If her husband Ora noticed, he never said. He never asked her
where she had been or what she had been doing until late in the evening. Even
though she didn’t smoke, he never inquired why her clothes smelled of
cigarettes. That could have been partly because he smoked cigars and he was so
accustomed to his own odor that hers never reached his weak olfactory glands.
It wasn’t as though he touched her or came that close anyway.
As for her children, Vivian (age 15) and Dale (age 13), she
took great care to wash before they would be exposed to her own transgressions.
Previously, this was her habit anyway. After all, Ora’s own stench permeated
their bed, and she had been washing it away every morning since shortly after
their marriage.
However, there was more to her more recent fixation on
cleanliness, and she knew it. She wanted to wash away any trace of her
transgressive activities. She always felt guilty afterward, sometimes waking up
in the middle of the night with her heart racing and her nerves rising like goose
bumps. Still, she never vowed to stop, because the two evenings per week that
she took the streetcar across the river to a slightly nicer part of the city to
spend an hour or two talking to strangers in a speakeasy had become her only
means of having any peace with her life.
Actually, after three weeks of this, she had started to make
friends. While the establishment, as many were during the height of
Prohibition, was usually crowded with both men and women, the regulars, she
learned quickly, mostly occupied a section nearest the escape exit.
Leta told herself that she went for the company. While she had
friends and family in close proximity, she sorely lacked the kind of attention
her husband was not providing. While sipping her gin amongst the mostly happy
and always lively crowd, she felt attractive and jolly.
When she wasn’t there, she missed her late husband Albert—his sparkling
blue eyes, his smiles, his laugh, the way he would grab her around the waist
and pull her close to him for a kiss, how he would don an apron to wash the
dishes and insist she sit at the kitchen table to entertain him with gossip,
how his skin always smelled of fresh soap and shaving cream, how his muscles
glistened with perspiration when he was firing up the whiskey still they had in
the basement, the way he always seemed to have some part of their bodies
touching in bed.
The contrast of being with her current husband Ora was
palpable and weighed heavily on her. There were entire days when they didn’t
share a word. She would rise early and start her child rearing and housework.
He would saunter in, swallow a cup of coffee and two pieces of toast with
strawberry jam, grab his lunch pail and head toward the door, belch in the
middle of the living room, pick up his paint materials and leave. Later in the
evening, he would return, drop his lunch pail on the dining room table, shuffle
through the house to the small tub in the back porch to wash his paint brushes,
then drip his way into the kitchen for whatever supper she had waiting, slurp
and chomp it down with beer, belch with satisfaction and then shuffle back
through the house and into their bedroom. Depending on his mood, he would shed
part to all of his clothes and flop onto bed. An hour or so later, he would
awaken, use the toilet and then return.
If he even noticed she was there, he never acknowledged her,
making it very easy for her to leave his supper on the stove and pursue her own
interests.
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