Chapter 16
I dedicated this book to the memory of Millie. Our paths crossed thirty years ago on several different occasions, but always at the same place.
I was working for a newspaper in a city of about half a million people and one of my prime assets was punctuality. Deadlines are very important to the people who get out the news and reporters who don't make it to work on time usually find a pink slip in their pay envelope after a few warnings.
A friend who worked in the art department was about to get the axe because she couldn't got to work on time. Since I was usually a good fifteen minutes early, I took it upon myself to go to her downtown apartment to make sure she was awake and dressed. Usually I brought along a cup of coffee.
As I started up the steps to her apartment, I often met a dark-haired, attractive woman in the entryway. For several weeks we exchanged smiles and progressed to "Good morning, fine day, isn't it?" I assumed she worked the night shift somewhere. One day I asked my friend where the girl worked, the one I saw two or three times a week who often came up the stairs with me.
She said, "Oh, she's a whore."
At my tender age I was both shocked and distressed. "But she seems like such a nice person," I said.
"Oh, she is a nice person," the girl assured me. "She's just as nice as she can be. Her name is Millie. She has two adorable children, but they don't live with her. She keeps them with a family over in the suburbs. But she gets them on weekends and holidays."
One morning as I was coming into the building, Millie was coming down the steps. Her face was white as snow and her eyes were spilling over with tears. I asked if I could help her. She said no, nobody could help her. Then she sat down on the stairs and cried the way children cry while I awkwardly tried to comfort her.
"I just couldn't stay up there in my apartment another second," she said between sobs. "I just see it over again, everywhere I look, but I know it isn't there. It didn't even happen at my place. I never take anybody there, you know."
At that point, it seemed necessary to get Millie off the steps so I suggested we go to my friends. Once inside the door of the apartment, I gave Millie the cup of coffee I'd brought and watched her sip it like a child being comforted by its mother. She held the paper cup with both hands and looked at me with big, sad eyes over the rim. For a change, my friend was up, dressed and ready to go to work, and it was fifteen minutes until time to be there.
After Millie drank all the coffee, she agreed with us that she'd probably feel better if she got what was worrying her off her chest.
She had been to a convention. A United Grape-Growers' convention. "Only I don't grow grapes," she said with a shadowy, haunted smile. Then all the rest of it came running out along with more tears.
"I don't drink, but I guess I couldn't tell the difference between grape juice and-oh, I'm sure there was grape juice in the drink this man gave me, so I feel pretty sure he spiked it with something. Vodka, probably, because honestly, I couldn't taste a thing, and I had three glasses. It was real good.
"The next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance, only I didn't know it was an ambulance. See, I never tell anybody why I don't drink. I just let 'em go ahead and think it's because I don't like the taste of whiskey or whatever else they want to think, because it sounds silly when I say I get sick enough to die. But it's true. Just one drink knocked me out for twenty-four hours once. The next time I tried it was four years later, and after two drinks I fell down on the floor and everybody thought I was dead. So I said never again.
"They were drinking a lot at that grape growers' convention and I was getting tired anyway, so I just decided to have a drink of grape juice before I came home. Maybe it was their idea of a joke to put something in the grape juice, but I don't think it was funny.
"They must have sobered up a little when I fell down on the floor, but they probably weren't sober enough to listen for my heartbeat or see if I was breathing or anything like that. What they did was call an ambulance. I could hear the siren and realized where I was and what was going on, but I thought I was going to a hospital, so I didn't say anything to the driver. He probably couldn't have heard me anyway, come to think of it.
"But he didn't take me to a hospital. Young punk. He just didn't know anything, but he should have stopped to consider that those men were all drunk and wouldn't know a dead woman from a live one. He took me to the morgue, that's where. When I realized where I was, I tried to tell him, look, I'm not dead! But you know, my throat was paralyzed. I couldn't utter a sound. He just left me there and I couldn't even move my head."
My friend and I were both ten minutes late to work that day. We convinced Millie that she'd feel better in the apartment, where she was sleeping soundly when we went back at noon. After quitting time, we returned and Millie was up and around, apparently recovered from her harrowing experience. But she said she'd never go to a grape growers' convention again.
"After this, I'm going to stick to men I know better like the American Legion gentlemen. Oh, they like a lot of bathroom jokes and think pissing into a paper bag and throwing it out the window from the fifteenth floor is great fun. But I don't think any Legionnaire would ever spike a girl's drink."
Millie passed away a few years ago. Her death was sudden and painless, but she knew her time was short. About a month before she died, my friend received a letter. They'd kept in touch all those years and I have kept in touch with my friend. In her letter, Millie referred to the time she'd been carted off to the morgue for dead. She said she'd never told her husband about that period of her life, but he'd been good to her and she loved him. Her postscript was typically Millie.
"But you know, sometimes I've been awfully bored. Now that I'm leaving, and looking back on twenty-two years with the same man, I wonder about a lot of things but sometimes I look at what tomorrow holds in the strangest way. I get to wondering if maybe I'm going to some great big convention in the sky."