Read Online Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Kent Haruf
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reached that brief moment of physical perfection. The baby fat was gone, her strawberry blonde hair grew long and full to her shoulders, and now each morning when she walked to work at the phone company she wore nylon hose and heels and a nice skirt and blouse. Consequently it was at about this time that some of the men in town began to make it a point to be drinking coffee at the front tables at the Holt Cafe so they could stare out the windows and watch her walk across Main Street. The men hoped that a sudden gust of wind would rise and lift her skirt to reveal more of her legs, or that a sudden breeze would come up and blow her skirt tighter against her thighs. Failing these, they were there every morning anyway, to watch her mount the curb when she reached the other side of the street. For she was something to see. But she was still a very nice girl, still entirely innocent and guileless, and she herself cared only about seeing Jack Burdette.
When she had begun to earn money as a secretary after she had graduated from high school, she had moved out of her mother’s home and had rented a tiny one-bedroom house of her own. It was over there on Chicago Street on the east side of town where there are mainly small one-story frame houses painted white and yellow and sometimes pink, with little gray slap-sided toolsheds in back along the alleys and vacant lots between the houses, with here and there an old wheelbarrow or an old car, a DeSoto or a Nash Rambler, say, rusting on blocks among the pigweed and redroot under the stunted elms. She worked steadily, efficiently, at the telephone office every day, and she kept her little house clean, mowed the lawn on summer evenings, shoveled the snow off the walks in winter, and for two years while Jack was gone she composed letters to him, following him from El Paso to San Francisco and then to Germany, all by mail, by letters—letters which Jack himself only rarely answered and then only to allow, as he would, I suppose, that he was in California now or that he had arrived in Germany, or perhaps (and this is more likely, knowing Jack) simply to complain that he had lost his weekend pass for some minor infraction of military rules and so had nothing better to do with his time than to scribble her a brief note on Army paper while he waited for the other men to come back so he could begin to play cards again.
But finally in the winter he had returned to Holt once more and it was all right again. Or perhaps for Wanda Jo it was better than all right, since for the next eight years she continued to go out with him, believing all that time that he would marry her yet.
Well, it was an abject kind of love. And it took many forms. But clean socks was at least one of them.
I think it must have been a matter of barter to Wanda Jo, a kind of romantic transaction. It was as if she believed that washing his socks and laundering his shirts was not only the obvious and logical progression from making crib sheets for him when they were in high school, but that now doing his laundry each week was also the fair means of exchange for the privilege of going out with him on Saturday nights. Because for eight years, Jack would park his car in front of her house on Chicago Street, on those Saturday nights, and then he would get out and saunter up to her house and under his arm he would carry to her front door a brown paper bag—a bag which would never contain roses or carnations or even a handful of daisies but which instead would always be stuffed to overflowing with another week’s accumulation of his dirty clothes, his dirty socks and his greasy shirts. Then Wanda Jo would open the door to him and take that paper bag from his hands. It was as if she thought he’d brought her a gift, a present, a romantic offering, as though she believed he’d given her something which was actually valuable and considerate. And of course in return she’d have something to give him too; she’d hand him that other
When she had begun to earn money as a secretary after she had graduated from high school, she had moved out of her mother’s home and had rented a tiny one-bedroom house of her own. It was over there on Chicago Street on the east side of town where there are mainly small one-story frame houses painted white and yellow and sometimes pink, with little gray slap-sided toolsheds in back along the alleys and vacant lots between the houses, with here and there an old wheelbarrow or an old car, a DeSoto or a Nash Rambler, say, rusting on blocks among the pigweed and redroot under the stunted elms. She worked steadily, efficiently, at the telephone office every day, and she kept her little house clean, mowed the lawn on summer evenings, shoveled the snow off the walks in winter, and for two years while Jack was gone she composed letters to him, following him from El Paso to San Francisco and then to Germany, all by mail, by letters—letters which Jack himself only rarely answered and then only to allow, as he would, I suppose, that he was in California now or that he had arrived in Germany, or perhaps (and this is more likely, knowing Jack) simply to complain that he had lost his weekend pass for some minor infraction of military rules and so had nothing better to do with his time than to scribble her a brief note on Army paper while he waited for the other men to come back so he could begin to play cards again.
But finally in the winter he had returned to Holt once more and it was all right again. Or perhaps for Wanda Jo it was better than all right, since for the next eight years she continued to go out with him, believing all that time that he would marry her yet.
Well, it was an abject kind of love. And it took many forms. But clean socks was at least one of them.
I think it must have been a matter of barter to Wanda Jo, a kind of romantic transaction. It was as if she believed that washing his socks and laundering his shirts was not only the obvious and logical progression from making crib sheets for him when they were in high school, but that now doing his laundry each week was also the fair means of exchange for the privilege of going out with him on Saturday nights. Because for eight years, Jack would park his car in front of her house on Chicago Street, on those Saturday nights, and then he would get out and saunter up to her house and under his arm he would carry to her front door a brown paper bag—a bag which would never contain roses or carnations or even a handful of daisies but which instead would always be stuffed to overflowing with another week’s accumulation of his dirty clothes, his dirty socks and his greasy shirts. Then Wanda Jo would open the door to him and take that paper bag from his hands. It was as if she thought he’d brought her a gift, a present, a romantic offering, as though she believed he’d given her something which was actually valuable and considerate. And of course in return she’d have something to give him too; she’d hand him that other
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