Beaches by Iris Rainer Dart

day Bertie told Sylvia she’d have to quit the job at the gallery. Michael came first.
    After that she went looking for other jobs. Flair, the lingerie shop in Shadyside, needed someone three weekdays and Saturdays, but Michael was home on Saturdays, at least in the mornings, and he wanted Bertie to be home on Saturdays, too. The Pittsburgh Playhouse had a job opening in their box office but the hours were four P.M. to ten P.M. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t find a job that was convenient for him.
    “Get a goddamned volunteer job,” he told her. “The little bit of cash you bring in doesn’t matter.” Bertie felt as
    if she’d been slapped. She’d been so proud of her checks from the Ellis Gallery.
    “Ahh, come on, Bert,” Michael said, noticing her look. “For God’s sake, you knew that.”
    Bertie had driven past the Home for Crippled Children many times, and just the name of the place made her sad. One morning at the corner of Northumberland Street, instead of taking a right to go to the market, she took a left into the parking lot of the Home. Something made her. A voice that said, Go on. You like children. Want to have dozens of your own. That’s what you always say about yourself. And you would, too, if you could only conceive. She hadn’t used her diaphragm in two years, and yet her period appeared every twenty-eight days like clockwork. And she was developing what she called a “niggling fear” that maybe she would never be pregnant. Oh, go on, Bert, the voice said. This is just what you’re looking for.
    The heels of her sandals tapped along the linoleum floor of the lobby, and she followed the sign with the arrow that said RECEPTION into a tiny office, where an older gray-haired woman wearing a nurse’s uniform looked up from her typing and over the eyeglasses which had slipped almost to the tip of her nose.
    “Yes?”
    “I’m Roberta Barren, and I live in the … I live down the …”
    Bertie was very nervous. It was as if she were about to ask the woman to give her something she needed badly, but didn’t deserve.
    “Do you, I mean, do you have a volunteer program here?”
    “Not officially,” the woman said, “but we can always use help.”
    On the following Monday, Bertie started work at the Home for Crippled Children. She went every Monday and Friday morning and stayed for a few hours. She had various duties, but her favorite job was reading stories to
    the younger children. She would push them in their wheel-chairs into a semicircle in the recreation room. Sometimes there would be five or six children, sometimes more, depending on how they were feeling that day. She would read to them from little Golden Books-Scuffy The Tugboat, The Little Engine That Could-and hold up the books so the children could see the pictures. Not one of the children looked the way Bertie thought a child was supposed to look, probably because their faces were so weary. She tried hard to read with a lot of expression, hoping that if she made the story exciting or funny she could elicit a childlike reaction from them. But rarely did they do anything other than listen quietly and nod when she asked if she was talking loud enough, or when she asked if they could see the pictures from where they were sitting.
    Carla was six years old, and she liked to stroke Bertie’s long brown hair. At first, it had made Bertie nervous, but when she saw that letting the child touch her hair made a tiny smile appear on Carla’s face, Bertie let her continue. One day she gave Carla a brush and let her happily run the bristles through her hair again and again.
    Just before she fell asleep one night, Bertie remembered a doll that Rosie had given her when she was Carla’s age. It was called a Toni doll, and it had hair that could be washed and curled and combed. Bertie remembered playing “beauty parlor” every day for weeks with the doll. Little girls like pretty hair.
    The next morning, Bertie telephoned every toy store