Chapter 13
If the next evening proved to be anything like her day, Sam would simply give up without a fight. There were only so many punches a person could take before a knockout.
Like every other day since Sam had gotten her own column, she stepped into the Women’s House Magazine bullpen ignoring her co-workers’ whispered slander, dodging Mr. Getty’s “deadline” reminders, and tiptoeing around Mel’s evil eye. By the time she got home, transformed into her mother’s mini-me, and bumped into Miss Posey on her way to infiltrate Thomas Cook, Sam fell to pieces. Literally speaking.
Eager to catch Sam on an unprecedented night out and looking uncharacteristically made up, Miss Posey blocked Sam’s path to her car with the full force of her five-foot-tall three-foot-wide frame. The moment Miss Posey noticed the glisten in Sam’s eyes, she adjusted a stray pink curler, straightened her housedress, then proceeded to hold Sam as she crumbled into a tearful waterfall of sadness.
“My dear, what’s got you in such a sad state?” Miss Posey consoled Sam with rigid pats on the back.
Sam swiped the tears away, smudging the mascara and stinging her eyes, only prompting more tears and smudging and stinging.
“It’s been a difficult day. The people at my office don’t like me much.”
“I suspect it’s because you don’t know your place. You’re an odd bird, and you don’t fit in. If you packaged yourself correctly, I’m sure they’d like you.”
But Sam didn’t want to fit in. She never had. When the other little girls wore poodle skirts and ballet shoes, Sam sported overalls and camp shirts. While the other teenagers collected Troll dolls and went out go-go dancing, Sam collected plant cuttings and hid in her room reading. The only way to appease them was to become them. What was the correct female packaging anyway?
While Sam would have preferred pants, pinstripes, and pockets, she’d been scolded more than once that a typist’s correct attire were pantyhose, miniskirts, and pussybow blouses. For that is exactly what everyone saw Sam as: a typist. An assistant. A subordinate. But never the respected columnist she worked so hard to be.
“I’ll be fine, Miss Posey.” Sam inhaled a breath and rummaged through her macrame purse for her car keys. “I really need to get going.”
“Are you going on a date… at this hour?”
“No, ma’am. It’s not a date.”
“Oh, well then, I’ll just say you look very nice for your non-date, Samantha.” It was the first pleasant thing Miss Posey had ever spoken to Sam. “Now if you could adjust your homemaking to match, you might actually have hope, my dear.”
Of course the niceties would be cut short. It was Miss Posey, after all. But considering Miss Posey’s porch was littered with tins hanging from the eaves, Sam found it ironic that the woman would challenge Sam’s housekeeping when her porch looked like a cannery.
“What part of the city are you venturing into? Only trouble happens after dark. And I imagine you know it’s improper for a single woman to go out alone. People will assume things.”
Miss Posey was the only one making assumptions.
“And rumors will spread.”
She was also the only one likely to spread them.
“I am meeting a friend.” Sam offered nothing more than that, for already she could see the urge pulsing behind Miss Posey’s quivering lips to call the rumor mill pronto.
Sam nudged past the muumuu-wearing blockade, nerves buzzing, makeup freshly streaked, and her prettiest peach prairie dress donned, ready to woo Thomas Cook. She glanced at the house next door, finding the For Sale sign gone… and in its vacancy two more had popped up further down the street.
“What’s that about?” Sam asked, gesturing at the suddenly available real estate.
“Dire times, my dear,” Miss Posey said, returning to her natural doom-and-gloom state as she trekked back to her perch on the porch. “I hear you are now living next to a criminal.”
“A criminal? In the suburbs?”
“Where else would they live? It is a lot easier to commit crime when you are surrounded by unsuspecting victims who are only a front yard away. If I were you, I’d sell your house before the neighborhood’s market value plummets. At least that is what I would do if I had somewhere else to go,” Miss Posey advised with a wise shrug.
“What makes you think I have somewhere else to go?” No way in hell or on earth would Sam’s mother permit her to move back home, bringing all of her plants… and especially not Fido, no matter how sweetly he nuzzled her.
“You’ll eventually move in with whomever you marry. And soon, I hope? Your biological clock is ticking away, my dear.”
“I don’t plan on marrying. Or having children,” Sam stated matter-of-factly, as if those were two perfectly acceptable choices for a woman in her twenties.
“Ha!” Miss Posey laughed.
Sam should have known better. How could single women thrive in a society where employers could discriminate against hiring them, the laws of which remained unchanged because women were forbidden from becoming lawyers or serving as judges, a plight that persisted because universities refused to admit them? While childlessness made a woman a pariah, singledom was her death sentence.
“Single and childless?” Miss Posey cast Sam a scrutinous gaze. “Are you mad? You can’t possibly consider that an acceptable life. It’s an abomination!”
“Why not? You’re single and childless. And you seem… content with that status.” As content as any lonely curmudgeon could be, Sam figured.
“I most certainly am not single or childless! I am a widow because the Korean War stole my husband from me, which is a very different thing. And my son is an ungrateful, selfish youngblood who moved across the country to California without me to work with silicon, of all things.” She cackled mirthlessly. “Good luck with that worthless venture.”
Sam suspected Miss Posey was referring to Silicon Valley, the newest hot-spot for science and technology development. Worthless venture it was not, but Sam was in a hurry, and Miss Posey clearly wasn’t.
“Be careful, dear,” Miss Posey warned as she examined one of her dangling cans. “Looks like a storm’s a-brewin’.”
