on how her employment rated. “Five dollars an hour for full time office work,” the man said. “Sounds low to me, but not unheard of. Most of our jobs are waitress, and that sort of thing. Those pay lower. On the other hand, you did get a job right off. Maybe you’d have got more per hour if you had looked longer; would you have got more total money for the summer?”

He had a point, and Connie was more than covering her expenses, or would when she received her second paycheck for the month. Anyway, she now had work experience. She also knew a lot about the market for housing over the summer. She’d do better next summer, and she’d rather work in an office -- even for Mr. Williams -- than wait on tables. Besides, next year she’d be eighteen.

Anyway, she now realized the University’s business side hadn’t closed for the summer; for that matter, classes were still being held. And she had a lot of free time in the mornings to deal with school. Wednesday, she went to pick up a catalog for the next school year. It told neither who was teaching which course nor the times, but otherwise it held all the information she needed.

The courses corresponding to the Jeffers course she took were on Steffano the first quarter -- Walters had told her that -- Millay the second, and Frost the third. Hmmm? Steffano, Millay, and Frost. She’d tell Andre; he’d be pleased. Well, she figured while waiting for Williams to get back and free her for lunch, she was not going to take the Steffano course. She could take the American Lit course, though. And, having given her a ‘B’ in Jeffers, Walters could hardly refuse to let her take the other two courses. She’d be competing with half the lit majors, of course. She’d read some over the summer and show up better prepared than she had for the Jeffers course.

She’d go back to her verse, as well. When she’d got to this point in her plans, Williams came back. She went to lunch and didn’t think about it until the next morning. The others left the apartment before nine, allowing Connie time for a leisurely bath and an excursion to the town library before work. When he came in, at 11:19, Connie handed Mr. Williams a rent receipt.

“Oh,” he asked, “did we rent out the last room in your building?” Then he read what he’d signed. “Connie! Would I cheat you?”

She decided to avoid that question. “The library requires proof of residence before I can get a card.”

He laughed and handed it to her.

Friday, she got a library card and took out Millay’s A Few Figs from Thistles. She looked at her watch, 2:17, when she got out of the office for lunch. After lunch, she read the book sitting on somebody’s front steps in the shade until 3:10. She was back in the office before 3:17.

After she’d been back at the office for a while, Gloria called. “Tell me,” she said, “if you have to go.”

“Nothing’s up. You know how it can be.”

“And how I know. A day can be empty. But another day can be jammed full. Tell me when you have to go, and I’ll let you.”

“And tell me when you have to deal with Pete.”

“Believe me, I will. He’s asleep right now, but I was wrong. Dwight is more mature.” Connie laughed.

She killed the book Saturday evening. Saturday’s mail brought a letter from Josh. There had been a musical event in Milwaukee, and Jessica had invited Josh. He’d told Jessica that Connie was his girlfriend now. “Don’t tell her that,” she wrote back. “Or, at least, don’t tell yourself that. Jessica hurt you, though it sounded like she was trying not to hurt you. You can tell her anything you want. But don’t tell yourself that you are going steady with me, because I’m not going steady with you. I may have studied with you; I may have gone on dates with you when I wasn’t going on dates with any other boy. But I never promised you anything.” In particular, though she didn’t want to type it out, she hadn’t promised him her body.

She reread the whole Millay book Sunday. She’d enjoyed it, but what it really generated was a desire to write some more verse of her own. Her experience in the mechanics-of-verse class had convinced her that she could handle more than iambic pentameter. She’d see how far she could go with dactylic tetrameter -- no, she didn’t want to deal with feminine rhymes. She was writing light verse, but not that light. She’d use anapestic tetrameter.

She turned out five quatrains that afternoon, and then cooked herself some dinner. After that, Carl and Candy took over the kitchen. Connie retreated to her room and the University’s catalog. Nine hours of psychology was required for graduation as well as nine hours of some other social science. Connie might as well kill the psychology requirement her sophomore year. American literature was a prerequisite for the Millay and Frost courses. She wasn’t going to meet that requirement, but she might as well take the course. It looked interesting anyway. And a French literature in translation course was open to graduates of French 203, like herself. Connie was puzzled why any knowledge of French was necessary to read the books in translation. On the other hand, it was presented by the French department; maybe they were pushing their intro courses. She’d look better taking an advanced lit course before the Millay, too. That would look on paper like an interest in lit, not simply an interest in Walters.

The advanced American lit course -- she’d look weird asking to take an advanced course in Dickens without even taking the English lit course concurrently -- was on Moby Dick. She could read the book over the summer. Unlike Millay’s poetry it was likely to take all summer; it was one whale of a book.

She was asking for a lot of reading, though. The American lit course recommended concurrent registration in American history. That wouldn’t be so much reading, and only reading for content. Besides, she’d always done well in history. That was a nice full schedule, except for Phys-ed.

Connie needed three more quarters of this to graduate, and she was tempted to take archery each spring of the next three years. Everybody warned, however, about letting that sort of requirement go until the last moment. And it would be just like the administration to stop teaching archery her senior year.

Monday, she went to the university library before work to see if she could take anything out despite not being registered just then. She could, and she took out a biography of Millay as well as Jeffers’s The Stallion. The latter was an old friend, and she still had a record of the good parts in the back of her French notebook.

When she got back from lunch that day, Mr. Williams was talking to his son Drew. Mr. Williams went off without telling her where he was going or when he was coming back. Drew stayed.

“Look,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be rude to you the other day.”

“That’s all right.”

“You’re a pretty girl, but I was too full of my own concerns to more than just notice that.”

“I’m not the sort of girl who expects compliments from passersby.” For that matter, she didn’t think of herself as particularly pretty.

“Well, my church group is having a dance Friday night. Would you like to go? Would you be willing to go as my date? I mean.”

In the first place, he was a reasonably presentable boy. In the second place, he was her boss’s son. In the third place, it was a signal to Josh that she wasn’t his steady. “Why, thank you. Friday night? When? Do you want to pick me up?”

“8:00? The doors open at 8:00, but we’ll still get there before any serious dancing starts.”

“In that case, why don’t you make it 8:30? I don’t get off here until 7:00. I could make it by 8:00, but it would be a rush.”

“8:30. Where is your place again?”

She gave him the address.

Tuesday, she returned the Millay book to the town library and got out Moby Dick.

Friday, Drew was on time picking her up, and she was ready for him. By the time they got to the gym in the Presbyterian church, the dance was already in progress. She could tell that she and Drew caused a little stir when they entered. Drew was an enjoyable dance partner, but nothing special. She kissed him good night on the front seat of his car.

Saturday, Mr. Williams made no comment on her relationship with Drew. Drew called her up that night to thank her.

She felt that the date deserved more than a quatrain. She wrote two quatrains and a final couplet to describe it.

Monday was the Fourth, and a holiday even in her office. Connie enjoyed the local fireworks. Tuesday, she got to the office early. She typed out another pair of quatrains and a final couplet to describe the fireworks display. After eating her lunch, she took the ten-line poem to the office of the Springfield Sentinel. “Here is something you might want to print,” she said. “Give me a byline, and I won’t want compensation.”

“I’ll show it to the editor,” the woman who spoke to her said.

Drew called her at the office to ask her to a movie on Saturday night. She accepted.

The newspaper editor called her the next morning. “You really are submitting this at our regular rates?”

“I was submitting it for free. What are your regular rates?”

“Two cents a line. It won’t make you rich.”

“A copy of the paper and a nickel over?”

“I’ll give you a free copy of the paper, too. One thing, though. If you want to submit an article on the Fourth of July to a daily paper, you get it here early on the fifth from now on. The night of the Fourth would be better.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” The piece was on the editorial page of the Thursday paper. She liked how it looked. Maybe she should specialize in that verse form, anapestic tetrameter in ABAB CDCD EE. She’d try that for a while.

She wouldn’t have gone to the movie by herself, and Drew sat with his arm over her shoulder. She put up with that until he cupped her boob with that hand. Then she removed his arm altogether.

When he drove her home, she said:, “Thanks for the movie.”

She raised her mouth for the kiss but removed his hand from her boob again. As she was opening the door, he said:, “Care to do it again next week?”

She thought for a minute. On the one hand, these were dates; on the other hand, it looked like they were turning into wrestling matches. Why not? she thought, and almost said it that way. When she did speak aloud, though, it came out as “Why, thank you.” Still, his invitation confirmed Helen’s promise so many years before that boys would still ask her out after she said no.

She did a poem every morning, sometimes about the previous day, sometimes about Drew or his father, sometimes about another subject. After she visited Gloria, she mailed her a poem titled “Pete.” She became quite disciplined on other things, as well, reading ten pages of the Millay biography or of Moby Dick every night.