“Peter? You and Peter are some pair.”
Catherine drew back her face sharply, as if she had been struck on the cheek. “Oh?”
“You go sit in a tree, and Peter goes home.”
“Peter went home?”
Sue Wilson said, “He didn’t even tell anybody. Janet saw him. She thought he went to get something in his car, but he got in and drove away. I call that rude.”
Bev said, “Peter isn’t rude.”
“He left his sled,” said Catherine. A restlessness came over her, and she thought how irritating and boring all these people were, and this kitchen, and this universe, and above all, above all, those little straight pretzels. Why weren’t they the three-ring kind?
“It’s about time!” said Bev. She tipped up the cover and Catherine saw a kernel burst into flower. Bev banged the cover down and shook the pan; there was a crack-crack-cracking. Catherine went over to the den and looked in quickly. Then she turned, walked across the kitchen, and went downstairs.
Through the half-open door of the playroom Catherine saw drifting smoke and the corner of a couch. She went into the workroom and put on her coat, fumbling with the plump buttons, shaped like half-globes. Pulling on her boots, and tying her kerchief under her chin, she strode through the garage.
When she stepped outside she saw that some of the party had returned to the slope. She had thought only of escaping from the house, and now she was standing in the floodlight, exposed. She felt like putting her hands over her face. The only private place was the leaning pine. She climbed the slope at the back of the house, away from the sledding path, and headed across the deep snow toward her tree. Under the moon and the dark blue sky the snow was luminous and tinged with blue.
Catherine stopped; in the open space of the pine she saw Bob Carwin, standing with one arm against the trunk as he leaned over Bonnie Baker, who sat on a low branch. Catherine turned back angrily into the upper yard. There was no place where she could be alone. There were people at the willow, people at the bottom of the sledding path, people in the pine. There were people in the playroom, people in the kitchen, people in the den. The party was spreading; soon it would flow across the yard, over the hedge, and into the next yard. It would flow across the town. It would spread into the dark blue sky, all the way to the snowy moon.
Catherine stood in the empty upper yard. She felt restless, yet there was no place to go. He had walked to his car and driven home. He had not told anyone he was going home. Catherine thought it was a strange, upsetting thing to have done, and all at once she felt an immense pity for Peter Schiller, and for herself, as if someone had done something to them and gone away. But it was Peter Schiller who had gone away. Catherine shook her head, as if to shake out the words. She looked about. Everything seemed suspenseful and mysterious — the blue snow, the deep boot-hollows in the snow, the floodlit black of the driveway, startling as spilled ink rushing across a table. It seemed to her that everything she looked at was about to change shape suddenly. But it all remained peaceful, suspended, still. And the sledders rushing down the slope were part of it too, as if their motion were only another form of stillness. A hill of summer blueberries, sledders in the snow. Catherine felt lifted up into stillness, as if things were about to shift slightly, or crack open like kernels, thrusting up inner blossoms. She felt a faint cracking inside her. In another moment she would understand everything. And as she waited, she bowed her head against the cold, as if in prayer.
A shout from the hill startled her. Catherine hugged herself, and shivered in the cold. It had slipped away, whatever it was. She felt tired, as if she had been running for a long time. It seemed to her that she had been set spinning, like a top that travels across a table, touches an object, and, still spinning, rushes off in another direction. The words had set her spinning to the tree, and from there to the playroom, and from there to the kitchen, and from there to the snowy wasteland of the upper yard. And once you were set spinning, who knew where you would stop? She was spinning, spinning, and now she was about to go spinning off again, because she could not bear to be alone. She no longer knew what was going to happen to her. She no longer knew anything at all.
Gravely, her head bowed slightly, Catherine walked down the hill.
But in the glow of the floodlight her spirits revived, and when she stepped into the smoky warmth of the playroom she felt so soothed, so enfolded, that she enjoyed the feel of her own smile as it pushed against her tightening cheeks. Bev and Brad waved from a couch; Catherine waved back. At the piano they were singing “Auld Lang Syne.” These were her friends, her dear friends who were waving to her and laughing and playing the piano and singing. There was a clatter of descending footsteps, and Catherine turned to the half-open door. Len Anderson entered, frowning as he lit a cigarette in cupped hands. “You’re leaving?” he said, looking up harshly. “Arriving,” she answered, and untied her kerchief. “And Len, I can’t tell you what a wonderful party it is.” Pleasure surged in her; and everyone was surprised when she gave him a big hug.
A Day in the Country
She had planned to continue further down the slope, but the slatted red bench in a sun-flooded bend of the path had proved too great an adventure. It was an adventure because it was there at all, demanding nothing, feigning indifference, and promising the secret pleasures of truancy. The wood was warm to her touch. The three hundred pages of The Machining of Plastics in their neatly tied folder remained unedited at her side, and in the late afternoon light, bright but no longer hot, Judith continued to look with pleasure through the opening in the trees at the sunny cliff with its gazebo of pale, peeled logs, and beyond to the dark green and light green and blue green of low hills. On the hills lay darker green patches that slowly moved: the shadows of clouds. They looked like carelessly strewn dark doilies. A young woman in faded blue jeans and a crimson T-shirt lay on her back on the cliff. Her boyfriend sat crosslegged beside her, drinking a can of beer that flashed in the sun. His shadow was so richly black that it might have been wet. They spoke, but quietly, as if hushed by the peacefulness of the view, and Judith would not have wished them to leave. It struck her, watching their stillness, that there was also a pleasurable truancy from play. One of the attractions of the place was its twenty-seven, or was it twenty-nine, scenic trails, and it was possible to feel much too responsible for covering the territory. She had been marching up and down trails all morning and half the afternoon, looking down at valleys with red barns and across at hills with little white houses, identifying fourteen wildflowers with the aid of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America and a four-page pamphlet she had bought for ninety-five cents at the gift shop near the dining room, resting only for a few minutes in the rustic gazebos placed along the cliff trails before setting off again, and she realized, seated gratefully on her bench, how delightful it was simply to stop. Simply to stop. At her feet grew a purple wildflower, with four-petaled clusters arranged along the upper part of a thick green stalk, and she purposely refrained from opening her shoulder bag and checking in the purple section of the field guide. The warm sun on her face made her feel healthy and sleepy. Flower, tree, rock, sky — for a moment Judith longed for a world without detail. It would be enough.