She went out to the driveway, to take the piece in to work. She had not written anything about Hildon’s affair with Lucy Spenser. She had nothing in it about Nicole Nelson being Lucy’s niece, or about Nicole having a crush on a dishwasher at the inn. She did not intend to pursue the story Edward had told her about the police, or to include mention of the fact that the publisher’s grandfather was a jump rope baron. She did not think there was any purpose in creating scandals where there were none and worried that writers who did were going to beat her to the best magazines and newspapers. It probably was an odd notion for a journalist to have: that many things were what they seemed, or less than they seemed. Myra saw it as a condescending attitude toward your subjects that their sex lives had anything to do with their performance at work. It was easy to turn things into a comedy: the lonely hearts adviser whose own life was a shambles; her niece pining for a dishwasher, but involved with a man found naked in the woods; her boss cheating on his wife with her; Lucy’s former lover writing letters from afar that were half pleading and half accusatory. Any other reporter would have stooped to making Lucy a person living a ludicrous life, and it bothered Myra that Lucy did not even feel she owed her a face-to-face interview, let alone a debt of gratitude. Even Lucy’s dog, she remembered hearing, was on parole: one more dead sheep and the police said they were going to look the other way when the farmer shot him.
Taking the back road to the office, she stopped while a herd of cows crossed the road. In Boston it would be twenty-year-olds with stringy hair, backpacks and Shakti sandals. Here, it was cows. The day was overcast; another day that threatened rain. As she started to drive again, she rolled up her car window halfway and braked for a flock of birds that she did not think could possibly swoop above the car in time. She put on the radio and listened to an official from the Miss America pageant who insisted that they were justified in removing Miss America’s crown. Myra spent a few seconds imagining what the letter from Miss America to Cindi Coeur would read like, and what Cindi Coeur would write back. Myra had always known girls like Lucy; girls who were in the right place at the right time. It was too stuffy in the car with the window rolled up and too cold with it rolled down. She decided to leave it down. She felt as if she could drive this road with her eyes closed. She passed Honey House, a small old farmhouse painted yellow, with a beehive painted on the front door. She couldn’t see the hive now, because the door was open and a screen door had been put up. There were hand-lettered signs, pointing down the driveway to the garage, telling people where to go to buy honey. She had never bought any. Someone had told her that the farmer’s wife wore an apron with swarming bees embroidered on the front and earrings with clusters of bees dangling from them. Not far from the Honey House was a wide dirt driveway that led to half a dozen pastel-colored trailers. A small American flag that had been anchored, somehow, in a birdbath, flapped in the breeze. Myra pulled quickly to the right; while staring at the flag, she had drifted to the center of the road, and a truck was coming at her. She heard her tires in the gravel and held the wheel steady. To the left and right, now, were acres of land that had been plowed. A dog trotted along the side of the road. A woman in a plaid skirt, holding a little girl’s hand, walked behind the dog. What did these people do with their lives? What did they think? Depending on her own state of mind, Myra thought they were either desperate or utterly content. She was feeling low today, so it was a day when she was certain they had it all over her: that they cleaned the lint off of the washing machine filter with the same care she used editing her prose, and that both tasks were equally worthwhile. In fact, if she really wanted to feel sorry for herself, these people had appliances and she didn’t — no dishwasher, no washing machine, no dryer — not even a blender after she made the mistake of leaving an iced-tea spoon in hers and turning it on. An iron. Everybody had an iron. It was like having a spine. To cheer herself up, she reminded herself that while everybody had an iron, not everybody had an ironing board. Ironing boards were among the most improvised household articles since coffee tables made out of wood cartons, and cinder block bookcases. She had removed the top board from her bookcase and put it across her table/desk to iron on, when she first came to Vermont. She realized that it was pathetic to equate having an ironing board with being a real adult. That was probably why she often used the ironing board as a chair.
People’s little secrets. The things they would not even think of as being secrets, until someone, say, asked to borrow an ironing board.
She went over the high bump that led down a steep slope to the newspaper’s parking lot. It was Saturday and there were only two cars in the lot; out of habit, she pulled into her space, facing the Leglan River. Before the paper moved into the big brick building, it had been a medical facility; the doctors’ assigned parking place signs were still there. A friend on the paper who had gone to Disneyland had put a cavorting Minnie Mouse decal over hers. Previously she had been Dr. Trigowski. The water was muddy and almost flooded the banks. It had been a rainy summer. The dampness was still in the air, and the sky still looked like rain.
Nate Wells and Herb Walsh were in the newspaper office. Herb had pulled his chair up to Nate’s desk and was shaking his head, much amused by something, as Myra walked in. Nate held a hand up in greeting and picked up his cigarette from the ashtray (another non-ashtray ashtray: a brick with the center gouged out) and took a puff before continuing with what he was reading. There was a picture on Nate’s desk of his wife and child. His wife had left him and was remarried to Nate’s cousin. His child had gone on a camping trip in the Grand Canyon and never been heard from again. There were also two separate photographs of collies. Nate now lived with two collies. At Christmas he had sent out cards with a photograph of the two collies sitting and facing the camera, one with a red bow around its neck and the other with a green bow. Below the picture was printed Greetings from Our House to Yours.
“Read this, read this,” Herb said, taking the piece of paper out of Nate’s hand. “This woman made up her own press release. This sounds like a story for you, Myra.” Herb loved to be amused. He often brought the Enquirer in to work. He especially liked the test in a recent issue that people could take to find out if their co-workers were space aliens.
Under a line of exclamation points, Bulletin had been written in calligraphy. It was an announcement of the founding of a feminist commune, subtitled Deep Breathing Can Destroy the Enemy. As best Myra could make out, it was a holistic approach to man-hating. Since she found these things more depressing than Herb, she was just about to sigh and hand it back when she caught the list of members. The first name on the list was Maureen Hildon’s. Myra’s eye went back to the text. The leader, Davina Cole, had recently acquired the long-abandoned old post office building, and by September I, would be ensconced with ten other women who wished to save mankind from man. Mankind could best be saved by womankind, but the first step necessary was to recondition through relaxation. Self-awareness = satisfaction. Apparently, through talking to yourself, hyperventilating, and examining your breasts, the enemy could be subverted. Potential members were urged to send a full-length black-and-white photograph or, preferably, negative, and $30 to Davina Cole. Space may be limited, Ms. Cole warned, though psychic sisterhood is expansive. There was a drawing in the lower left-hand corner of a woman with fingertips that looked like talons on her breast (nipple mid-center, like a bull’s eye), and an arrow around the breast, moving counterclockwise. Women now embrace destiny not douche bag, it concluded.