The summer that Homer was 48 Etta said she had to have a rest because she was all worn out. Homer didn’t want to go away but she kept nagging him, and at last he left the hardware store with his clerk and his oldest boy and they went up to La Vallette. He was looking bad himself, all gray and dried-up.
He hardly spoke to anybody any more, and just lived between his home and the store. He’d just given up all his old friends, and somehow he’d got all bitter inside.
La Vallette is a little town up on the lake where all sorts of religious cranks go for a cheap rest. There are some cottages and three or four cheap hotels and a wooden tabernacle.
Homer and Etta were just like all the others. Etta, of course, knew most of the dreary lot. She’d made herself into a kind of celebrity. They all knew the crusader, Mrs. Etta Dallet Dilworth. I guess she enjoyed it a great deal, holding court in a rocking chair on the hotel porch and speaking now and then at the tabernacle, but Homer got a bit fed up being just Mister Etta Dallet Dilworth and he took to going for long walks along the lake front.
It was a desolate country but beautiful in a wild way. There were miles and miles of dunes with the whitest sand glittering in the sunlight. And here and there were marshes and inlets where wild birds settled.
Homer went walking along the shore in and out among the dunes, skirting the marshes. At first he’d go off for an hour or two, and then he began to go off in the morning and stay until lunch time, and then one day he began taking a box lunch with him.
He’d been unhappy for so long that he liked to get away from people and hide. I guess getting away from Etta and the pack of gabblers who surrounded her was kind of a relief, too. And being away all day like that got him to thinking.
It’s dangerous for a man of 48 to think too much about his own happiness, especially when he’s had a life like Homer’s. And the marshes and the lake and the sunlight and the wild birds began to do things to him.
He said it was like slipping backwards. He kept going back and back until he got to feeling a little the way he used to feel when we went swimming together. And one day he found himself taking off all his clothes and lying down on the clean white sand among the dunes to eat his lunch. And all at once he was kind of frightened.
It was the first time the sun had touched his body since that day he lay on the grass by the haunted house, and the feel of it began to do funny things to him. He sat up and looked at his body and saw suddenly that it wasn’t old and soft and fat. It was dry and the muscles were sharp and hard but not rounded the way they’d been when he was young. But it struck him suddenly that he wasn’t old. He was 48, though, and wouldn’t have many more years of health and vigor. And the feel of the sun and the soft warm breeze made him kind of dizzy.
He said he felt as if he was beginning to grow all over again inside himself. Suddenly he saw that he was happy for the first time in twenty years; but that frightened him and he began to be afraid of sin again, and he got up quickly and put on his clothes.
He tried to give up his long walks but when he stayed at the hotel all he saw were gabbing old women and skinny men, and soon he began going off again for the day among the dunes, and after a day or two he began taking off his clothes again and lying in the sun.
He began to grow tanned all over. His muscles began to grow round and plump and solid again.
He felt happier, and once or twice he got up at 4 in the morning to go out to the lake and see the sun rise. The sun became the center of all his existence. It was kind of as if he had a rendezvous every day with the sun out there among the white dunes.
Sometimes on cloudy days he thought he was going crazy, but as soon as the sun came out he felt all right again, and sure of himself. After a time he began to be troubled because the more he thought of it the more it seemed impossible ever to go back to live at Hanover in that untidy house that Etta kept so badly.
Etta noticed that he went off alone a good deal and she began to nag him about leaving her alone so much and not going to the tabernacle. But he didn’t seem to mind even that. He just didn’t hear her and managed to endure it until he could escape to the dunes.
One day she made a terrible scene in the dining room because she said he was being too kind to the waitress and looked at her too often.
After it was over she went to the management and demanded that the girl be discharged, but the management wouldn’t do it because Etta couldn’t prove the girl had done anything at all. They couldn’t discharge a girl just because she “looked” at a man. They just transferred her to another table and put an ugly old woman to wait on him and Etta.
After that he really took to noticing the girl for the first time, and he saw that she was big and blonde and voluptuous, and in spite of himself, he began stealing glances at her across the room. Once or twice she saw him and smiled. He knew that what he was doing was sinful and tried to put her out of his mind.
Etta grew more and more difficult. He said he thought it was because she couldn’t bear to see him looking well and happy. And one day she said she’d told the hotel they were going to leave at the end of the week.
The idea terrified him because it meant the end of the only happiness he’d known since he married her and it meant a return to the awful house in Hanover. He’d been so used to doing what she wanted that he didn’t say anything, but that afternoon, while he was lying in the sun, he made up his mind that he wasn’t going to leave and go back to Hanover. As he dressed himself, he made up the speech he was going to say to her, repeating it over and over to himself in the silence of the dunes to give himself courage.
He was walking home through the dunes, kicking the white sand and thinking how he meant to defy Etta, when he heard a curlew crying, and looking up to see it, he saw something else. Just ahead of him, lying in a hollow between two dunes, he saw the figures of a man and woman. They were asleep in the sun.
At first he wanted to run, and then he was overcome suddenly by a return of his old bitterness. He was outraged and indignant. And then he saw that, like himself, they had thought themselves alone among the dunes because it was a spot never visited by the people who came to La Vallette.
He tried to run away and could not. He was only able to stand there, his feet fixed in the white sand, staring.
Suddenly he was no longer shocked. These two people were like himself. They weren’t like Etta. Like him, they worshipped the sun!
He did not know how long he stood there. The sun slipped down towards the blue lake and the girl stirred, and he saw then for the first time that the Venus of the sands with the golden hair was the waitress over whom Etta had made the scene.
He turned and ran, fearful lest they should discover him, and as he ran he knew that he meant to stay on at La Vallette, and that maybe he would never go back to Hanover at all. When he got home he went to Etta and told her he meant to stay, and when she couldn’t find out any reason she tried everything to gain control over him again. She even flung the washbowl on the floor and broke it and dashed her head against the door, but all her hysterics seemed to have no effect upon him.
That night he dared not look for the waitress, because he saw her in a new way and looking at her became intolerable to him.
I imagine she was good-hearted and easy-going and meant well to everybody, and was just born to be good to men and make them happy. She felt sorry for Homer, I guess, being married to a dried-up whiner like Etta.
Anyway whenever he did look at her, she looked back and smiled, and that set Homer to thinking of everything he’d missed and that he was 48 and pretty soon he’d be dead without ever having lived at all.