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Title: Big Blonde
Author: Parker, Dorothy (1893-1967)
Date of first publication: February 1929
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: The Bookman, February 1929
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 13 January 2018
Date last updated: 13 January 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1497

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






BIG BLONDE

By Dorothy Parker

Hazel Morse was a large, fair woman of the type that incites some men
when they use the word "blonde" to click their tongues and wag their
heads roguishly.  She prided herself upon her small feet and suffered
for her vanity, boxing them in snub-toed, high-heeled slippers of the
shortest bearable size.  The curious things about her were her hands,
strange terminations to the flabby, white arms splattered with pale tan
spots--long, quivering hands with deep and convex nails.  She should
not have disfigured them with little jewels.

She was not a woman given to recollections.  At her middle thirties,
her old days were a blurred and flickering sequence, an imperfect film,
dealing with the actions of strangers.

In her twenties, after the deferred death of a hazy widowed mother, she
had been employed as a model in a wholesale dress establishment--it was
still the day of the big woman, and she was then prettily colored and
erect and high-breasted.  Her job was not onerous, and she met numbers
of men and spent numbers of evenings with them, laughing at their jokes
and telling them she loved their neckties.  Men liked her, and she took
it for granted that the liking of many men was a desirable thing.
Popularity seemed to her to be worth all the work that had to be put
into its achievement.  Men liked you because you were fun, and when
they liked you they took you out, and there you were.  So, and
successfully, she was fun.  She was a good sport.  Men like a good
sport.

No other form of diversion, simpler or more complicated, drew her
attention.  She never pondered if she might not be better occupied
doing something else.  Her ideas, or, better, her acceptances, ran
right along with those of the other substantially built blondes in whom
she found her friends.

When she had been working in the dress establishment some years she met
Herbie Morse.  He was thin, quick, attractive, with shifting lines
about his shiny, brown eyes and a habit of fiercely biting at the skin
around his finger nails.  He drank largely; she found that
entertaining.  Her habitual greeting to him was an allusion to his
state of the previous night.

"Oh, what a peach you had," she used to say, through her easy laugh.
"I thought I'd die, the way you kept asking the waiter to dance with
you."

She liked him immediately upon their meeting.  She was enormously
amused at his fast, slurred sentences, his interpolations of apt
phrases from vaudeville acts and comic strips; she thrilled at the feel
of his lean arm tucked firm beneath the sleeve of her coat; she wanted
to touch the wet, flat surface of his hair.  He was as promptly drawn
to her.  They were married six weeks after they had met.

She was delighted at the idea of being a bride; coquetted with it,
played upon it.  Other offers of marriage she had had, and not a few of
them, but it happened that they were all from stout, serious men who
had visited the dress establishment as buyers; men from Des Moines and
Houston and Chicago and, in her phrase, even funnier places.  There was
always something immensely comic to her in the thought of living
elsewhere than New York.  She could not regard as serious proposals
that she share a western residence.

She wanted to be married.  She was nearing thirty now, and she did hot
take the years well.  She spread and softened, and her darkening hair
turned her to inexpert dabblings with peroxide.  There were times when
she had little flashes of fear about her job.  And she had had a couple
of thousand evenings of being a good sport among her male
acquaintances.  She had come to be more conscientious than spontaneous
about it.

Herbie earned enough, and they took a little apartment far uptown.
There was a Mission-furnished dining room with a hanging central light
globed in liver-colored glass; in the living-room were an "overstuffed
suite", a Boston fern and a reproduction of the Henner _Magdalene_ with
the red hair and the blue draperies; the bedroom was in gray enamel and
old rose, with Herbie's photograph on Hazel's dressing table and
Hazel's likeness on Herbie's chest of drawers.

She cooked--and she was a good cook--and marketed and chatted with the
delivery boys and the colored laundress.  She loved the flat, she loved
her life, she loved Herbie.  In the first months of their marriage, she
gave him all the passion she was ever to know.

She had not realized how tired she was.  It was a delight, a new game,
a holiday, to give up being a good sport.  If her head ached or her
arches throbbed, she complained piteously, babyishly.  If her mood was
quiet, she did not talk.  If tears came to her eyes, she let them fall.

She fell readily into the habit of tears during the first year of her
marriage.  Even in her good sport days, she had been known to weep
lavishly and disinterestedly on occasion.  Her behavior at the theatre
was a standing joke.  She could weep at anything in a play--tiny
garments, love both unrequited and mutual, seduction, purity, faithful
servitors, wedlock, the triangle.

"There goes Haze," her friends would say, watching her.  "She's off
again."

Wedded and relaxed, she poured her tears freely.  To her who had
laughed so much crying was delicious.  All sorrows became her sorrows;
she was Tenderness.  She would cry long and softly over newspaper
accounts of kidnapped babies, deserted wives, unemployed men, strayed
cats, heroic dogs.  Even when the paper was no longer before her, her
mind revolved upon these things and the drops slipped rhythmically over
her plump cheeks.

"Honestly," she would say to Herbie, "all the sadness there is in the
world when you stop to think about it!"

"Yeah," Herbie would say.

She missed nobody.  The old crowd, the people who had brought her and
Herbie together, dropped from their lives, lingeringly at first.  When
she thought of this at all, it was only to consider it fitting.  This
was marriage.  This was peace.

But the thing was that Herbie was not amused.

For a time, he had enjoyed being alone with her.  He found the
voluntary isolation novel and sweet.  Then it palled with a ferocious
suddenness.  It was as if one night, sitting with her in the
steam-heated living room, he would ask no more; and the next night he
was through and done with the whole thing.

He became annoyed by her misty melancholies.  At first, when he came
home to find her softly tired and moody, he kissed her neck and patted
her shoulder and begged her to tell her Herbie what was wrong.  She
loved that.  But time slid by, and he found that there was never
anything really, personally, the matter.

"Ah, for God's sake," he would say.  "Crabbing again.  All right, sit
here and crab your head off.  I'm going out."

And he would slam out of the flat and come back late and drunk.

She was completely bewildered by what happened to their marriage.
First they were lovers; and then, it seemed without transition, they
were enemies.  She never understood it.

There were longer and longer intervals between his leaving his office
and his arrival at the apartment.  She went through agonies of
picturing him run over and bleeding, dead and covered with a sheet.
Then she lost her fears for his safety and grew sullen and wounded.
When a person wanted to be with a person, he came as soon as possible.
She desperately wanted him to want to be with her; her own hours only
marked the time till he would come.  It was often nearly nine o'clock
before he came home to dinner.  Always he had had many drinks, and
their effect would die in him, leaving him loud and querulous and
bristling for affronts.

He was too nervous, he said, to sit and do nothing for an evening.  He
boasted, probably not in all truth, that he had never read a book in
his life.

"What am I expected to do--sit around this dump on my tail all night?"
he would ask, rhetorically.  And again he would slam out.

She did not know what to do.  She could not manage him.  She could not
meet him.

She fought him furiously.  A terrific domesticity had come upon her,
and she would bite and scratch to guard it.  She wanted what she called
"a nice home".  She wanted a sober, tender husband, prompt at dinner,
punctual at work.  She wanted sweet, comforting evenings.  The idea of
intimacy with other men was terrible to her; the thought that Herbie
might be seeking entertainment in other women set her frantic.

It seemed to her that almost everything she read--novels from the
drug-store lending library, magazine stories, women's pages in the
papers--dealt with wives who lost their husbands' love.  She could bear
those, at that, better than accounts of neat, companionable marriage
and living happily ever after.

She was frightened.  Several times when Herbie came home in the
evening, he found her determinedly dressed--she had had to alter those
of her clothes that were not new, to make them fasten--and rouged.

"Let's go wild to-night, what do you say?" she would hail him.  "A
person's got lots of time to hang around and do nothing when they're
dead."

So they would go out, to chop houses and the less expensive cabarets.
But it turned out badly.  She could no longer find amusement in
watching Herbie drink.  She could not laugh at his whimsicalities, she
was so tensely counting his indulgences.  And she was unable to keep
back her remonstrances--"Ah, come on, Herb, you've had enough, haven't
you?  You'll feel something terrible in the morning."

He would be immediately enraged.  All right, crab; crab, crab, crab,
that was all she ever did.  What a lousy sport _she_ was!  There would
be scenes, and one or the other of them would rise and stalk out in
fury.

She could not recall the definite day that she started drinking,
herself.  There was nothing separate about her days.  Like drops upon a
window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.  She had been married
six months; then a year; then three years.

She had never needed to drink, formerly.  She could sit for most of a
night at a table where the others were imbibing earnestly and never
droop in looks or spirits, nor be bored by the doings of those about
her.  If she took a cocktail, it was so unusual as to cause twenty
minutes or so of jocular comment.  But now anguish was in her.
Frequently, after a quarrel, Herbie would stay out for the night, and
she could not learn from him where the time had been spent.  Her heart
felt tight and sore in her breast, and her mind turned like an electric
fan.

She hated the taste of liquor.  Gin, plain or in mixtures, made her
promptly sick.  After experiment, she found that Scotch whiskey was
best for her.  She took it without water, because that was the quickest
way to its effect.

Herbie pressed it on her.  He was glad to see her drink.  They both
felt it might restore her high spirits, and their good times together
might again be possible.'

"'Atta girl," he would approve her.  "Let's see you get boiled, baby."

But it brought them no nearer.  When she drank with him, there would be
a little while of gaiety and then, strangely without beginning, they
would be in a wild quarrel.  They would wake in the morning not sure
what it had all been about, foggy as to what had been said and done,
but each deeply injured and bitterly resentful.  There would be days of
vengeful silence.

There had been a time when they had made up their quarrels, usually in
bed.  There would be kisses and little names and assurances of fresh
starts ... "Oh, it's going to be great now, Herb.  We'll have swell
times.  I was a crab.  I guess I must have been tired.  But
everything's going to be swell.  You'll see."

Now there were no gentle reconciliations.  They resumed friendly
relations only in the brief magnanimity caused by liquor, before more
liquor drew them into new battles.  The scenes became more violent.
There were shouted invectives and pushes, and times sharp slaps.  Once
she had a black eye.  Herbie was horrified next day at sight of it.  He
did not go to work; he followed her about, suggesting remedies and
heaping dark blame on himself.  But after they had had a few
drinks--"to pull themselves together"--she made so many wistful
references to her bruise that he shouted at her, and rushed out, and
was gone for two days.

Each time he left the place in a rage, he threatened never to come
back.  She did not believe him, nor did she consider separation.
Somewhere in her head or her heart was the lazy, nebulous hope that
things would change and she and Herbie settle suddenly into soothing
married life.  Here were her home, her furniture, her husband, her
station.  She summoned no alternatives.

She could no longer bustle and potter.  She had no more vicarious
tears; the hot drops she shed were for herself.  She walked ceaselessly
about the rooms, her thoughts running mechanically round and round
Herbie.  In those days began the hatred of being alone that she was
never to overcome.  You could be by yourself when things were all
right, but when you were blue you got the howling horrors.

She commenced drinking alone, little, short drinks all through the day.
It was only with Herbie that alcohol made her nervous and quick in
offence.  Alone, it blurred sharp things for her.  She lived in a haze
of it.  Her life took on a dream-like quality.  Nothing was astonishing.

A Mrs. Martin moved into the flat across the hall.  She was a great
blonde woman of forty, a promise in looks of what Mrs. Morse was to be.
They made acquaintance, quickly became inseparable.  Mrs. Morse spent
her days in the opposite apartment.  They drank together, to brace
themselves after the drinks of the nights before.

She never confided her troubles about Herbie to Mrs. Martin.  The
subject was too bewildering to her to find comfort in talk.  She let it
be assumed that her husband's business kept him much away.  It was not
regarded as important; husbands, as such, played but shadowy parts in
Mrs. Martin's circle.

Mrs. Martin had no visible spouse; you were left to decide for yourself
whether he was or was not dead.  She had an admirer, Joe, who came to
see her almost nightly.  Often he brought several friends with
him--"The Boys", they were called.  The Boys were big, red,
good-humored men, perhaps forty-five, perhaps fifty.  Mrs. Morse was
glad of invitations to join the parties--Herbie was scarcely ever at
home at night now.  If he did come home, she did not visit Mrs. Martin.
An evening alone with Herbie meant inevitably a quarrel, yet she would
stay with him.  There was always her thin and wordless idea that,
maybe, this night, things would begin to be all right.

The Boys brought plenty of liquor along with them whenever they came to
Mrs. Martin's.  Drinking with them, Mrs. Morse became lively and
good-natured and audacious.  She was quickly popular.  When she had
drunk enough to cloud her most recent battle with Herbie, she was
excited by their approbation.  Crab, was she?  Rotten sport, was she?
Well, there were some that thought different.

Ed was one of The Boys.  He lived in Utica--had "his own business"
there, was the awed report--but he came to New York almost every week.
He was married.  He showed Mrs. Morse the then current photographs of
Junior and Sister, and she praised them abundantly and sincerely.  Soon
it was accepted by the others that Ed was her particular friend.

He staked her when they all played poker; sat next her and occasionally
rubbed his knee against hers during the game.  She was rather lucky.
Frequently she went home with a twenty-dollar bill or a ten-dollar bill
or a handful of crumpled dollars.  She was glad of them.  Herbie was
getting, in her words, something awful about money.  To ask him for it
brought an instant row.

"What the hell do you do with it?" he would say.  "Shoot it all on
Scotch?"

"I try to run this house half-way decent," she would retort.  "Never
thought of that, did you?  Oh, no, his lordship couldn't be bothered
with that."

Again, she could not find a definite day, to fix the beginning of Ed's
proprietorship.  It became his custom to kiss her on the mouth when he
came in, as well as for farewell, and he gave her little quick kisses
of approval all through the evening.  She liked this rather more than
she disliked it.  She never thought of his kisses when she was not with
him.

He would run his hand lingeringly over her back and shoulders.

"Some dizzy blonde, eh?" he would say.  "Some doll."

One afternoon she came home from Mrs. Martin's to find Herbie in the
bedroom.  He had been away for several nights, evidently on a prolonged
drinking bout.  His face was gray, his hands jerked as if they were on
wires.  On the bed were two old suitcases, packed high.  Only her
photograph remained on his bureau, and the wide doors of his closet
disclosed nothing but coat-hangers.

"I'm blowing," he said.  "I'm through with the whole works.  I got a
job in Detroit."

She sat down on the edge of the bed.  She had drunk much the night
before, and the four Scotches she had had with Mrs. Martin had only
increased her fogginess.

"Good job?" she said.

"Oh, yeah," he said.  "Looks all right."

He closed a suitcase with difficulty, swearing at it in whispers.

"There's some dough in the bank," he said.  "The bank book's in your
top drawer.  You can have the furniture and stuff."

He looked at her, and his forehead twitched.

"God damn it, I'm through, I'm telling you," he cried.  "I'm through."

"All right, all right," she said.  "I heard you, didn't I?"

She saw him as if he were at one end of a caon and she at the other.
Her head was beginning to ache bumpingly, and her voice had a dreary,
tiresome tone.  She could not have raised it.

"Like a drink before you go?" she asked.

Again he looked at her, and a corner of his mouth jerked up.

"Cockeyed again for a change, aren't you?" he said.  "That's nice.
Sure, get a couple of shots, will you?"

She went to the pantry, mixed him a stiff highball, poured herself a
couple of inches of whiskey and drank it.  Then she gave herself
another portion and brought the glasses into the bedroom.  He had
strapped both suitcases and had put on his hat and overcoat.

He took his highball.

"Well," he said, and he gave a sudden, uncertain laugh.  "Here's mud in
your eye."

"Mud in your eye," she said.

They drank.  He put down his glass and took up the heavy suitcase.

"Got to get a train around six," he said.

She followed him down the hall.  There was a song, a song that Mrs.
Martin played doggedly on the phonograph, running loudly through her
mind.  She had never liked the thing.

  "Night and daytime,
  Always playtime.
  Ain't we got fun?"


At the door he put down the bags and faced her.

"Well," he said.  "Well, take care of yourself.  You'll be all right,
will you?"

"Oh, sure," she said.

He opened the door, then came back to her, holding out his hand.

"'Bye, Haze," he said.  "Good luck to you."

She took his hand and shook it.

"Pardon my wet glove," she said.

When the door had closed behind him, she went back to the pantry.

She was flushed and lively when she went in to Mrs. Martin's that
evening.  The Boys were there, Ed among them.  He was glad to be in
town, frisky and loud and full of jokes.  But she spoke quietly to him
for a minute.

"Herbie blew today," she said.  "Going to live out west."

"That so?" he said.  He looked at her and played with the fountain pen
clipped to his waistcoat pocket.

"Think he's gone for good, do you?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said.  "I know he is.  I know.  Yeah."

"You going to live on across the hall just the same?" he said.  "Know
what you're going to do?"

"Gee, I don't know," she said.  "I don't give much of a damn."

"Oh, come on, that's no way to talk," he told her.  "What you need--you
need a little snifter.  How about it?"

"Yeah," she said.  "Just straight."

She won forty-three dollars at poker.  When the game broke up, Ed took
her back to her apartment.

"Got a little kiss for me?" he asked.

He wrapped her in his big arms and kissed her violently.  She was
entirely passive.  He held her away and looked at her.

"Little tight, honey?" he asked, anxiously.  "Not going to be sick, are
you?"

"Me?" she said.  "I'm swell."



II

When Ed left in the morning, he took her photograph with him.  He said
he wanted her picture to look at, up in Utica.  "You can have that one
on the bureau," she said.

She put Herbie's picture in a drawer, out of her sight.  When she could
look at it, she meant to tear it up.  She was fairly successful in
keeping her mind from racing around him.  Whiskey slowed it for her.
She was almost peaceful, in her mist.

She accepted her relationship with Ed without question or enthusiasm.
When he was away, she seldom thought definitely of him.  He was good to
her; he gave her frequent presents and a regular allowance.  She was
even able to save.  She did not plan ahead of any day, but her wants
were few, and you might as well put money in the bank as have it lying
around.

When the lease of her apartment neared its end, it was Ed who suggested
moving.  His friendship with Mrs. Martin and Joe had become strained
over a dispute at poker; a feud was impending.

"Let's get the hell out of here," Ed said.  "What I want you to have is
a place near the Grand Central.  Make it easier for me."

So she took a little flat in the forties.  A colored maid came in every
day to clean and to make coffee for her--she was "through with that
housekeeping stuff", she said, and Ed, twenty years married to a
passionately domestic woman, admired this romantic uselessness and felt
doubly a man of the world in abetting it.

The coffee was all she had until she went out to dinner, but alcohol
kept her fat.  Prohibition she regarded only as a basis for jokes.  You
could always get all you wanted.  She was never noticeably drunk and
seldom nearly sober.  It required a larger daily allowance to keep her
misty-minded.  Too little, and she was achingly melancholy.

Ed brought her to Jimmy's.  He was proud, with the pride of the
transient who would be mistaken for a native, in his knowledge of
small, recent restaurants occupying the lower floors of shabby
brownstone houses; places where, upon mentioning the name of an habitu
friend, might be obtained strange whiskey and fresh gin in many of
their ramifications.  Jimmy's place was the favorite of his
acquaintances.

There, through Ed, Mrs. Morse met many men and women, formed quick
friendships.  The men often took her out when Ed was in Utica.  He was
proud of her popularity.

She fell into the habit of going to Jimmy's alone when she had no
engagement.  She was certain to meet some people she knew, and join
them.  It was a club for her friends, both men and women.

The women at Jimmy's looked remarkably alike, and this was curious,
for, through feuds, removals and opportunities of more profitable
contacts, the personnel of the group changed constantly.  Yet always
the newcomers resembled those whom they replaced.  They were all big
women and stout, broad of shoulder and abundantly breasted, with faces
thickly clothed in soft, high-colored flesh.  They laughed loud and
often, showing opaque and lustreless teeth like squares of crockery.
There was about them the health of the big, yet a slight, unwholesome
suggestion of stubborn preservation.  They might have been thirty-six
or forty-five or anywhere between.

They composed their titles of their own first names with their
husbands' surnames--Mrs. Florence Miller, Mrs. Vera Riley, Mrs. Lilian
Block.  This gave at the same time the solidity of marriage and the
glamour of freedom.  Yet only one or two were actually divorced.  Most
of them never referred to their dimmed spouses; some, a shorter time
separate, described them in terms of great biological interest.
Several were mothers, each of an only child--a boy at school somewhere,
or a girl being cared for by a grandmother.  Often, well on towards
morning, there would be displays of kodak portraits and of tears.

They were comfortable women, cordial and friendly and irrepressibly
matronly.  Theirs was the quality of ease.  Become fatalistic,
especially about money matters, they were unworried.  Whenever their
funds dropped alarmingly, a new donor appeared; this had always
happened.  The aim of each was to have one man, permanently, to pay all
her bills, in return for which she would have immediately given up
other admirers and probably would have become exceedingly fond of him;
for the affections of all of them were, by now, unexacting, tranquil
and easily arranged.  This end, however, grew increasingly difficult
yearly.  Mrs. Morse was regarded as fortunate.

Ed had a good year, increased her allowance and gave her a sealskin
coat.  But she had to be careful of her moods with him.  He insisted
upon gaiety.  He would not listen to admissions of aches or weariness.

"Hey, listen," he would say, "I got worries of my own, and plenty.
Nobody wants to hear other people's troubles, sweetie.  What you got to
do, you got to be a sport and forget it.  See?  Well, slip us a little
smile, then.  That's my girl."

She never had enough interest to quarrel with him as she had with
Herbie, but she wanted the privilege of occasional admitted sadness.
It was strange.  The other women she saw did not have to fight their
moods.  There was Mrs. Florence Miller who got regular crying jags, and
the men sought only to cheer and comfort her.  The others spent whole
evenings in grieved recitals of worries and ills; their escorts paid
them deep sympathy.  But she was instantly undesirable when she was low
in spirits.  Once, at Jimmy's, when she could not make herself lively,
Ed had walked out and left her.

"Why the hell don't you stay home and not go spoiling everybody's
evening?" he had roared.

Even her slightest acquaintances seemed irritated if she were not
conspicuously light-hearted.

"What's the matter with you, anyway?" they would say.  "Be your age,
why don't you?  Have a little drink and snap out of it."

When her relationship with Ed had continued nearly three years, he
moved to Florida to live.  He hated leaving her; he gave her a large
cheque and some shares of a sound stock, and his pale eyes were wet
when he said good-bye.  She did not miss him.  He came to New York
infrequently, perhaps two or three times a year, and hurried directly
from the train to see her.  She was always pleased to have him come and
never sorry to see him go.

Charley, an acquaintance of Ed's that she had met at Jimmy's, had long
admired her.  He had always made opportunities of touching her and
leaning close to talk to her.  He asked repeatedly of all their friends
if they had ever heard such a fine laugh as she had.  After Ed left,
Charley became the main figure in her life.  She classified him and
spoke of him as "not so bad".  There was nearly a year of Charley; then
she divided her time between him and Sydney, another frequenter of
Jimmy's; then Charley slipped away altogether.

Sydney was a little, brightly dressed, clever Jew.  She was perhaps
nearest contentment with him.  He amused her always; her laughter was
not forced.

He admired her completely.  Her softness and size delighted him.  And
he thought she was great, he often told her, because she kept gay and
lively when she was drunk.

"Once I had a gal," he said, "used to try and throw herself out of the
window every time she got a can on.  Jee-_suss_," he added, feelingly.

Then Sydney married a rich and watchful bride, and then there was
Billy.  No--after Sydney came Ferd, then Billy.  In her haze, she never
recalled how men entered her life and left it.  There were no
surprises.  She had no thrill at their advent, nor woe at their
departure.  She seemed to be always able to attract men.  There was
never another as rich as Ed, but they were all generous to her, in
their means.

Once she had news of Herbie.  She met Mrs. Martin dining at Jimmy's,
and the old friendship was vigorously renewed.  The still admiring Joe,
while on a business trip, had seen Herbie.  He had settled in Chicago,
he looked fine, he was living with some woman--seemed to be crazy about
her.  Mrs. Morse had been drinking vastly that day.  She took the news
with mild interest, as one hearing of the sex peccadilloes of somebody
whose name is, after a moment's groping, familiar.

"Must be damn near seven years since I saw him," she commented.  "Gee.
Seven years."

More and more, her days lost their individuality.  She never knew
dates, nor was sure of the day of the week.

"My God, was that a year ago!" she would exclaim, when an event was
recalled in conversation.

She was tired so much of the time.  Tired and blue.  Almost everything
could give her the blues.  Those old horses she saw on Sixth
Avenue--struggling and slipping along the car-tracks, or standing at
the curb, their heads dropped level with their worn knees.  The tightly
stored tears would squeeze from her eyes as she teetered past on her
aching feet in the stubby, champagne-colored slippers.

The thought of death came and stayed with her and lent her a sort of
drowsy cheer.  It would be nice, nice and restful, to be dead.

There was no settled, shocked moment when she first thought of killing
herself; it seemed to her as if the idea had always been with her.  She
pounced upon all the accounts of suicides in the newspapers.  There was
an epidemic of self-killings--or maybe it was just that she searched
for the stories of them so eagerly that she found many.  To read of
them roused reassurance in her; she felt a cozy solidarity with the big
company of the voluntary dead.

She slept, aided by whiskey, till deep into the afternoons, then lay
abed, a bottle and glass at her hand, until it was time to dress to go
out for dinner.  She was beginning to feel towards alcohol a little
puzzled distrust, as toward an old friend who has refused a simple
favor.  Whiskey could still soothe her for most of the time, but there
were sudden, inexplicable moments when the cloud fell treacherously
away from her, and she was sawn by the sorrow and bewilderment and
nuisance of all living.  She played voluptuously with the thought of
cool, sleepy retreat.  She had never been troubled by religious belief
and no vision of an after-life intimidated her.  She dreamed by day of
never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen
and admire, of never more being a good sport.  Never.

But how would you do it?  It made her sick to think of jumping from
heights.  She could not stand a gun.  At the theatre, if one of the
actors drew a revolver, she crammed her fingers into her ears and could
not even look at the stage until after the shot had been fired.  There
was no gas in her flat.  She looked long at the bright blue veins in
her slim wrists--a cut with a razor blade, and there you'd be.  But it
would hurt, hurt like hell, and there would be blood to see.
Poison--something tasteless and quick and painless--was the thing.  But
they wouldn't sell it to you in drug-stores, because of the law.

She had few other thoughts.

There was a new man now---Art.  He was short and fat and exacting and
hard on her patience when he was drunk.  But there had been only
occasionals for some time before him, and she was glad of a little
stability.  Too, Art must be away for weeks at a stretch, selling
silks, and that was restful.  She was convincingly gay with him, though
the effort shook her viciously.

"The best sport in the world," he would murmur, deep in her neck.  "The
best sport in the world."

One night, when he had taken her to Jimmy's, she went into the
dressing-room with Mrs. Florence Miller.  There, while designing curly
mouths on their faces with lip-rouge, they compared experiences of
insomnia.

"Honestly," Mrs. Morse said, "I wouldn't close an eye if I didn't go to
bed full of Scotch.  I lie there and toss and turn and toss and turn.
Blue!  Does a person get blue lying awake that way!"

"Say, listen, Hazel," Mrs. Miller said, impressively, "I'm telling you
I'd be awake for a year if I didn't take veronal.  That stuff makes you
sleep like a fool."

"Isn't it poison, or something?" Mrs. Morse asked.

"Oh, you take too much and you're out for the count," said Mrs. Miller.
"I just take five grains--they come in tablets.  I'd be scared to fool
around with it.  But five grains, and you cork off pretty."

"Can you get it anywhere?" Mrs. Morse felt superbly Machiavellian.

"Get all you want in Jersey," said Mrs. Miller.  "They won't give it to
you here without you have a doctor's prescription.  Finished?  We'd
better go back and see what the boys are doing."

That night, Art left Mrs. Morse at the door of her apartment; his
mother was in town.  Mrs. Morse was still sober, and it happened that
there was no whiskey left in her cupboard.  She lay in bed, looking up
at the black ceiling.

She rose early, for her, and went to New Jersey.  She had never taken
the tube, and did not understand it.  So she went to the Pennsylvania
Station and bought a railroad ticket to Newark.  She thought of nothing
in particular on the trip out.  She looked at the uninspired hats of
the women about her and gazed through the smeared window at the flat,
gritty scene.

In Newark, in the first drug-store she came to, she asked for a tin of
talcum powder, a nail-brush and a box of veronal tablets.  The powder
and the brush were to make the hypnotic seem also a casual need.  The
clerk was entirely unconcerned.  "We only keep them in bottles," he
said and wrapped up for her a little glass vial containing ten white
tablets, stacked one on another.

She went to another drug-store and bought a face-cloth, an orange-wood
stick and a bottle of veronal tablets.  The clerk was also uninterested.

"Well, I guess I got enough to kill an ox," she thought, and went back
to the station.

At home, she put the little vials in the drawer of her dressing-table
and stood looking at them with a dreamy tenderness.

"There they are, God bless them," she said, and she kissed her
finger-tip and touched each bottle.

The colored maid was busy in the living room.

"Hey, Nettie," Mrs. Morse called.  "Be an angel, will you?  Run around
to Jimmy's and get me a quart of Scotch."

She hummed while she awaited the girl's return.

During the next few days, whiskey ministered to her as tenderly as it
had done when she first turned to its aid.  Alone, she was soothed and
vague, at Jimmy's she was the gayest of the groups.  Art was delighted
with her.

Then, one night, she had an appointment to meet Art at Jimmy's for an
early dinner.  He was to leave afterward on a business excursion, to be
away for a week.  Mrs. Morse had been drinking all the afternoon; while
she dressed to go out, she felt herself rising pleasurably from
drowsiness to high spirits.  But as she came out into the street the
effects of the whiskey deserted her completely, and she was filled with
a slow, grinding wretchedness so horrible that she stood swaying on the
pavement, unable for a moment to move forward.  It was a gray night
with spurts of mean, thin snow, and the streets shone with dark ice.
As she slowly crossed Sixth Avenue, consciously dragging one foot past
the other, a big, scarred horse pulling a rickety express-wagon crashed
to his knees before her.  The driver swore and screamed and lashed the
beast insanely, bringing the whip back over his shoulder for every
blow, while the horse struggled to get a footing on the slippery
asphalt.  A group gathered and watched with interest.

Art was waiting, when Mrs. Morse reached Jimmy's.

"What's the matter with you, for God's sake?" was his greeting to her.

"I saw a horse," she said.  "Gee, I--a person feels sorry for horses.
I--it isn't just horses.  Everything's kind of terrible, isn't it?  I
can't help getting sunk."

"Ah, sunk, me eye," he said.  "What's the idea of all the bellyaching?
What have you got to be sunk about?"

"I can't help it," she said.

"Ah, help it, me eye," he said.  "Pull yourself together, will you?
Come on and sit down, and take that face off you."

She drank industriously and she tried hard, but she could not overcome
her melancholy.  Others joined them and commented on her gloom, and she
could do no more for them than smile weakly.  She made little dabs at
her eyes with her handkerchief, trying to time her movements so they
would be unnoticed, but several times Art caught her and scowled and
shifted impatiently in his chair.

When it was time for him to go to his train, she said she would leave,
too, and go home.

"And not a bad idea, either," he said.  "See if you can't sleep
yourself out of it.  I'll see you Thursday.  For God's sake, try and
cheer up by then, will you?"

"Yeah," she said.  "I will."

In her bedroom, she undressed with a tense speed wholly unlike her
usual slow uncertainty.  She put on her nightgown, took off her
hair-net and passed the comb quickly through her dry, vari-colored
hair.  Then she took the two little vials from the drawer and carried
them into the bathroom.  The splintering misery had gone from her, and
she felt the quick excitement of one who is about to receive an
anticipated gift.

She uncorked the vials, filled a glass with water and stood before the
mirror, a tablet between her fingers.  Suddenly she bowed graciously to
her reflection, and raised the glass to it.

"Well, here's mud in your eye," she said.

The tablets were unpleasant to take, dry and powdery and sticking
obstinately half-way down her throat.  It took her a long time to
swallow all twenty of them.  She stood watching her reflection with
deep, impersonal interest, studying the movements of the gulping
throat.  Once more she spoke aloud to it.

"For God's sake, try and cheer up by Thursday, will you?" she said.
"Well, you know what he can do.  He and the whole lot of them."

She had no idea how quickly to expect effect from the veronal.  When
she had taken the last tablet, she stood uncertainly, wondering, still
with a courteous, vicarious interest, if death would strike her down
then and there.  She felt in no way strange, save for a slight stirring
of sickness from the effort of swallowing the tablets, nor did her
reflected face look at all different.  It would not be immediate, then;
it might even take an hour or so.

She stretched her arms high and gave a vast yawn.

"Guess I'll go to bed," she said.  "Gee, I'm nearly dead."

That struck her as comic, and she turned out the bathroom light and
went in and laid herself down in her bed, chuckling softly all the time.

"Gee, I'm nearly dead," she quoted.  "That's a hot one!"



III

Nettie, the colored maid, came in late the next afternoon to clean the
apartment, and found Mrs. Morse in her bed.  But then, that was not
unusual.  Usually, though, the sounds of cleaning waked her, and she
did not like to wake up.  Nettie, an agreeable girl, had learned to
move softly about her work.

But when she had done the living room and stolen in to tidy the little
square bedroom, she could not avoid a tiny clatter as she arranged the
objects on the dressing table.  Instinctively, she glanced over her
shoulder at the sleeper, and without warning a sickly uneasiness crept
over her.  She came to the bed and stared down at the woman lying there.

Mrs. Morse lay on her back, one flabby, white arm flung up, the wrist
against her forehead.  Her stiff hair hung untenderly along her face.
The bed covers were pushed down, exposing a deep square of soft neck
and a pink nightgown, its fabric worn uneven by many launderings; her
great breasts, freed from their tight confiner, sagged beneath her
arm-pits.  Now and then she made knotted, snoring sounds, and from the
corner of her opened mouth to the blurred turn of her jaw ran a lane of
crusted spittle.

"Mis' Morse," Nettie called.  "Oh, Mis' Morse!  It's terrible late."

Mrs. Morse made no move.

"Mis' Morse," said Nettie.  "Look, Mis' Morse.  How'm I goin' get this
bed made?"

Panic sprang upon the girl.  She shook the woman's hot shoulder.

"Ah, wake up, will yuh?" she whined.  "Ah, please wake up."

Suddenly the girl turned and ran out in the hall to the elevator door,
keeping her thumb firm on the black, shiny button until the elderly car
and its Negro attendant stood before her.  She poured a jumble of words
over the boy, and led him back to the apartment.  He tiptoed creakingly
in to the bedside; first gingerly, then so lustily that he left marks
in the soft flesh, he prodded the unconscious woman.

"Hey, there!" he cried, and listened intently, as for an echo.

"Jeez.  Out like a light," he commented.

At his interest in the spectacle, Nettie's panic left her.  Importance
was big in both of them.  They talked in quick, unfinished whispers,
and it was the boy's suggestion that he fetch the young doctor who
lived on the ground floor.  Nettie hurried along with him.  They looked
forward to the limelit moment of breaking their news of something
untoward, something pleasurably unpleasant.  Mrs. Morse had become the
medium of drama.  With no ill wish to her, they hoped that her state
was serious, that she would not let them down by being awake and normal
on their return.  A little fear of this determined them to make the
most, to the doctor, of her present condition.  "Matter of life and
death" returned to Nettie from her thin store of reading.  She
considered startling the doctor with the phrase.

The doctor was in and none too pleased at interruption.  He wore a
yellow and blue striped dressing-gown, and he was lying on his sofa,
laughing, with a dark girl, her face scaly with inexpensive powder, who
perched on the arm.  Half-emptied highball glasses stood beside them,
and her coat and hat were neatly hung up with the comfortable
implication of a long stay.

Always something, the doctor grumbled.  Couldn't let anybody alone
after a hard day.  But he put some bottles and instruments into a case,
changed his dressing-gown for his coat and started out with the Negroes.

"Snap it up there, big boy," the girl called after him.  "Don't be all
night."

The doctor strode loudly into Mrs. Morse's flat and on to the bedroom,
Nettie and the boy right behind him.  Mrs. Morse had not moved; her
sleep was as deep, but soundless, now.  The doctor looked sharply at
her, then plunged his thumbs into the lidded pits above her eyeballs
and threw his weight upon them.  A high, sickened cry broke from Nettie.

"Look like he tryin' to push her right on th'ough the bed," said the
boy.  He chuckled.

Mrs. Morse gave no sign under the pressure.  Abruptly the doctor
abandoned it, and with one quick movement swept the covers down to the
foot of the bed.  With another he flung her nightgown back and lifted
the thick, white legs, cross-hatched with blocks of tiny, iris-colored
veins.  He pinched them repeatedly, with long, cruel nips, back of the
knees.  She did not awaken.

"What's she been drinking?" he asked Nettie, over his shoulder.

With the certain celerity of one who knows just where to lay hands on a
thing, Nettie went into the bathroom, bound for the cupboard where Mrs.
Morse kept her whiskey.  But she stopped at the sight of the two vials,
with their red and white labels, lying before the mirror.  She brought
them to the doctor.

"Oh, for the Lord Almighty's sweet sake!" he said.  He dropped Mrs.
Morse's limp legs, and pushed them impatiently across the bed.  "What
did she want to go taking that tripe for?  Rotten yellow trick, that's
what a thing like that is.  Now we'll have to pump her out, and all
that stuff.  Nuisance, a thing like that is; that's what it amounts to.
Here, George, take me down in the elevator.  You wait here, maid.  She
won't do anything."

"She won' die on me, will she?" cried Nettie.

"No," said the doctor.  "God, no.  You couldn't kill her with an axe."



IV

After two days, Mrs. Morse came back to consciousness, dazed at first,
then with a comprehension that brought with it the slow, saturating
wretchedness.

"Oh, Lord, oh, Lord," she moaned, and tears for herself and for life
striped her cheeks.

Nettie came in at the sound.  For two days she had done the ugly,
incessant tasks in the nursing of the unconscious, for two nights she
had caught broken bits of sleep on the living room couch.  She looked
coldly at the big, blown woman in the bed.

"What you been tryin' to do, Mis' Morse?" she said.  "What kine o' work
is that, takin' all that stuff?"

"Oh, Lord," moaned Mrs. Morse, again, and she tried to cover her eyes
with her arms.  But the joints felt stiff and brittle, and she cried
out at their ache.

"Tha's no way to ack, takin' them pills," said Nettie.  "You can thank
you' stars you heah at all.  How you feel now?"

"Oh, I feel great," said Mrs. Morse.  "Swell, I feel."

Her hot, painful tears fell as if they would never stop.

"Tha's no way to take on, cryin' like that," Nettie said.  "After what
you done.  The doctor, he says he could have you arrested, doin' a
thing like that.  He was fit to be tied, here."

"Why couldn't he let me alone?" wailed Mrs. Morse.  "Why the hell
couldn't he have?"

"Tha's terr'ble, Mis' Morse, swearin' an' talkin' like that," said
Nettie, "after what people done for you.  Here I ain' had no sleep at
all, an' I had to give up goin' out to my other ladies!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Nettie," she said.  "You're a peach.  I'm sorry I've
given you so much trouble.  I couldn't help it.  I just got sunk.
Didn't you ever feel like doing it?  When everything looks just lousy
to you?"

"I wouldn' think o' no such thing," declared Nettie.  "You got to cheer
up.  Tha's what you got to do.  Everybody's got their troubles."

"Yeah," said Mrs. Morse.  "I know."

"Come a pretty picture card for you," Nettie said.  "Maybe that will
cheer you up."

She handed Mrs. Morse a post card.  Mrs. Morse had to cover one eye
with her hand, in order to read the message; her eyes were not yet
focussing correctly.

It was from Art.  On the back of a view of the Detroit Athletic Club he
had written: "Greeting and salutations.  Hope you have lost that gloom.
Cheer up and don't take any rubber nickles.  See you on Thursday."

She dropped the card to the floor.  Misery crushed her as if she were
between great smooth stones.  There passed before her a slow, slow
pageant of days spent lying in her flat, of evenings at Jimmy's being a
good sport, making herself laugh and coo at Art and other Arts; she saw
a long parade of weary horses and shivering beggars and all beaten,
driven, stumbling things.  Her feet throbbed as if she had crammed them
into the stubby champagne-colored slippers.  Her heart seemed to swell
and fester.

"Nettie," she cried, "for heaven's sake pour me a drink, will you?"

The maid looked doubtful.

"Now you know, Mis' Morse," she said, "you been near daid.  I don' know
if the doctor he let you drink nothin' yet."

"Oh, never mind him," she said.  "You get me one, and bring in the
bottle.  Take one yourself."

"Well," said Nettie.

She poured them each a drink, deferentially leaving hers in the
bathroom to be taken in solitude, and brought Mrs. Morse's glass in to
her.

Mrs. Morse looked into the liquor and shuddered back from its odor.
Maybe it would help.  Maybe, when you had been knocked cold for a few
days, your very first drink would give you a lift.  Maybe whiskey would
be her friend again.  She prayed without addressing a God, without
knowing a God.  Oh, please, please, let her be able to get drunk,
please keep her always drunk.

She lifted the glass.

"Thanks, Nettie," she said.  "Here's mud in your eye."

The maid giggled.  "Tha's the way, Mis' Morse," she said.  "You cheer
up, now."

"Yeah," said Mrs. Morse.  "Sure."






[End of Big Blonde, by Dorothy Parker]
