Street Scene


Tracy Daniels graduated from high school not long before her father was forced to retire from his factory job. Partly for that reason, she went right to work, taking college courses at night. Tracy had lived at home for another year after she began working before she got her own apartment. Very soon after that, her father died suddenly. Since her mother had died when she was ten and her older brothers did not really have money to spare, the house was sold off to cover funeral expenses.

In the depression that followed all that, between being on her own and now not having a home to go back to, she was maneuvered into living with a man named Richard Drake. She thought she knew him well, but she slowly learned that she did not.

By the time she confronted him four years later about not moving toward marriage, she was no longer certain that she wanted to marry him anyway. They had a fight and she was back to an apartment of her own, less happy but less vulnerable.

Hank Davis was heading down Chestnut Street on an afternoon in May, coming home from work. He saw a familiar shape up ahead of him carrying two big grocery bags and he called out:

“Tracy Daniels! What are you doing down this way? I thought you and Richard lived further uptown. Although it’s been, what, three months since I saw you. Did the two of you move down here?”

She turned her pleasant face around and smiled at him. “No, Hank, *I* did. I moved out on him two months ago.”

The surprise must have shown in his face, because she went on, “It’s been building for a long time, and what finally set me off was, well, too small and ridiculous to talk about. Mostly it’s that after we had been living together for four years, I wanted to start talking about marriage, and he didn’t. I tried for some time to bring him around to the idea, but he wouldn’t have it at all.”

Hank looked down at the ground for a second and he said to her, “I’m sorry to hear that, Tracy. You deserve as good as can be gotten, but I don’t think it’ll take very long for someone as sweet and pretty as you to find a good man to settle down with. You seem to be heading in my direction; could I carry one of those bags for you?”

She studied his face for a second, then said, “Why, thank you, sir. Thank you for the help and for the compliment, though I don’t feel at all pretty or sweet today. It’s only another block down here.”

So Hank took one bag, and then he took the other one from her when they got up to her front door, so that Tracy could get at her keys. She opened the door and took the second bag back and invited him in, so he went. The door led into her living room, with a couch which he now recalled not seeing in Richard’s place before she moved in. He caught a quick glimpse of a new-looking double bed and curtains as they walked into her kitchen.