Tarrant’s streets were full on a hot Saturday evening. Jeanine and Milton each paid for their own tickets to the Lyric Theater to see Bringing Up Baby, where large overhead fans sucked out the stale air. It made Jeanine feel as if her hair was standing on end. The Movietone News shorts zoomed over a globe that looked as if it were made of plaster but the audience sat and ate popcorn and were entranced with the illusion of being in outer space and regarding their home planet at a distance. Then the newsreel brought them back to earth. There was Mussolini in a uniform and high boots and then the prime minister of Finland. They both seemed of equal importance simply because they were walking and talking through the grainy atmosphere of newsreel films. Then sports. People like Babe Didrikson and Lou Gehrig did not seem to have any stories about them, Jeanine thought; they were sort of human sporting goods.
Dust sifted beneath the double doors and past the concession stand and then drained down the carpeted aisles and settled at the edge of the proscenium. Amelia Earhart had disappeared in the Pacific and the search had finally been given up. King George was perfectly happy now that his weak and silly brother was married to an American divorcée, and the newest bathing suits were demonstrated on a California beach. Jeanine never saw moving pictures from one month to the next and so was completely absorbed. Milton watched her and laughed when she was so moved by the opening scene of Bringing Up Baby that she paused with popcorn halfway to her open mouth to watch Cary Grant, the paleontologist, fit bones onto a brontosaurus skeleton. Katharine Hepburn was impossibly bold and outspoken. Jeanine sank down in her seat in seizures of laughter. She clutched her red-and-white-striped box of popcorn with both hands. Other people in the theater were calling out Hey shut it up and Pipe down.
“They snatched m-m-my idea,” said Milton. “Dinosaur skeletons! J-jeanine, they are thieves, shameless thieves!”
“What dinosaur idea?”
“You and I st-standing in the Fairy dinosaur tracks, hunting d-d-down the leaping tyrannosaurus…”
Their voices were loud and people called out, Pipe down, hey, go outside!
Jeanine whispered, “Into a lost world, I get to wear a kind of suede bathing suit and a rock necklace. You wear one of those jungle hats.”
“Yes, yes!”
And at the end Katharine Hepburn, who was a society girl, and Cary Grant, who was a paleontologist, fell in love after one day of insanity, and leopards, and being jailed. It seemed perfectly logical. Jeanine was completely caught up in the hypnotic sequences, the beautiful interiors. It seized her mind.
They walked out onto Main Street, and as they stood on the curb all the streetlights came on. People on the sidewalks glanced up into the electric glare and then went on in the warm night air, as if they were people on a stage set. The Movietone News and the soft brilliance of the black-and-white film dazed her and she could not shift her mind away from it. Tarrant’s main street seemed like some kind of background to Jeanine, a street full of people hired to wander around, to dance to a jukebox in the drugstore across the street, an empty wagon coming down the street, driven by an actor posing as a tired man who had sold all his produce at the Saturday farmers’ market. So was she, she was some kind of a body in a crowd scene. She was to stay all night with Betty and go to the MacComber House the next day for volunteer work with the Red Cross. Now she and Betty were going to act in some movie scene about aspiring secretaries who roomed together and traded lipsticks.
She took hold of his shirtsleeve. “I feel like an extra, Milton,” she said. “Help me, help me, my mind is stuck in that movie.”
He stood back and blinked at her from behind his thick glasses. “I see. Well, Jenny, the way you can tell if you’re an extra or not is if they p-p-pay you.” He grasped her hand and strode on down the street. They were to go to his apartment over the shoe store and see his radio. He said it was not as seductive as going up to see his etchings but his radio appealed to the mind and not the sweaty, lugubrious body. Milton led her through the crowded street. It still seemed to her they were all people on a stage or a movie set, speaking dialogue. They went up some back stairs in the alley behind the shoe shop and he suggested that he and she escape the fictional world of Tarrant, Texas, the picturesque but desiccated cattle herds of Palo Pinto County, the starving cotton farmers in their costumes of rags, and go to the big city. He said he was smitten with her, devastated, his heart was being crushed like foil in her small, elegant hands and she said for him to give it a rest but she laughed and held his arm.
His apartment was one room with a bathroom over the shoe store, next to Betty’s little room. Long panels of typewritten pages were pasted to the walls. Wires came through the window and fed themselves into the back of a huge radio. His clothes, what there were of them, were flung over a cot and a pair of shoes turned up with socks spilling out of them, as if they were crawling out and about to begin speaking in tongues. In the corner was a wooden crate of cabbages and potatoes. An icebox dripped. The hot night air poured in through the open window.
He pulled out a chair for her. “I get free ice,” he said. “I get free milk and formal wear from the f-f-funeral home, and fifteen dollars a week. These riches can all be yours if you pledge your troth to mine.”
“What’s a troth?” said Jeanine.
“They bear l-l-live young and lurk under bridges.” He then turned to the big Philco console radio and held his hand out to it. “Jeanine, this is Philco console radio. Philco, this is Jeanine Stoddard.”
“Charmed,” she said. “Crushed, devastated. Slaughtered.” She sat down and crossed her feet at the ankles.
“I sold the family cow for that thing. L-1-look, Jeanine.” He turned the fan toward her and the long strips of newspaper copy fluttered. He gestured out the window. She got up and came to lean out the window frame beside him. “I’ve strung antenna wire in a hu-u-u-u-uge c-circle, from the top of the saddle store to the peanut-shelling outfit, warehouse, whatever the hell they call it, to the harness-making place and b-b-back here. I can get anywhere, I can get goddamned Mars.” He turned the radio on. A glow appeared from behind its fabric front panel. “It’s on KMOX, St. Louis,” he said. “Listen. NBC.” He sang along with the tones; bong, bong, bong. The announcer’s voice came on. In twenty minutes we will have a report from H. V. Kaltenborn. Kaltenborn has spent the last eight days in Munich reporting on these momentous events, barely taking time to eat or sleep. Milton sat down in a chair beside her and his hair seemed to spike up in yet wilder shocks of internal electricity, his excitement made his glasses sparkle. “J-Jeanine, Jenny, come to Chicago with me. This is a proposal. We could guh-get married. Lots of people get married. You and I could marry one another, shamelessly, openly. Scandalize everybody.”
“Stop it,” said Jeanine, but she was laughing. “I like where I am.”
“But then we would move back! I promise. Little boys on the st-street would say ‘That’s Jeanine and Milton, used to live in Chi-Chicago!’” He jumped up. Big-band music came through the speaker. “But this is the modern world, Jeanine. Modern! Moving forward, p-pretty soon nobody will be from anywhere. Archaic ties. Ancient tribal deadwood.” He turned down the volume. “I have a favorite d-d-dish, here, saved it just for you.” She bent forward in the chair to watch him unscrew a jar of preserved blackberries, fling them in a dish, crush two peppermint candy canes with a hammer and sweep the crushings into the bowl. Then he took an ice pick and hewed mightily at a block of ice in the icebox and threw in cool, glittering pieces.
They bent over the single bowl with two spoons on his scarred and rickety table while the fan blasted them with hot air.
“You propose to everybody,” said Jeanine. She reached for a dishtowel and wiped her lips.
“No, n-no,” he said. “Just two or three in the past month. A m-month has fled past me during which t-time I have proposed nothin’ to nobody, not nohow.” He bent forward and kissed her. His breath was fragrant with mint and blackberries. “If I could ever get over my stutter I would duh-drop all this cynicism. It’s flat and shallow isn’t it? It’s the fashion.” He dipped into the bowl again. “Just through these copper wires, imagine, the voice and, uh, words have more power and import than they ever have in human history.” He waved his spoon. Jeanine stopped eating the mint and blackberries and listened. “Never has the human language been so imp-p-portant and that’s because far away things are now reaching out t-t-t-to us, we aren’t protected anymore here behind the Continental shelf. We can saturate people with words. They believe them. It’s lovely. I want to do that. Come with me to Chicago, Jenny. Sweet Jenny.”
“You’re going to some school for elocution,” she said. “In Chicago.”
He nodded and put one hand to his mouth, briefly. “Learn to speak at will. You don’t know…” He paused and his eyes had a watery brightness. “What a weight it is. Like every w-w-word is weighted or ch-chained.” He took up a triangular piece of ice in the bowl of his spoon. “I have a talent, Jeanine. A g-gift, and it is languishing in chains. So unfair!” He breathed out a long breath and swallowed. “It’s so unfair. And I don’t know why.” He wiped his forehead and then became himself again. “We could make p-plans,” he said. “Plots. I like plotting better than p-planning.”
“You don’t have any money, Milton,” she said. “Are you going to go to school in Chicago on cabbages?”
“Wait and see,” he said. “Juuu-just wait.” He spooned up the last bite, deep purple berries and syrup and bits of candy cane, and put it to her lips and she swallowed it. “Move in town,” he said. “B-b-beautiful Jeanine, of the gray eyes. Town is b-better. Even your cousin has running water. Even I have running water. Why not?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “If I said I just loved being out there, would that sound crazy?”
“Yes. Everybody wants to get off the d-d-damn farm, Jeanine.”
They sat together on his cot and listened to Kaltenborn’s report from Munich. Jeanine closed her eyes and lay back with Milton’s arm over her shoulder. They were trading countries with one another, chopping off pieces here and there and handing them around. She thought about moving into town. And then to a bigger town, the excitement of Chicago or St. Louis. They were all moving someplace else anyway, weren’t they? This thought made her heart constrict, briefly, and an image came into her mind of the old house empty once again. She could hear the sound of a T &P freight going through Tarrant, such a small place in the middle of Central Texas with the power plant on the Leon River and the farm and ranch stores, the town swimming pool and the doctor with his cactus growing in the front yard and the hotel where oil leases were sold and marriages betrayed, the rodeo grounds swirling with dust. And beyond the electric lights, the dark hills. Radio waves passed through all these things and were invisible as speech. The Tolliver house and the town of Tarrant suddenly seemed unimportant and common. Jeanine found herself in an anxious dream, walking behind several black-and-white people who were dressed in glossy stylish clothes; she was saying something that nobody was listening to. They would not listen to her. She and Milton were slumped against each other and sound asleep when Betty hammered on the door, yelling for them to wake up.
JEANINE WADDED HERSELF up on Betty’s couch in a nightgown. Betty’s face was hot and sweaty, she twisted up her hair and said she’d been smooching with Si, and then they got into an argument, right there in the China Moon dance palace, and then they made up and the smooching went on unabated until she tore herself away and ran up the stairs to find Jeanine and Milton asleep and the big Philco radio blasting out Hawaiian dance music. Betty was covered in a yellow nightgown as big as a parachute. Her dark Stoddard hair snarled up in a tangle of pin curls. Lights from a passing car washed across the ceiling and the music of a radio from somewhere down at street level came to them. Betty frowned at her fingernails. She reached for an emery board on her nightstand. “Come on, Jeanine, go to work somewhere in Fort Worth. You could get a good job somewhere. Buy some nice clothes, you could be a receptionist. You could go to work in a flower shop or Montgomery Ward. There’s decent jobs around.”
“I couldn’t stand it,” said Jeanine. The thought of dressing up every day and living in a town and hurrying to please people was enough to freeze her blood. She could never manage to please people and especially not for five dollars a week. “I like to dress in rags and make chicken coops. I’m my own boss.”
Betty didn’t laugh. “Get a dull stupid job,” she said. “Like me. And go out dancing or something in the evenings. Ross Everett is very serious about you.” Betty got up and poked in her little cupboard and found a waxed-paper sleeve of Saltines and jumped back in her bed and threw some to Jeanine. “Ross’d just love you in a playsuit. Can’t you just picture yourself spraying cows with tick dip and wearing a playsuit?” They ate Saltines and scattered crumbs on the sheets.
“I like being at our place. I don’t want a playsuit. Why doesn’t anybody listen to me?” Jeanine found she had dribbled cracker crumbs into the neck of her nightgown and she tried to slap them away. “Why am I eating these things?”
“And now Milton Brown, you buy yourself a satin dress for dancing in, and those little open-toed numbers I showed you, and he’s a dead man. Dead. Just get a job for a while and buy yourself some nice clothes, Jeanine. It ain’t forever.” Betty sighed with a big Ooof sound. She was exhausted from all the arguing and smooching with Si. “You’re seeing two different men! Now that’s what I call a social life. You got to nail down Milton, though. That’s the kind of guy he is. You got to nail his shoes to the floor.”
“You’re not listening to me, Betty. This is like a nightmare.” Jeanine stared out the window. Then sleep nearly overcame her. She lifted her head and searched in her straw purse for her handkerchief and blew her nose. “When you talk and people don’t hear anything you say.”
“Si keeps wanting to get married,” Betty said. “But I’m having too much fun right now. I ain’t ready for kids and housework.” Betty watched another car crawl by on the street below. “And we’re going to have some oil well money coming in.”
“Betty, there ain’t going to be any oil well money.”
“Yes there is. That well is going to come in.”
“Come in what? Sour gas and salt water probably.”
“Mama says it’s good.”
“Good for what?” Jeanine yawned until tears ran, and then flopped back on the pillow.
“She says it’s going to come in, girl.” Betty stared out the window into the faintly lit night of the small town. Then her eyes slid shut. “Going to be high-gravity and under pressure.”
“You tell me how you know that,” said Jeanine. “But you ain’t going to answer, you’re going to sleep.”
“No I am not, I’m just checking my eyelids for holes.”
In a minute Betty fell into a light snoring. Jeanine thrashed around on the narrow couch and could not sleep; she looked out into the street where trees bent like hair, brushed by the wind that had come up out of the southeast as if there might be a hurricane down in the Gulf, as if this wind might reach all the way to Palo Pinto County bearing rain. Jeanine thought that if she lived in a big city it would no longer matter if it rained or not.