Chapter 7C

We reached the top of the stairs. She stood in the middle of the living room and looked about. She sighed downheartedly, "I'm so tired of this." Suddenly she started crying; she frowned and then squinted hard, and her eyes closed and squeezed out small pearly tears that tumbled quickly down her cheeks. "I'm so tired of this," she wept, and covered her face quickly with her hands.

I went to her and held her shoulders, letting her lean against me with her face in my chest. For a minute she cried as I silently stroked her hair. Soon she calmed down.

She sniffed loudly and moaned, "I'm so silly."

"You're dead tired," I said. Firmly, I held her away from me and looked into her reddened, wet, tired, absolutely beautiful face. "You get right over to that sofa and relax. I'll get the other stuff."

"Oh, independent me, look at how well I'm holding up. I'm sorry, I guess all this just... hit me all at once."

"Go to that sofa, or I'll carry you over there and nail you to it."

"Oh, all right..." She whimpered like a defeated little girl and brushed the wet hair from her face and went to the sofa. I moved to the door, and by the time I turned around to look at her she had fallen onto her back on the sofa, her head against an armrest and one foot dangling onto the floor. She sniffled again.

I stood by the door and shook a warning finger at her. "Now, don't you move until I'm finished."

Three quick trips up and down the stairs, and I finished the job. I set the last box onto the floor and saw that she seemed asleep with her head nestled on a cushion against the armrest. Grabbing some paper towels from one of the boxes, I went to her and knelt on the floor beside her, and reached up to wipe her forehead.

Her eyes opened and she smiled wearily. "Oh, look at ME! I feel as if I need a nurse. No, don't--" She took the towel from my hands, folded it, and gently wiped the sweat from my face. She whispered sweetly, "Thank you, hon. You've done enough for me already. I'm sorry I organized this so badly."

"You did fine," I said. "We moved two carloads in a little over an hour."

"Stop being so nice to me. You've always been too nice to me. I wonder why you didn't just blow your stack and start yelling when I was having a stroke in the car coming over here."

"You were tired."

"You're too nice, hon. I wasn't just tired, I was overworked and disorganized. And just plain mad. This must be the fifth time I've moved my stuff in a year. I can't depend on anybody, everything I do goes wrong, I rush into things before I know what I'm doing, I worked myself to death for god knows what, I took on too many classes this semester... I'm a mess."

"Just another lady genius working her way through college."

"Stop. Be a Clark Gable and slap me around a little and bring me to my senses."

"I could never do that."

She blew her nose. "No, I guess you couldn't. I'd probably slap you back, anyway."

"You probably would. And you're bigger than me."

"Not anymore."

"Well... you're older."

She wiped her nose. "Yeah, but you're catching up." She crumpled the towel and pitched it on the floor and took the fresh towel that I had in my hand. "What a big grown up girl *I* am, right? I can't believe I broke into tears just because I fell on my rear end."

"Stop apologizing for being worn out."

"Listen... how the heck are we gonna get you home?"

"I don't wanna go home."

"I'll call a cab."

"That costs too much."

"I can afford it. Anyway, I owe you something for all this."

"No! I'll take the bus."

"But you won't get home until after ten."

I shrugged. "I wanna stay here for a while."

"And do what? You've already done enough."

"It's nice here. I like it, it's a great apartment. Right now, I just want -- " I stopped.

"You want?"

I didn't answer. I suddenly became aware of how, over the past few months or perhaps over the past few years, I'd become so indirect and timorous. I was thinking about that and about how to reply to her, when she laughed bashfully and blew her nose again.

"Hon, we can't... uh... I'm so embarrassed to admit this, I have never admitted this to you, but... well, we can't."

"Can't what?"

"You know. It's... that time of the month. It started today." She suddenly hid her face with the napkin. "Oh, god, after all we've done together, why am I so embarrassed? Oh, I'm so messed up."

I said to her flatly, "That's not what I was thinking about."

"What? What do you mean, then?"

"I wasn't thinking about that, that's not what I wanted."

"Oh. I'm sorry." She laughed and rolled her eyes. "Oh, WELL! We know where Martha Jane's mind is, don't we? Oh, brother! I'm sorry, hon. What did you want, then?"

I hesitated, only briefly, wondering why I waited and why I could not be direct with this young woman. I started to say, "Well..." and rose on my knees so that I looked down at her, and stuttered, "Well, I just wanted--". I stopped, looked deeply into her questioning face, and then put my arms around her and placed my head on her chest, just below her breasts, and hugged her.

She asked, surprised, "This is what you wanted?"

I nodded against her.

I felt her fingers at my temple, stroking my hair. "That's all you wanted?"

I nodded. "Just for a while."

She stroked my hair for another moment and then said, "Wait a minute, lemme get my shoes off." I lifted and she reached down to pull off her loafers and said, "You too, hon." I removed my tennis shoes as she stretched lengthwise on the sofa and reclined along and against the backrest. She held her arms up to me. She said, "Come here. Let's cuddle."

I lay half on top of her, and she curled up closer to me and held me with my face in her neck as stroked my back and my hair.

She said after a while, "I think I'll like this place. It's so nice looking out the windows at the trees. It's the first comfortable dump I've seen since I started school."

"I like the breeze in the leaves," I said.

"Yes."

We talked, not moving, then rested silent for a while. Then we talked.

I did not tell her much about myself. I was uncertain about what was happening to me or who I had become. She talked about her mother and how her mom's health had gradually improved after being courted and spoiled for years by her boyfriend, Mr. Buchanan. He owned an office supply house and did well financially and had a beautiful home in East Memphis. Martha Jane said she didn't like the man very much. He was nice, very generous with his time and money and his displays of affection. And patient; he had now spent some years waiting for Martha Jane's mom to get over her fears of disappointment and her feelings of inadequacy about her ill health. But Mr. Buchanan was old fashioned, very "Memphis" and close-minded about women. He adored her mom, but the only virtues he could see in any female were subservience and physical beauty. He gently but constantly urged her successful sister Evelyn to quit her job and find a husband. He had respect for, but meager agreement with, Martha Jane's independence or her liberal politics. He felt that a woman's place was in the home rearing babies and baking turkeys. He had helped Martha Jane in small ways financially with her schooling, but he wanted to marry her mom and he wanted Martha Jane and Evelyn to live in his home and not in their own apartments; he wanted them to stay in his home until they were cured of their career ambitions and could get themselves married and "raise a family in the proper way."

"There is no way for me to talk to him," Martha Jane said, still stroking my hair. "He agrees in word, and then disagrees in action by not supporting anything I do or believe. And if he tells me one more time how pretty I am, I think I might get very angry and do or say something stupid that I'll regret and that he probably doesn't deserve. He's been very good to my mother -- and my mother, unfortunately, agrees with him. I wouldn't want to mess it up for her."

We fell silent for several minutes. We listened to the wind filter listlessly through the trees.

She said, "You haven't talked much."

I shook my head no.

"Is there anything you want to tell me?"

Again, I shook my head no.

"Hon, that light over there on the table is in my eyes. Can you turn it off?"

I rose and turned off the only lamp in the room. I stood there until our eyes became accustomed to the dim moonlight and the faint glow from the light in the kitchen.

From the sofa, she looked up at me with two small points of light in her dark eyes. "I'm sorry I'm incapacitated."

I shrugged. "I wasn't even thinking about it. I just wanted to spend an afternoon doing whatever it is you usually do."

She grinned. "Really?"

"Really."

"Come here and lie down."

I went to the sofa expecting to lay with her as before, but she stood up and motioned for me to lie where she had been. "Go ahead, hon."

I lay down lengthwise and face up, my head against the end armrest. She knelt on the floor beside me with her head onto my chest. "It was getting a little cramped the other way."