But he did. The settling of the house took longer than he'd expected-you know how complicated just the title search could get, with Emorys-and then a broken-down radio shop is not all that much in demand. He stayed on through March, April. I was glad. With Saul around, life seemed more definite. We had to get on a schedule, give him his meals at predictable hours. Also, he was good at fixing things and he made repairs we'd been needing for years. In the evenings, he watched TV with me and Mama (who wouldn't say boo to him, in spite of his careful manners) or he took me out We went to movies, or restaurants, or the B & B Soda Shop. He acted like a brother, never so much as held my hand, but there was a measuring look in his eyes. I didn't know what he was waiting for. At the end of an evening I would climb to my bedroom, and there in the mirror was this college-age girl in a sweater and skirt-not a sullen old spinster after all.
Well, of course I fell in love with him. How could I avoid it? With that serene, pure face of his, those heavy-lidded eyes. It hit me for maybe the first time in my life that someone could have a whole world inside his head that I would never guess at. I was desperate to know what he thought about things. What was it like to have a family like his, a mother like Alberta? How did he feel passing his house now, with the shutters sagging off their hinges? He never said. I couldn't ask. Every time I saw him I wanted to ask, but I had such a sense of his separateness that it didn't seem possible. We stayed locked in this friendly small talk about mortgage assumptions and leaky faucets. The real conversation was carried on in silence: he helped me into my sweater as if wrapping a breakable gift. He somehow knew to lift my hair and settle it over my collar in just the right way. And I threw out three bowls of batter, trying to make Alberta's buckwheat pancakes. Even my mother took part in this conversation, for when we were all together now she grew stiff and still. She sent us little rodenty glances. The three of us were strung on elastic, and not a person could move without joggling the others.
Then one night in April we were coming home from a movie, Lana Turner in something or other. We happened to walk past his father's radio shop. A narrow, dismal wooden place set between a sandwich joint and a shoe repair, vacant all this time, black as a toothless mouth. I could have cried just looking at it, so how must Saul have felt? I reached out and touched his arm, and instantly he stopped and took hold of my hand and looked down at me. "Listen," he said.
He scared me. I thought he was mad that I had touched him; Fd upset the balance, some way. But what he said was, "You know I don't have a job yet, Charlotte." I said, "Jobr "And I don't seem to have any interests. I don't know what I'm going to do in life. So I'm waiting to see what just lands, but so far nothing has." I couldn't tell what he was getting at. I said, "Urn-"
"It's you and me I'm talking about, Charlotte."
"Oh " I said.
"I feel I have to have some land of a future before I can say anything to you." I still didn't understand. It seemed like an excuse, to tell the truth. I was used to high school dates, where the future had no bearing whatsoever.
"Well," I said, "is that all you're waiting for? I hike you better without a future." But I might as well not have spoken, because his face stayed troubled the rest of the walk home. Though he did keep hold of my hand, and on our front porch he kissed me-but only once, and very gravely, like somebody much, much older than me. Which he was, in a way. I was so young! I didn't think ahead at all. I only thought how strange it felt to touch surfaces like this, from behind our two private selves. I could have stood there all night with my head against his woolen shoulder. It was Saul who finally said we should go in.
My mother started condensing somehow, shrinking and drying. She was scared.
I saw how she watched Saul with her bright, webbed eyes. The kinder he was to her, the more carefully she watched him. When he asked her a question it took her a long time to answer; she had to rise up through so many layers of fear. At night, when I helped her into bed, she clutched my wrist hard and peered into my face and moved her lips but said nothing. Then I would go downstairs and Saul would grip that very same wrist and draw me toward him. For a second I always felt confused and panicky. "What is it?" he would ask me, but I never told.
I kept trying to understand him. It wasn't easy. He lacked the recklessness that I had expected of him- had hoped of him, even. If anything, he was too serious. (When I was in high school, they always told you to look for a sense of humor.) He treated me in a stern, unsmiling way that made me shy. Also, I couldn't figure out this job business. It seemed he was waiting for his life's work to be issued like a fate. Really, he was so trustful. "Maybe you ought to just set out and seek your fortune," I said, only half joking. "That's what I would do. Oh, I'd love to go with you! Take off tomorrow, travel anywhere."
"No, you wouldn't," he said. "Leave your mother? At this point in her life?" I don't know how a man like that could have been a son of Alberta's.
In May, he bought me an engagement ring. He took it out of his pocket one night when the three of us were eating supper-a little diamond. I hadn't known anything about it. I just stared at him when he slipped it on my finger.
"I thought it was time," he told me. I'm sorry, Mrs. Ames," he said. "I can't wait any longer, I want to marry her." Mama said, "But I-"
"It won't be right away," he said. "I'm not taking her off tomorrow. I don't even know what my work will be yet. We'll stay here as long as you need us, believe me. I promise you."
"But-" Mama said.
That was all, though.
I should have refused. I wasn't helpless, after all, I should have said, "I'm sorry, I can't fit you in. I never planned to take a second person on this trip." But I didn't. He was sitting next to me, and the leathery, foreign smell of his skin called up so much love that I seemed to be damaged by it. Everything he said was peculiarly clear, as if spoken in crackling cold air. It really didn't occur to me to turn him down.
Seven
I woke with a sense of being rocked and shaken. I sat up and looked around me. The sun was so bright it made my eyes ache, but I could see that we were parked in a marshy, straw-colored field. Jake was at the wheel, muttering something. Two men in denim jackets were flinging themselves against the rear of the car. "Now!" one shouted, and I felt the thud of their bodies. The wheels spun. "Dunderheads," said Jake, shutting off the ignition. "If those two would get together, for once…"
"What's going on?" I asked him.
He gave me a slit-eyed look and got out of the car. "What we need is that there tractor," I heard him telling the men. "All you got to do is bring it up behind and give her a shove."
"Tractor? What tractor?" one man asked. "You talking about that yonder? Why, she's just a little old twelve-horse thing my wife uses for the kitchen garden. You think we're going to push you out with that? And there's no way of getting in behind you; this bank is rising up too steep to your rear."
"Pull her from ahead then, I don't care."
"Pull her neither, you're looking at a toy. That thing don't even tote manure good."
"Look," said Jake, "I got twenty dollars says you can do it if you work it right." Through the rear window, I saw him dealing out money to the man in the red plaid cap. Little puffs of mist were coming from their mouths. "In ones?" the man said.