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PART II
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS

57A

“NOW, SUGAR,” TREY began one afternoon while Marina washed the breakfast dishes, “I hope you don’t mind having lessons in the summer, but I got you a tutor, just like I promised.”

Marina looked over her shoulder. “You did? I mean, no, I don’t mind.”

“Good, because I’ve got plans for you.”

Her brow wrinkled. It wasn’t like him to plan things out for her. “Like what?”

“Like getting you into law school.”

That was so unexpected, Marina thought she might upchuck.

“You’re looking a little peaked. Are you all right?”

“Law school?” she whimpered. “Me?”

“Oh, sure, and I don’t want to hear anything about you’re a woman. Some of the smartest people I know are women. For damn sure my girls are.”

“Trey, it’s not— I mean, lily pads are one thing, but— I mean, I’m not that smart.”

He huffed. “You have lawyered me into corners so neatly I feel like it would be a crime to keep you at home cooking and cleaning for the rest of your life.”

“But I trip over my tongue all the time and, and, and I can never think of what I want to say and, um, I’m doing it right now even.”

“That is true,” he said sagely, “but that can be fixed. When you’re passionate about something, though, you shine. So,” he went on without waiting for her to respond, “his name’s Carville. He’ll be here Wednesday, about four. He starts teaching at East High this fall, but his summer job’s at Ready-Mix, so this’d be after work. He’s just out of college, so twenty-one or thereabouts, not married so he doesn’t have anybody to scurry home to, and not much older than you so you won’t feel like he’s your daddy or something, where you’ll be scared if you got a wrong answer. I told him maybe you’d give him dinner depending on how long your session went. Two, three hours maybe? Up to him.” He paused. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked with uncertainty. “Making him dinner, I mean?”

“Um, no. No,” she said vaguely, unable to shift her thinking that fast. Law school?!

“I’m going to lean hard on the school district to let you go back to school senior year, or if you don’t want to—”

“No,” she said quickly. “I would be a laughingstock.”

“Okay, then, to give you a high school diploma. There’s got to be a way, and if there isn’t, I’ll make them figure one out if you met all the requirements or could pass a college entrance exam. Or something. Haven’t thought it all through yet. Meantime, you can start in on getting into college because I’m positive you’d make a crackerjack lawyer. You don’t even need to go to college for that. Just take a test.”

Marina felt a little faint, so overtaken with … something …

“He’s a math teacher, so I figured, we’d get all of one thing out of the way then go on to the next topic. I interviewed a whole bunch and made sure—well, as close as I could tell—to hire somebody who could teach you the way you learn best.”

She was now so dizzy she clutched the edge of the sink to keep from falling over.

“Marina?” He was suddenly behind her, wrapping his arm around her shoulder and guiding her to a chair. “Good God, woman! You look like you did at our wedding,” he said, his voice far away. The refrigerator door opened and shut. Now the cupboard. “Like you’re going to upchuck any second now.” That was exactly how she felt. “Thought you were past that morning sickness.” He pulled the other chair to her and sat to feed her the way he had the day after their wedding. “Macaroons,” he crooned. “NuGrape.”

NuGrape. She loved NuGrape. She took the bottle and sipped, then took a bite of the macaroon he offered her. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Sugar, you have to take care of my little prince or princess,” he teased lightly. “Even if you don’t have a care for you, I do.”

She was still full from breakfast, but the macaroons and NuGrape were so comforting, she let him feed her anyway. She needed time to gather herself and her wits.

“So what do you think?”

“I thought … I thought you wanted to be the lawyer? How can I— I’m going to have a baby and then maybe more and— Only women like Dot go to college and they don’t become lawyers.”

“You wouldn’t know this but there’s a female judge sitting in municipal court.”

Marina gasped. “A judge?!”

“And I think you deserve a place on that bench someday.”

“But—”

“I don’t care what other people generally do. I care about what you can do. And my people, but I hire smart folks straight off and I pay them to do their jobs well. I was not going to marry a dumb girl, Marina. I told you that. I keep telling you that.”

“But what if I don’t like it?” she cried desperately.

“Being good at it and liking it are two different things. If you don’t like it, I won’t make you, but I think you’ll eat it right up once you get some confidence. Sugar, if you can make a dress from looking at a picture, I am absolutely convinced you could do anything.”

*  *  *

Marina stared at the dress critically, which made Dot even more fidgety than she already was. There were very few things that made Dot nervous, but doing things she knew her mother wouldn’t approve of was one of them.

With Marina’s newfound freedom, Dot had a lot more freedom too. For some reason, Sister Albright thought Marina was less likely to get into trouble now than she had been before she met Trey, which was not at all.

So here they were at Harzfeld’s and Dot was trying on a dress she had been coveting since they saw it while shopping for Marina’s wedding dress. Sister Albright had sneered at it and told Dot if she ever came home with something that immodest, she’d get her hide tanned.

It was a dress straight off an Erté print: long, body-hugging, sleeveless. It was a rich green, which turned Dot from a looker into a movie star, but it was sequin-and-bead-covered chiffon and the lining was beige, which gave the illusion of being able to see all the wearer’s private parts. Worst of all, it had no back at all.

“Marina,” Dot whined.

“This was your idea,” Marina said, then twirled her finger to make Dot turn around. “How is that staying on?” she whispered, feeling the sleeve binding, the binding of the back edges all the way down to the top of Dot’s bottom, and finding nothing special in its construction. “There is no back! But it’s staying on! It can’t be your curves because you don’t have any. How?”

“Marina!”

“You act like she’s going to walk in and catch you.”

“She might!” she squeaked. “You never know when she’s going to want a new dress. Buy this one so we can go. You can take it apart and see how it’s done.”

“I am not spending three months’ house money on a dress when I can look at something and know how it’s made.”

“Except you can’t with this one.”

Marina twitched her mouth. That was true. She still couldn’t bring herself to spend four hundred fifty dollars on a dress she intended to take apart. “I’ll look in the pattern book,” she finally decided, but doubted it would be there.

With that, Dot darted back into the changing room. Marina sighed. She’d like to be able to wear that dress and look like a million bucks like Dot, but it would never work on her. She was too short, too pudgy, too … pregnant. Besides, she didn’t like the idea of showing her whole back all the way down to the top of her bottom.

“You’re not very good at being bad,” Marina noted once they were on their way to Kresge’s.

“I know,” Dot said with disgust. “All that flapper business of Mama’s, and then I can’t even— Ugh!”

“Do you want to be a flapper?”

“I want to be able to playact!”

“Oh.”

“So, um … ” Dot began once they got their sodas and onion rings. Marina had been eating supper at Kresge’s a lot because there was no one at home to cook for and it was almost cheaper when Marina couldn’t eat all the food she’d bought before it went bad. “Have you and Trey, um … done … the thing?”

“No,” Marina said without embarrassment. If she had, then she’d be embarrassed.

“It’s been a month.”

“But I don’t want to and Trey doesn’t want me to, so we don’t.”

Dot harrumphed. Marina had already explained the conundrum Trey had set upon himself. “I bet he has someone for that, like your father. Grandfather. The reverend.”

Marina’s mouth tightened a little. It wasn’t the first time Dot had said it. In fact, she said it more and more frequently for the same reason Trey bad-mouthed Dot: she was jealous. Marina was almost tired of trying to balance them, but she did like that she was the object of jealousy.

“But don’t you want to find out? If he is, then you don’t have to worry about it.”

“That’s true,” Marina acceded, as she always did. “But I wouldn’t like it.”

“But—”

“Dot, why do you want me to hate my husband?”

“I don’t want you to hate him!” she protested. “I don’t hate him. I just want to know—”

“Then go down to the speak and look!” Marina burst out. “He said I mayn’t, but he didn’t say you couldn’t!”

Marina expected Dot to be shocked, but when she saw the cal­culating look on Dot’s face, she realized that was exactly what she wanted to do.

“You wouldn’t be able to do it,” Marina said with a roll of her eyes. “You couldn’t even try on a dress without practically upchucking from shame.”

“It’s pretty,” Dot pouted.

“Yes, and I’m going to figure out how to make it so it stays on.”

“Mm. What about it? Go to the speak with me?”

“No! Trey is nice to me and gives me everything I want and has asked me to respect two wishes. One of them is to not go to the speak. Oh, you know what he did this morning?” Marina told her about the tutor.

“What?! But that would mean I would never get to see you!”

“You could come over and be tutored too. You’d be so far ahead of your classes you could maybe test out and get a jump on college!” Now Marina was getting excited. If both of them were—

“I don’t want to go to school in the summertime! I want to run around with you when I’m not helping Daddy. After all, you don’t even get out of bed until after noon.”

“It’s just six hours a week!” Marina protested. “Two hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, maybe dinner—”

“Hold your horses, sister! You’re going to be alone with a man younger than Trey over six hours a week in your house? Having dinner with him?”

Marina blinked. “Well, yes. I’m married now. I’m a Missus.”

“That’s not the point and there are people who don’t pay attention to Missuses. Look at your father—grandfather. What if he’s the type of man to force himself on you? What if he gets a crush on you? What if—”

“Augh! Nobody is going to get a crush on me.”

“Trey has one.”

57A

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