Fun and games don’t last forever and for all the things you get away with, sooner or later there’s a day of reckoning.
The basketball season went on, then pitchers and catchers reported for spring training. The winter concerts were long gone and UDC was busy rehearsing for the spring concert series. Bill’s fiancé was getting ready to graduate and she and Bill were getting ready to get married. Life was life.
Winter was dreary and long. If April was the cruelest month, February, for as short as it was, was one of the longest, dullest, bleakest periods of time. Everything plodded on. The days were bitter cold and the ever-present winds made them feel even colder. There was not much snow. Things were flat, barren and brown.
Seemed like day by day tempers at work were flaring more often and more intensely. Bea appeared to be outrageously jealous of Mary and acted out whenever Bill went off with her. She started playing power games with Bill, mostly about stupid stuff like laundry room and storeroom keys, both of which she coveted steadfastly. There wasn’t a single time when she would give up the keys without reminding Bill to lock the doors behind him. Most often and whenever she could, she would go down with him, not because she didn’t trust him but because she wanted to remind him that she was the boss.
Her extracurricular demands became more outrageous too. At the strangest times she would tell Bill to meet her downstairs and when he did she would be waiting for him, waiting for him to take care of her. He might find her in the storeroom sitting atop a stack of boxes with no panties on and her legs wide open. Or he might find her in the linen room totally naked just waiting for him. She always made sure to take care of him too, but she was relatively indifferent to whether or not he was in the mood. This too he realized was nothing more than a power-play.
Bill recognized power-plays. He remembered—he would never forget—that arrival at the workhouse, getting off the bus, the drama that the prison guards played on him and everyone who was there to see it and experience it. Then there were the times when he was sitting in his work-detail bus and from the bus window they watched the same guards play the same drama on the new inmates.
He had seen brutal things. Personally, he had been picked on, chastised, humiliated and had his head shaved. Or, it wasn’t shaved completely. Worse, they just chopped off all the hair he’d spent years growing.
In comparison, Bea’s power plays were inconsequential, even humorous. They were petty, small, evil-intentioned.
He and Mary had developed and were continuing a sensitive, caring affair. Once they had disclosed their feelings, once they had opened up about them, there was no turning back.
“I love you,” Mary had said.
“I love you too,” said Bill.
Those words were uttered, it was like the dam had burst and emotions were flooding out of each of them. They went to the Upper Room. They spent as much time as they could downstairs in the party room and anywhere else where they could be together. They even spent time at Mary’s house when Mary could get Alfreda to babysit.
Bill’s fiancé did not seem to notice much about his being absent. It was not that he was a great actor and was busy pretending he wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. It was more that she was into herself, ever into herself, almost never looking much outside of that.
There would be a time of reckoning for Bill and her too. Anyone who was looking at them from outside their situation could already see everything, could already see that even before they were married they were growing apart. She had not signed on to be married to a cook.
Pick up a copy of my published works here:
By Peter Weiss
