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Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you.

— Katherine Anne Porter, Letters of Katherine Anne Porter

 

Chapter 1

This is not my bedroom.

Where am I? Gasping and pulling unfamiliar bedcovers up to my chin, I strain to collect my senses. But no explanation for my whereabouts comes to mind.

The last thing I remember, it was Wednesday evening and I was painting my bedroom a bright, saturated yellow. Frieda, who had offered to help, was appraising my color choice. “Too much sunniness for a bedroom,” she pronounced, in that Miss Know-It-All tone of hers. “How will you ever sleep in on gloomy days with a room like this?”

I dipped my brush into the paint can, carefully wiped off the excess, and climbed the stepladder. “That’s entirely the point,” I told Frieda. Leaning over, I began cutting along a tall, narrow window frame.

Oughtn’t I to remember what happened next? Oddly, I do not. I cannot recall spending the evening painting, then standing back to admire our work before we cleaned up. I have no memory of thanking Frieda for her help and bidding her good- bye. I don’t remember going to sleep in the sun- colored room, the sharp smell of fresh paint filling my nostrils. But I must have done those things, because here I lie. And given that here is not my home, evidently I am still asleep.

Nonetheless, this is not my typical sort of dream. My nighttime forays tend toward the fantastical, toward dreams that place one outside of conventional time and space. This, I have concluded, is because I read so much. Have you read Something Wicked This Way Comes? It just hit the stands this past June, but is anticipated to be one of the best- selling books of 1962. Ray Bradbury is splendidly readable; I press the novel on everyone who steps into Frieda’s and my bookstore looking for something “really gripping.”

“It will haunt your dreams,” I assure such customers. A self-fulfilling prophecy: the night before last, I dreamed I was stumbling behind Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, the two young protagonists of Bradbury’s book, as they were enticed by the middle-of-the-night arrival of the carnival in Green Town. I was trying to persuade them to proceed with caution—but they, being thirteen- year- old boys, simply ignored me. I remember how difficult it was to keep up with them, how I could not get my feet to operate correctly. Will and Jim moved farther away in the shadows, their shapes turning into dark dots and then finally to nothing, and all I could do was blubber in frustration.

So you see, I am not the type of woman who dreams about something as straightforward as waking up in another person’s bedroom.

This dream bedroom is quite a bit larger and swankier than my actual bedroom. The walls are sage green, nothing like the deep yellow I chose for home. The furniture is a matched set, sleek and modern. The bedspread is neatly folded at the foot of the bed; soft, coordinating linens encase my body. It’s delightful, in a too-put-together sort of way.

I slide under the covers and shut my eyes. Surely, if I keep my eyes closed, soon I will find myself hunting whales in the South Pacific, dressed rather grubbily and swilling whiskey with the mateys on my ship. Or I’ll be flying high over Las Vegas, the wind blowing my hair back against my face, my arms transformed into enormous wings.

But nothing of the sort happens. Instead, I hear a man’s voice. “Wake up. Katharyn, love, wake up.”

I open my eyes and look into the deepest, bluest eyes I have ever seen.

And then I close my own again.

I feel a hand on my shoulder, which is nude, save for the thin strap of my satin nightgown. It’s been a good long while since any man has touched me intimately. But some feelings are unmistakable, no matter how infrequently one experiences them.

I know I should be terrified. That would be the appropriate response, would it not? Even if one is asleep, one should be horrified to sense an unfamiliar man’s hand placed on one’s bare flesh.

Yet, curiously, I find this imaginary fellow’s touch utterly enjoyable. The clasp is gentle but firm, the fingers curled around my upper arm, the thumb gently caressing my skin. I keep my eyes closed, enjoying the sensation.

“Katharyn. Please, love. I’m sorry to wake you, but Missy’s forehead feels warm . . . she wants you. Please, you need to get up.”

Eyes shut, I consider this information. I wonder who Missy is, and why her warm forehead should be any concern of mine.

In that rambling way in which events occur in dreams, my thoughts are replaced with the lyrics to a song that was popular on the radio a few years ago. I can hear the melody, though I’m sure I don’t have the words right—Rosemary Clooney sang the tune, and it was something about having stars in one’s eyes. Something about not letting love turn one into a fool. The idea makes me smile; clearly, I am being about as foolish here as one could possibly be.

I open my eyes and sit up in bed, instantly remorseful that this position shift causes the blue-eyed man to remove his warm hand from my shoulder.

“Who are you?” I ask him. “Where am I?”

He returns my quizzical look. “Katharyn, are you okay?”

 

For the record, my name is not Katharyn. It’s Kitty.

All right—it really is Katharyn. But I’ve never cared for my given name. It’s always felt too formal. Kath-a-ryn doesn’t roll off the tongue, the way Kitty does. And since my parents bestowed on me an unusual spelling of an otherwise ordinary name, I find it tiresome having to clarify whenever I am asked to spell it.

“I think I’m okay,” I tell Blue Eyes. “But really, I have no idea who you are or where I am. I’m sorry.”

He smiles, and those handsome peepers twinkle. Other than the eyes, he is fairly ordinary-looking. Medium height, medium build, a slight love handle around the middle. Thinning russet hair that is starting to go a bit gray. I’d put his age at around forty, a few years older than me. I inhale, noticing a woodsy, soapy scent about him, as if he recently finished shaving and showering. He smells delectable, and I feel my heart skip a beat. Good heavens, could this dream get any more absurd?

“You must have been in some deep sleep, love,” he says. “You know who I am. I’m your husband. You’re in our bedroom, at our house.” He sweeps his arm around the room, as if to prove his case. “And right now, our daughter—whose name is Missy, by the way, in case you’ve forgotten—is likely running a fever, and she needs her mother.”

He holds out a hand to me. As if on instinct, I slip mine into his.

“Okay?” he begs. “Please, Katharyn.”

I furrow my brow. “I’m sorry, you said you are . . .”

He sighs. “Your husband, Katharyn. I’m your husband, Lars.”

Lars? What a peculiar name. I cannot think of a single person I’ve ever met called Lars. I half smile, thinking about my oh-so-imaginative brain. It couldn’t just invoke a Harry or an Ed or a Bill. No, ma’am, my mind has fabricated a husband named Lars.

“All right,” I say. “Just give me a moment.”

He squeezes my hand and releases it, then leans over to kiss my cheek. “I’ll take her temp while we’re waiting for you.” He rises and leaves the room.

Once again, I close my eyes. Now the dream will shift, surely.

But when I open my eyes, I’m still there. Still in the green bedroom.

I see no alternative, so I get up and cross the room. With its clerestory windows above the bed, its sliding glass door that looks as though it leads to some sort of patio, and its large, adjacent bathroom, I deduce that this room, were it real, would be part of a rather modern residence. More modern—and presumably bigger—than the one- bedroom, 1920s-era duplex that I rent in the Platt Park neighborhood of Denver.

I peek into the bathroom. The fixtures are light green, shiny and chrome- accessorized. The long vanity has two sinks and a gold-flecked white Formica counter. The vanity is composed of blond wood cabinets that gently taper downward and inward toward the wall, such that the vanity is deeper at the countertop level than it is near the floor. The tiled floor is a fresh mosaic of mint green, pink, and white. I have no idea if I’m in Denver anymore, but if so, this certainly is not old-time Platt Park, where nothing new has been built since before the war.

Examining myself in the mirror over the dresser, I half expect to see some entirely different person—who knows who this Katharyn is? But I look exactly like myself. Short, buxom, with exasperating strawberry-blond hair that cowlicks itself over my forehead and frizzes everywhere else, no matter how often I go in for a wash-and-set. I put my fingers through it, noting that on the ring finger of my left hand are a sparkling diamond and a wide gold wedding band. Well, naturally, I think. And how optimistic of my brain to have invented a husband who can afford a nice-size rock.

Foraging in the closet, I find a navy-blue quilted bathrobe that fits me perfectly. Belting it around my waist, I enter the hallway, on my way to find the oddly named Lars and his unwell child Missy.

On the wall directly in front of me, clearly positioned so that it can be seen from inside the bedroom, is a large color photograph. It shows a mountain scene: the sun sunk over the horizon, the peaks backlit with pink and gold tones. Ponderosa pines rise the length of the photograph on the left- hand side. I’ve lived in Colorado my entire life, but I have no idea where this is, or even if it’s the Rocky Mountains.

I’m trying to decode this mystery when I am tackled around the waist on my right side. I struggle to regain my balance and keep from falling over backward.

“Ouch!” I say as I turn around. “Don’t do that. Remember to support yourself entirely. You are too big now to lean on other people and expect them to hold you up.”

What in the world? Who is this woman saying these things? It can’t be me. These words don’t sound like anything I’d ever say, or even think.

Looking up at me is a small boy. He’s got Lars’s piercing blue eyes and a neat, short haircut that nevertheless can’t hide a reddish-blond cowlick over his brow. His peaches-and-cream face is scrubbed clean. He looks like he could be in an advertisement for milk or Popsicles. Yes, he’s that cute, and I find that my heart melts a bit, looking at him.

He releases me and says he’s sorry. “I just missed you, Mama,” he says. “I haven’t seen you since yesterday.”

I am speechless. Then, reminding myself that I am, after all, asleep, I smile at the boy. I lean down and give his shoulder a squeeze. I’m just going along with this dream now. Why not? So far, this is a pleasant enough place to be.

“Take me to your father and Missy,” I say, grabbing the child’s soft, plump hand.

 

We walk down the hall and go up a half flight of stairs. At the top is a girl’s bedroom, with carnation-pink walls, a little white wooden bed, and a low bookcase filled with picture books and stuffed animals. Sitting upright in the bed is an equally angelic child, a female version of the boy who holds my hand. Her expression is forlorn and her cheeks are flushed. She is about the same size as the boy. I am terrible at deciphering children’s ages, but I’d guess they are around five or six. Twins?

“Mama’s here!” Cherub Boy says, climbing onto the bed. “Missy, Mama’s here and you’re going to be fine.”

Missy whimpers. I sit next to her and touch her forehead, which feels distressingly warm under my hand. “What hurts?” I ask her gently.

She leans toward me. “Everything, Mama,” she says. “My head especially.”

“Did Daddy take your temp?” I can’t believe how easily these words, these motherly actions, are coming to me. I feel like an old pro.

“Yeah, he’s washing the ther-mon-eter.”

“Thermometer,” Cherub Boy corrects her. “It’s a ther-MOM-eter. Not a ther-MON-eter.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Mind your own beeswax, Mitch.”

Lars appears in the doorway. “One hundred one-point-six,” he reports.

I am unsure what that means. Oh, I know it means her temperature is 101.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But I do not know what it means in terms of medication, bed rest, staying home from school.

Because I do not have children. I am not a mother.

 

I don’t mean to imply that I never wanted children. Quite the contrary. I was one of those little girls who loved baby dolls, who fed them pretend bottles and changed their pretend diapers and pushed them around in a tiny doll-size pram. An only child, I begged my parents for a sibling—not because I wanted to be a big sister, but because I wanted to be a little mother to somebody.

For a long time I thought I’d marry Kevin, my steady during college. He left for the Pacific theater in ’43, along with just about every other young man who hadn’t already gone. I remained faithful to him—girls in those days did that, remained faithful. Kevin and I exchanged letter after letter. I sent him care packages of cookies, socks, shaving soap. In my sorority house, we stuck thumbtacks on a map of the South Pacific, marking our soldier boys’ progress. “It’s hard to wait, but it will be worth it when they’re home,” we girls told each other. We sobbed into our hankies when we got word that someone’s fellow wasn’t coming back. But we also sent a little silent prayer of gratitude to heaven that it wasn’t our fellow, not this time.

Much to my relief, Kevin returned from the war intact and seemingly unchanged, eager to resume his studies as a premed student and attain his goal of becoming a doctor. We continued dating, but he never did pop the question. We were invited to wedding after wedding, where everyone asked when it would be our turn. “Oh, you know, someday!” I’d say, my tone overly gay and nonchalant. Kevin simply changed the subject whenever it came up.

Year after year passed. Kevin finished medical school and began his residency; I worked as a fifth-grade teacher. But as far as our relationship went, one year was as static as the next. Finally I knew I could no longer put off an ultimatum. I told Kevin that unless he wanted to make our relationship permanent, I was through.

He sighed heavily. “That’s probably for the best,” he said. His good-bye kiss was brief, perfunctory. Not a year later, I heard he’d married a nurse from the hospital where he worked.

 

Well, clearly, in this dream world, none of that—those wasted years, Kevin’s callous rejection—matters at all. In this world, I landed myself a winner somewhere along the line. Good for you, Kitty, I can hear my Delta Zeta sisters congratulating me. Good for you.

The thought strikes me as absurd, and I stifle a laugh. Then I put my hand to my mouth, mortified. This is a dream; nonetheless, there is a sick child here. I ought to behave appropriately. I ought to be suitably, maternally troubled.

I look up from Missy’s bed, and my eyes meet Lars’s. He’s staring at me with admiration and—could I be reading this correctly?—desire in his eyes. Do married people truly look at each other this way? Even in the middle of a kid-has-a-fever crisis?

“What do you say?” Lars asks me. “You always know what to do when these things happen, Katharyn.”

Do I? How interesting this dream is. I glance out the window at what appears to be a winter morning, the windowpane frosty and snow falling lightly.

And then, suddenly, though I cannot explain it, I do know exactly what to do. I rise and walk across the hall to the bathroom. I know precisely where on the medicine cabinet shelf I will find the tiny plastic bottle of St. Joseph’s Aspirin for Children. I pull a paper cup from the dispenser attached to the wall and run a bit of cool water into it. Opening the bathroom’s linen closet, I remove a facecloth, hold it under cold water, and squeeze it out.

Walking purposefully, I carry the medicine bottle, facecloth, and cup to Missy’s room. I apply the cloth to her forehead, gently pressing it against her warm skin. I hand her two aspirin tablets; these she swallows dutifully, using the water to chase them down. She smiles gratefully at me and leans back against her pillow.

“Let’s let her rest now.” I settle Missy under the covers and fetch several picture books from her shelf. She begins paging through Madeline’s Rescue—a volume in that delightful children’s series by Ludwig Bemelmans about a Parisian boarding school student named Madeline and her eleven classmates—the house covered in vines, the girls in two straight lines. Missy’s fingers trace the words on each page as she sounds them out in a whispery, throaty voice.

Lars comes forward and takes my hand. We smile together at our daughter, and with our adorable son beside us, we quietly leave the room.

 

But then, as suddenly as it happened, the dream is over.

My bedside alarm clock is ringing sharply. I reach over, eyes shut, and press down hard on the button that stops the alarm. I open my eyes, and the room is yellow. I am home.

 

 

Chapter 2

Goodness,” I say to myself. “That was quite the dream.” Stiffly, I sit up in bed. Aslan, my yellow-hued tabby, is curled up next to me, purring softly with his eyes half closed. I named him after the lion in C. S. Lewis’s novel The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—an extraordinary book, especially if one adores children’s fantasy stories. I read each Narnia novel as it came out, and I’ve read the entire series at least half a dozen times since.

I look around my bedroom. The windows are bare, stripped of their curtains and shades. Masking tape still frames the woodwork. My bed and nightstand are the only pieces of furniture in the room; before I began painting yesterday, Frieda and I moved the bureau and hope chest to the living room, to make space and keep splatters off the furniture. The room smells of paint, but the color is extraordinary—it’s the exact color of the sun on a bright day. It’s just what I’d hoped for. With a satisfied smile, I rise and don my robe, padding across the newspaper-covered floor.

Heading to the kitchen to make coffee, I stop to switch on the radio that sits on one of several scratched, tag-sale bookshelves that line my living room, overflowing with books and journals. I twist the knob to turn up the volume and tune the dial to KIMN. They’re playing “Sherry” by the Four Seasons, which I’ve been hearing constantly on the radio this week—I’d put money on it topping the Billboard chart this weekend.

I place my percolator under the kitchen faucet and fill it with water, then pull a can of Eight O’Clock Coffee from an upper cabinet and begin measuring it into the stainless-steel top chamber of the percolator.

“. . . Out tonight . . .” I sing along under my breath as the song on the radio fades away.

“And now here’s an oldie but a goodie,” the disc jockey says. “Does anyone out there remember this one?”

As the next song begins, my hand freezes, my fingertips holding the coffee scoop and hovering midair over the percolator. Rosemary Clooney’s voice fills my small duplex.

“Now that’s just plain eerie,” I say to Aslan, who has wandered in to check whether his morning dish of milk has been set on the floor yet. I finish pouring the coffee and switch the percolator to On.

The song—I remember now that it’s titled “Hey There”—dates back at least seven or eight years. I don’t remember the exact year it was so popular, but I do remember humming it often in those days. I haven’t thought about that song in ages. Not until I heard it playing in my head, in my dream last night.

I recall my dream man’s eyes, piercing and blue, like the water in a postcard from some exotic locale. I remember thinking that I ought to have been frightened, but I was not. Did I look at him with stars in my eyes? I suspect one could say I did.

Well, but how could I help it? The way his eyes gazed into mine. He looked at me as if I were everything to him. As if I were his whole world.

That, to me, was without a doubt exotic. No one, not even Kevin, has ever looked at me like that.

And the way Lars spoke! Katharyn, love, wake up. You must have been in some deep sleep, love. You always know what to do, Katharyn.

No one, here in the real world, says such things to me. And certainly no one addresses me as Katharyn.

There was a brief period, some years ago, when I toyed with calling myself Katharyn. This was right around the time when Frieda and I opened our bookstore. With a new career and a new decade of life—I’d turned thirty a few months prior—I felt it was time for a sea change. Despite my general dislike of the unwieldy Katharyn, I could think of no better way to bring about a grand change of character than to alter my name. Perhaps, I mused, I needed only to get used to it.

And so I charged forward. I had personal stationery printed with the name “Katharyn Miller” on it. I asked Frieda and my other friends to call me Katharyn. I said my name was Katharyn when introducing myself to customers, to the other shopkeepers who we were just getting to know on our little block of stores on Pearl Street. I even asked my parents to use my given name—which they, albeit reluctantly, did. They have always been overindulgent with me.

Frieda was not so easy to push over. “Kitty suits you,” she said. “Why change?”

I shrugged and said that perhaps it was simply time to grow up.

I even used that name when introducing myself to potential suitors. It felt good, a fresh start. A chance to be someone new. Someone a bit more sophisticated, a bit more experienced.

Nothing happened with any of those fellows—a random first date here and there, but no second ones. Apparently, changing my name was not going to automatically change my persona, the way I’d hoped it might.

A few months later I placed the remaining “Katharyn Miller” stationery in the dustbin and quietly went back to calling myself Kitty. No one commented.

 

I take my coffee to my desk, which faces my two living room windows. I open the curtains. Seated here, I can look out onto Washington Street. It’s a sunny, warm September day. The postman is coming down the street; I wave as he fills my mailbox and that of the Hansens, who own this duplex and live in the other half of it. After the postman leaves, I go outside to get my mail and my Rocky Mountain News morning paper.

Lars, Lars . . . I am still running the name over in my mind. Lars who?

And where have I heard that name before?

I go back inside, glancing at the newspaper headlines. President Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University yesterday, promising a man on the moon by the end of the decade. I’ll believe it when I see it. I cast the paper on my dining table, planning to read it over breakfast.

My mail contains only a few items. Besides several bills, there is an advertisement with a coupon for a free car wash—not that that would do me any good; I don’t even own a car—and a postcard from my mother.

 

Good morning, sweetheart,

I hope you have nice weather. It’s 85 degrees here and humid, but lovely, of course. There is nowhere lovelier on Earth, I assure you!

I want to remind you of our return date. We’ll take the overnight flight on October 31st. We’ll make a connection in Los Angeles and arrive in Denver on Thursday, November 1st.

We are having a wonderful time, but we can’t wait to be home and see the fall colors! And you, of course.

Love,

Mother

P.S. I am also eager to get back to the hospital; I miss the babies terribly. Wonder how many have been born since we left????

 

I smile at her note. My parents have been in Honolulu for the past three weeks and will be there for about five weeks more. It is a huge trip for them, the biggest they have ever taken away from Denver. Their fortieth wedding anniversary was this past June, and the trip is a celebration. My uncle Stanley is a chief petty officer at the Pearl Harbor naval base. My parents have been staying with Uncle Stanley and Aunt May in their apartment off-base, in Honolulu.

This trip is a wonderful event for them, the experience of a lifetime, but I could see why they—especially my mother—wouldn’t want to be away from home any longer than two months. My mother is committed to her work in the Unwell Infants Ward at Denver General; she has been volunteering there for almost as long as I can remember. (“The oldest candy-striper on the planet,” she cheerfully calls herself.) My dad worked for the Colorado Public Service Company for years, assembling electrical meters for homes; he took early retirement last year, at age sixty. Dad spends his time puttering around the house, reading, and going golfing with his cronies twice a week, even in the winter, as long as there is no snow on the ground.

I think back to the dream, and how it was snowing when I looked out the window in the girl’s bedroom. Missy? Is that the name? Yes, snow was falling outside the window in Missy’s room. I wonder that I can remember such a detail from a dream, that my mind can create entire snowscapes for my viewing pleasure while I am asleep.

I smile at the memory of the view inside the room, as well: those two darling children, and the man with the beautiful eyes.

Finishing my coffee, I file Mother’s latest postcard in a manila folder, nestling it with the others I have received—at least three or four a week. I keep the folder on my desk beside a framed photograph of my parents.

I rise and go draw myself a bath. Nice as that dream life was, I need to get on with my own, very real day now.

 

I walk to our bookshop on Pearl Street. It’s only a few blocks. Frieda walks from her home, too, and sometimes we meet on the way. Today, however, I am alone as I turn the corner onto Pearl. For a moment I stand still, taking in the quiet, the desolation. There is not another soul about. No automobiles pass my way. The drugstore is open; I can see their neon sign lit up in the left- hand window. The sandwich shop, too. I know from experience that throughout the course of the morning, perhaps a handful of passersby will stop in there for coffee or a salami on rye to go. But only a handful.

It was not always this way.

When Frieda and I first opened Sisters’ Bookshop in the fall of 1954, we thought this the perfect location. Back then, we got the streetcar traffic from the Broadway line, which veered onto Pearl. We’re just down the block from the Vogue Theater, and we made sure to stay open in the evenings when a feature was playing, to cater to the before-and-after movie crowd. We saw a lot of evening customers in those days; people loved to browse our bookstore at night, no doubt hoping to meet a mysterious beauty or handsome stranger among the stacks.

Things are much more iffy now. The Broadway line has been shut down—all of the streetcar lines have been shut down, replaced with buses. The new bus line does not run down Pearl Street, so we don’t get that traffic anymore. The Vogue still shows films, but they don’t draw the crowds that they did years ago. People simply don’t shop and amuse themselves on our block and in other small commercial areas like ours, not the way they used to in bygone years. They get in their cars and drive to the new shopping centers on the outskirts of town.

We’ve been talking about that, Frieda and I. What to do about it. Ought we to close down, get out of this business entirely? Ought we to—as Frieda suggested years ago, and I held back—close down this location and open in one of the shopping centers? Or ought we to just maintain the status quo, believing that if we stick with it, why then, things will surely turn around? I don’t know, and neither does Frieda. It’s a daily topic of conversation.

What I’ve learned, what we’ve both learned over the years, is that nothing is as permanent as it appears at the start.

 

Before we opened our store, I’d worked as a fifth- grade teacher, a job that I told myself I was crazy for. I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I would silently chant to myself each morning as I bicycled from my parents’ home, where I still lived, to my school a few miles away.

How could I not love it? I’d ask myself. After all, I adored children, and I adored books and learning. What sort of person would I be, then, if I did not, logically, also love to teach?

But standing at the chalkboard in front of a large class of ten-year-olds made me as nervous as a novice musician who had somehow faked her way into performing in an overflowing concert hall. Small and alone, seated at the grand piano under the spotlight, that phony musician would realize too late that the moment she struck a key, she wasn’t going to hoodwink anybody.

That is how I felt, standing there in my classroom. My palms would sweat, and my voice would become too quick and high-pitched; often a student would ask me to repeat something. “Miss Miller, I didn’t catch that,” one would say, and then they all would take it up: Me, neither. Nor did I, Miss Miller. What did you say, Miss Miller? I felt that I was a joke to them. But not a good joke, not one that I was in on, too.

Every year I had a few standouts—thank goodness for the standouts—those students who could learn in any environment, students who were smart and adaptable and quick to grasp concepts all on their own, without much help from me. But such pupils were few and far between.

And then there were the parents. Oh, the parents.

I remember one particularly awful morning toward the end of my teaching career. Mrs. Vincent, whose daughter Sheila had just received a D in history on her midterm report card, stormed into my classroom before the first bell. She waved Sheila’s report card angrily. Sheila trailed behind her mother.

“What is the meaning of this grade, Miss Miller?” Mrs. Vincent demanded. “Sheila tells me that you don’t even study history in your class!”

“Of course we do,” I replied, trying to keep my voice steady. Crossly, I bit my lip; why should I have to defend something so obvious? “We’ve been learning about the Civil War all term.”

“The Civil War? The Civil War? What possible use does a young girl have for something as prehistoric as the Civil War?”

The question was so absurd, I could not even come up with an answer. Sheila stood smugly next to her mother, dark eyes challenging mine. I wanted to slap her. I knew I never would, but the impulse was so strong, I had to put my hands firmly at my sides to control myself.

“That is the curriculum,” I said. “That is what I am asked to cover, ma’am.” I walked to the classroom doorway as the bell rang, ready to greet my other students. “I am just following the curriculum.”

Mrs. Vincent smirked. “Well, that’s creative, isn’t it?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she whirled around and left the room.

I was a wreck; honestly, it took me weeks to get over that one. Over time, I began to blame myself. Yes, I was just doing my job. But if my students couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn—why then, I was at fault. Learning had come so easily to me over the years; I assumed therefore that it would be easy to teach others. I didn’t know how to fix things when that turned out to be untrue.

During those same years Frieda, who had been my best friend since high school, worked in an advertising firm. It was demanding but glamorous work, and she was good at it. Her firm’s accounts were mostly local businesses, but many of them were sizable companies—the Gates Corporation, Russell Stover Candies, Joslins Department Store. She went to parties and grand opening events. She wore gorgeous evening gowns, which she would model for me beforehand, to see what I thought. I always thought they were fabulous.

On the surface, Frieda seemed to be having a fine time. But when she and I were alone, comfortable on the weekend in dungarees, low-heeled shoes, and sweaters, she’d confess that it was all too much, it was all a sham. It made her feel, she said, as if she were acting in a play. “Acting is fun once in a while,” she said. “But it’s tiresome to do it all day, every day.”

Frieda and I talked a lot about our situations. How much she hated the phoniness of her work. My fear that I was failing at the one thing I had thought I’d be good at.

“What would a different life be like?” she asked me one Sunday afternoon toward the end of March 1954, as we took a walk in my new neighborhood. I had moved out of my parents’ house the month before—approaching my thirties, I’d felt that it was time for me to be out on my own, so I had leased an apartment in Platt Park. My new place was not far from the school where I taught; it was also less than a ten-minute walk to the small house that Frieda had purchased two years earlier. It was a typical Denver spring—as usual, we’d had more snowstorms in March than in any other month. That year, as in most years, the storms were generally followed by several warm, sunny days, during which the snow melted into puddles and new grass poked up in muddy yards. The day before, we’d had one of these characteristic late-season snowfalls—but that Sunday, as Frieda and I took our stroll, it was clear and bright, with temperatures in the fifties.

Frieda watched heavy droplets of melting snow fall from a nearby house’s eaves. She turned back to me and asked, “What if the work we did was gratifying?”

“What if I didn’t end most days in tears?” My mind felt open, alive, as I considered the possibilities.

Frieda nodded slowly. “Indeed, sister,” she replied. “Indeed.”

Finally we decided that it was time to stop dreaming and start living our dreams. We raided our savings accounts, borrowed from our parents, and got a business loan. As single women, we had to have a man cosign our loan; fortunately, Frieda’s father was agreeable. Thus Sisters’ was born.

I remember our elation when we opened the store. At last, we were doing what we wanted to do with our lives. We would have a thriving business that we co- owned; we would make our own choices and determine our own fates. From here on out, no one—parents, bosses, not to mention a horde of contrary ten-year-olds and their mothers—would have a hand in determining who Frieda and I were going to be. Nobody would decide that for us, nobody save for each other.

We’d both come through our twenties without marrying, something that no other girl we’d known in high school or college had done. Neither of us is perturbed by singlehood. The goal I once had to marry Kevin—that seems irrelevant now. It was the desire of a young woman—a girl, really. A girl I no longer am.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that being unmarried gives me—and Frieda, too—an element of freedom and quirkiness that other women our age do not have. It’s like being a singular necklace that might catch one’s eye in the jewelry section of a department store, the one strung with colorful, random beads, rather than the monotonous, expected strand of pearls.

Who needs men? Frieda and I ask each other. Who needs children? We smirk at our station- wagon- driving counterparts, feeling relief that we never fell into that trap.

It is not a life that either of us has wanted for a long, long time.

 

Our day is challenging, Frieda’s and mine. We have only two customers in the morning, each of whom purchases a copy of that new Bradbury novel—a rising star in our humble little line-up, that book. In the afternoon a few folks come in to browse, and several people ask if we have Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—the book, about the hazards of pesticides, was presented as a series of essays in the New Yorker earlier this year and will be published as an anthology later this month. Silent Spring is much anticipated in local literary circles, but unfortunately, we won’t receive copies from our distributor until the last week of September.

All day long, Frieda is edgy, irritable. Her mood rubs off on me, and I notice that my hands shake a lot, even though I’ve only had two cups of coffee today. Perhaps it is just the memory of the dream, which lingers in my mind.

“I need to get out of here,” Frieda tells me at four thirty. “I’ve had enough for one day. Will you close up?”

I nod and watch her leave. Outside the shop, she furiously lights a cigarette and stomps down the street.

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