Listening to Billie by Alice Adams Page B

said, “I’m really sorry.”
    “You know, I ordinarily don’t spend much time with secretaries.” Was that his notion of the
coup de grâce?
    “So I understand.” Eliza was unable not to say this.
    An iced pause. And then the real
coup de grače
: “Well, you actually won’t fall into that category much longer. The grant that supports your job runs out next month. The other two—uh—ladies will stay on, of course.”
    Was that true? Could she now be free of jobs, collecting unemployment money? As she hung up, Eliza was breathless with the possibility.
    And having said that she was going to walk through Chinatown, that was what she did, in the heat, in the bedraggled remnants of the New Year celebration.
    She walked down Vallejo Street to Columbus, and then right, toward Broadway; hurried across to Grant Avenue, to Chinatown. There the old ladies, clutching tattered shopping bags, walked sideways on their ruined feet past the cheap bright Western-style stores and the Chinese markets that displayed exotic vegetables and fish and barbecued chickens and duck. Thin dark young Oriental men, dressed in black business suits for the holiday, sauntered along the street, and almond-eyedchildren darted in and out of alleys, while firecrackers spurted like machine guns. The gutters were littered with sodden bright confetti.
    Back in her own house, an hour or so later, Eliza was tired, but some of the day’s earlier trouble had drained or evaporated from her mind. With a cup of tea she sat comfortably at her kitchen table, savoring the rare luxury of no thoughts at all.
    And then the phone rang. And because it could be Catherine saying something about when she was coming home—saying anything—for the third time that day Eliza answered the ring.
    It was a friend from college, Peggy Kennerlie, inviting her to a party in Belvedere, some weeks off. Eliza accepted, out of habit, and then wondered why: she was tired of both the Kennerlies; she had been tired of Kennerlie parties for years. Maybe she wouldn’t go.
    She began to see this series of calls as some form of punishment—or possibly a test?
    Another call. An unmistakable soft voice said, “Hey, Eliza, this is Miriam. How’re you doing?”
    “Oh, I’m fine. Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, real okay.” She laughed, her rich rounded laughter that meant affection for Eliza, and that also signaled that she was high, on God knows what. “Say, Eliza, do you know the last name of Lawry? Kathleen’s Lawry?”
    “Lawry? No, I don’t.”
    “Well, it’s got to be the one. He call me, say he seen me, say could I meet him for a drink.”
    “Christ, Miriam. Kathleen would kill you.”
    “You right, and anyway I’m not about to meet him for a drink. I don’t drink!” And she laughed again, prolonged, and
high.
    •  •  •
    Eliza’s last phone call was from Daria, calling from New York, to say that she was pregnant. “Two months, a baby next August—it could come on your birthday! Eliza, isn’t that fantastic! I can’t believe it. I’ve always wanted—we’d like a dozen children, Smith and I. Eliza, isn’t it
great?
”

7 / Miriam
    Tall and beautiful, stoop-shouldered, Miriam shuffled across the hard bare neglected yard of the Project, in the morning, on her way to work. She was wearing tight new black shoes and a big brown coat. Even though the coat hid most of her body, she still stooped—she always had; and she walked with her head lowered, through the bunches of skinny little kids on their way to school, with their books and funny little bags of lunch.
    She was hungry; quarreling at breakfast with her mother, her stomach had closed up and she couldn’t eat. Her mother was light-skinned and had dyed her hair blond, and she was mean. Her mother said Miriam was mean: “The blacker the meaner. You just like your father, just exactly. Sulking. Black and mean.” Maybe she was mean, but just because she got a raise at work was she supposed to make payments on