Living Room Read Online Free Page A

this number?”
    It was her mother’s voice she heard leaning into her ear: Don’t be smart-ass.
    “What’d you think?” repeated Harry.
    Unfortunately the music came to a stop just as she said too loudly, “It’s aboriginal,” and the word lay there on the dance floor between Harry and herself, heard by others around him. Harry came up very close to her and she thought he might be suggesting they go off somewhere to talk.
    “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he said, turned his back, and walked off into the crowd.
    She wanted to yell after him, “I didn’t mean it that way,” but she found her bewildered way back in silence to the group of girls, unreduced in number.
    To Caroline, who had been watching Shirley, though the words exchanged on the dance floor had been inaudible, the scenario was clear. She took Shirley’s hand and stroked it.
    Shirley, reconstructing the last few minutes, thinking what she ought to have said, tried to invent a dialogue with a more pleasant outcome. Caroline had, by now, taken her arm, and Shirley suddenly became aware of the tenderness with which her hand was being held.
    Caroline put her lips to Shirley’s ear and said gently, “Never you mind.”
    Shirley felt alarm. Is this what being made love to was like? “What are you doing?”
    “Nothing,” said Caroline, letting her hands drop.
    Shirley, confused, knew one thing: it was not nothing.
    Although she had told her father she would be home at ten-thirty, she arrived home an hour earlier, let herself in with her key, and wanting a human being to talk to, and not finding him in the living room, quietly went to the door of his bedroom, tapping on it ever so lightly in the hope that if he had gone to sleep early, as he sometimes did, he would not hear, and otherwise he would come out and talk.
    “What is it?” said her father’s voice, a strange tremor in it.
    “It’s me,” said Shirley, carefully pushing the door open and seeing in the light from the hallway, not her father but Mrs. Bialek sitting up in bed, the blanket gathered up to her chin, her face a fury.
    Shirley said, “Where is he?” and only then noticed the hump under the bedclothes and realized her father was in the same bed, hiding.
    “I’m sorry,” said Shirley, her unsteady hand closing the door.
    *
    Now Mrs. Bialek, who never slept over because it would be an admission of culpability, remonstrated with Hartman for not having a lock on the bedroom door.
    “She was not coming back till ten-thirty!”
    Further lovemaking was useless. Though the last person either of them wanted to see was Shirley, they had no choice but to dress in silence. Afterward, they looked in the living room and kitchen and then in Shirley’s bedroom. She wasn’t anywhere in the house. By this time, it was very nearly ten-thirty, she couldn’t have gone back to the dance, she didn’t stay over at friends’ houses, she had no one close friend he could call, so Mr. Hartman put on his overcoat and went down into the street, expecting to find his waif sulking under a street lamp.
    She wasn’t anywhere that he looked. At midnight, he called the police and reported Shirley as a missing person.
    “Do you have a recent photograph?” the desk sergeant asked. How could he tell this policeman, a stranger, that he had no photograph of Shirley because it was Rosalie who had taken the snapshots until Shirley was seven, and none had been taken since. “Didn’t I describe her good?”
    “A photograph would be a big help.”
    Hartman’s chest felt like it was bursting, what could he say? “Will you send someone to look for her?”
    “We’ll send out a teletype.”
    “How will a teletype find her?” said Hartman in alarm.
    “I have to ask this question,” said the sergeant. “Is your girl on drugs?”
    “She’s thirteen years old!”
    “Please tell us if she’s on drugs.”
    In despair, Hartman hung up without a further word. Mrs. Bialek put her arms around his heaving