“What makes you think the world is?” Amanda asked.
“I know it is.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. Nobody’s kidding out there. Out there you work, and you eat, and you live. I want to live. Amanda, I think I... Amanda, don’t you feel very important?”
“What do you mean?”
“Important. Just important being alive and being a girl... a woman? I... Amanda, I think that’s very important, being a woman. I mean, I know you got offended when Matthew touched you tonight. Well, I don’t feel that way, I feel quite flattered, I feel so good when I’m desired. I like being the way I am, and I like to think that someone wants to touch me, that it’s exciting for a man to touch me because I’m a woman. I enjoy everything about being a woman, Amanda. And I think it’s important. That’s why I have to get away from this trivial little-girl stuff, to get out there and see what’s happening and know what’s happening and to... to live because that’s what being a woman is. Because... Amanda, I want to have babies. I want to have dozens of babies. I want to meet that person I don’t know yet, oh I wish I meet him, I wish he doesn’t pass me by and not know me, I want to have dozens of his babies. And when I meet him, I really want to be a woman, I want to have reached the point when I come to him where I really am a woman, where everything he ever thought of as womanly is me, and, Amanda, I’ll bring all this to him and we’ll be so rich because he’ll be bringing to me everything that’s a man.”
Gillian paused.
“I have to leave Talmadge,” she said very softly.
“I see.”
“There’s so much to do.”
“Yes.”
“This is May,” she said. “And then there’ll be June, and the semester will be over.” She paused. “I won’t be coming back.”
“Yes.”
“Amanda, don’t... don’t be so afraid. Don’t be so afraid of life.”
“Yes, Gillian.”
The room was silent.
“Good night, dear,” Gillian said. “I’m very sleepy.”
“Good night, Gillian.” Amanda paused. Almost inaudibly, she said, “I’ll miss you.”
The town of Talmadge, Connecticut, became a different sort of town during the summer months, and Julia Regan — who hated the town anyway — hated it more during that loathsome hiatus. The change never really occurred until after final examinations were over at the university and the students began leaving for their homes. It was then that the town settled into its colonial stupor and became a lazy sort of fly-buzzing town, with giant maples spreading dappled sunshine on the wide walks of the main street, the twin steeples of the First Congregational Church dominating the hill and the town, white against blue, and far in the distance the walled and dormant university. The townspeople were really quite proud of the university, and yet they sighed a deep sigh of relief whenever June rolled around and they could reclaim the town for themselves and watch the slow lethargic change that came over it. Actually, the change began with Memorial Day, or at least the beginnings of the change began then. For it was then that the town began reminding itself of its history and its rural character, then that it began tentatively shrugging off the label of “university town,” a label that, unfortunately, put the emphasis on the first word. And since Memorial Day each year became the unofficial day of the beginning of the metamorphosis, it was Memorial Day that Julia Regan came to loathe as a symbol of all that was decadent and stultifying in Talmadge.
On that Memorial Day in 1943, she stood in the school courtyard with her friends and neighbors and watched the preparations for the annual parade to the town hall. There were three fire engines lined up in the schoolyard, side by side. The hood of each complicated-looking machine carried the gold lettering TALMADGE, CONN., FIRE DEPARTMENT, and the brilliant engines only made the sun seem more intense. They had been polished especially for the parade, and all that gleaming brass and red-hot enamel glowed in the noonday sun, reflecting dizzying bursts of brilliance, which were giving Julia a headache.
The Talmadge Volunteer Fire Department, a group composed of ninety-per-cent hick townie and ten-per-cent Madison Avenue commuter, a fraternal group who never attended the same Talmadge parties together but who were expected nonetheless to extinguish fires with great communal camaraderie, stood about in the schoolyard in their dress blue uniforms looking ill-fitted and ill at ease, and possibly hoping that a sudden fire alarm would put an end to their discomfort. Julia Regan, leaning against the wall with her secrets churning inside her head, watched a totally inept pack of cub scouts marching back and forth before the red-and-gold engines in blue-and-yellow slovenliness. The scout leader had graying temples, and his uniform was too tight, and he shouted orders like a martinet, and Julia wished he would hush, and she wondered for perhaps the fiftieth time why she bothered to attend these false town functions in this false-front town. She leaned against the shaded brick of the school building, a woman of thirty-nine, her long brown hair braided into a bun at the back of her neck, her eyes closed as she listened to the “Hup-tup-tripp-fuh” of the troop leader and heard the chaotic cadence of the eager cub scouts and thought, He is dead.
“Hello, Mrs. Regan,” the voice beside her said, and she opened her eyes, smiling automatically even before she knew who was speaking.
“Looks like it’s going to be a good parade,” Ardis Fletcher said.
“Yes,” Julia answered. “It does indeed.” She smiled limply. It was a smile reserved for women, a smile that tried to convey a fragility in direct contradiction to her physical structure. She was a tall, slender woman with a strong and beautiful profile, and the smile she turned on her female friends was one that better suited her sister, Millie. And yet the attempt was not unsuccessful. Despite the big-boned evidence of her body, Julia was thought of by the women of Talmadge as delicate and gentle, if a bit spirited. The men of Talmadge looked at Julia somewhat differently. She had learned very early in life that it was not necessary for a woman to be readily accessible to all men so long as she gave an impression of accessibility. The smile she flashed to men held the possibility of intimacy, promised an arduous and passionate woman if only one could reach her, a mysterious lingering smile with more than a touch of sensuality in it, and yet the smile of a lady. And so, to her credit, the men of Talmadge looked upon her as a good-looking widow — spirited, to be sure — who could possibly, just possibly, and only with the most infinite delicacy and patience, be had. The smile she turned on Ardis Fletcher was her woman-smile, but it was wasted on Ardis, who at nineteen was concerned with nothing more subtle than the shape of her own body, which was about as subtle as a tornado. If anything, Ardis with her bright-red hair and sparkling blue eyes, her short skirt and contour-hugging sweater, supplemented the dazzling splendor of the fire engines and the cub scouts and the school band, which had lined up beside the fire engines in a glittering display of tuba and cornet and trombone.
“Have you heard from Davey?” Ardis asked, and Julia flinched at her use of the diminutive in referring to her son, and noticed too that Ardis did not look at any woman she spoke to; her eyes instead wandered over the eligible male members of the holiday crowd, and one of Julia’s secrets caught in her throat, the fact that her only son David was not in the Pacific any longer but was instead in the Naval prison at San Diego, California. A convict. Her David was a convict.
“Yes,” she answered in her low, steady voice. “I got a letter only yesterday. He’s doing fine.”