The O'Briens by Peter Behrens

her face, dressed, and walked to Windward Avenue, where she placed an order at the Italian grocery. Ice was sold at the feed and grain store and she ordered a block delivered. The man at the telephone company office said she certainly could have a ’phone: lines were up along all the canals. She bought soap at the drugstore and stamps at the post office and mailed her note. The post office was only a short way from the real estate office. She could have stopped in under some pretext and might have seen Joe O’Brien, but she wanted him to come to her.
    When she reached home her groceries were waiting in two crates on the kitchen floor. A block of ice feathered with sawdust had been settled in the icebox. It took her most of an hour to put away her groceries, deciding just where things ought to go. It was satisfying, managing by herself.
    For the rest of the day she roamed from room to room. It wasn’t restlessness exactly. She felt happy, almost too satisfied to be still. The empty house and the calm space was exactly what she needed. For dinner she heated a can of tomato soup and crumbled a cracker into it. For dessert she ate half of a big, tasteless California pear.
    She slept in her blanket nest on the floor and woke late. There was no fog. She made coffee and walked through the rooms holding a steaming cup, still pleased with the emptiness and the morning light in each room. She did not leave the house or even dress. Late in the afternoon she filled the bathtub and lay in it with light and air wafting in the open window. Feeling sleepy, she touched her floating breasts and tried to imagine carrying and delivering a baby. It seemed impossible, but plenty of people had done it, even in her family.
    She didn’t know yet what she was going to do. She wanted to just be for a while. To collect herself. Much of her life had just been a refraction of her parents’ desires and needs. She wanted light, and time to think — if that was what one called the business of living in one’s mind and instincts, with nothing else for company. More an animal than a person: that was what she wanted to be for a while.
    But animals need heat. She started to wonder why Joe O’Brien had not called on her as promised. After all, his brother had described him as “a gentleman of leisure.” She felt a cut of anxiety. Perhaps he had left already for Mexico.
    She had no claim on him, only that he’d promised to call.
    She stepped out of her bath, dressed quickly, and began straightening her empty rooms again. That she might never see him again was troubling. How sensitive and intelligent he had seemed, with his blackness and those quick blue eyes. He had listened so carefully, but after mulling over what she said maybe he’d dismissed it as girlish and silly and decided to have no more to do with her.
    But he had probed her thoughts. Listened to her. And she’d felt her body exercising some radiant power over his — she hadn’t admitted that to herself until now, but it was true. She’d felt it. She made up her blanket bed and began cleaning her kitchen, scouring the sink, washing down countertops, throwing out orange peel, coffee grounds, and empty soup tins. She couldn’t stop. She went from room to room, dusting every window ledge, breathing sharp, shallow breaths, her heart pounding. After an hour the house was perfectly orderly and clean, but still it did not satisfy, and she did not know what more she could do. Then she remembered Cordelia in Pasadena, washing windows every couple of weeks.
    Lifting Joe O’Brien’s white roses from their bucket, she breathed in their fragrance. Then she put them in the bathroom sink and filled the bucket with a solution of vinegar and water and began cleaning windows, starting in the kitchen and working her way through every room. They didn’t seem very dirty at first, but the slanting afternoon sunlight began detailing every smear. No