“You could lend it to people,” Martha suggested, her hands still in her pockets. “I mean it might be very inspiring.”
“It’s the nicest present you’ve ever given me,” Everett said, getting out of the car and putting his arms around her shoulders. “The nicest anybody’s ever given me.”
After they had put Everett on the train (“The train,” Martha screamed, and the three of them ran, Everett trying to take his other bag from Martha and Martha wrenching it away, to the platform, where Everett kissed first Lily, then Martha, and then a small girl who had wandered, carrying an American flag on a stick, from a family at the far end of the platform), Lily and Martha sat in the car, not speaking, until the train began to roll. Tapping an unlighted cigarette on the dashboard and humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Martha had seemed, until then, in trance. When the train whistled, however, she jumped out of the car and ran again to the platform, calling Everett’s name, looking in all the windows as the cars gathered speed, and then she walked slowly back to the station wagon, her raincoat fallen open and her pale blue nightgown trailing through the leaves that blew across the concrete parking lot.
“Get in,” Lily said. “We’ll get some breakfast.”
“He left the flowers.”
“He’s got The McClellan Journal. That’s what counts.”
Martha looked away. Lily saw that she was crying.
“They’d only have died on the train,” Lily said. “You put them in your room.”
Martha slammed the door closed. “I think I’ll go over home with you.”
“I thought you had a midterm.”
“I do.”
“We’ll get some breakfast,” Lily repeated, turning the ignition key.
They stopped at a drive-in near the Davis campus. Martha talked animatedly for a few minutes about the rôle played by Alice Lee Grosjean in the Long Administration in Louisiana (it seemed she was writing a paper about the Longs) and about someone at Berkeley who had invited her down for the Miami Triad dance. (It was to be at the Fairmont and she really wanted to go, except this boy had an unfortunate predilection for saying things like you’re the most terrific girl I’ve ever known, and she really wasn’t up to that kind of thing, not these days, not any more.) Then, abruptly, she stopped talking and began examining her fingernails, three of which were enameled a brilliant American Beauty red.
“Everett said last night I shouldn’t wear fingernail polish,” she said after a while. “So I started to take it off this morning but I was in a hurry and spilled the whole bottle of remover. All over Betty Jean’s V-Mail.” Martha giggled. Betty Jean, who was engaged to a Marine, was her roommate and current bête noire. According to Martha, Betty Jean saved on board money by eating cheese and crackers in their room instead of lunch downstairs; the further economy was that she then saved the cheese glasses for her hope chest. Martha claimed that Betty Jean had twenty-seven cheese glasses, fifteen with red tulips and twelve with blue cornflowers.
“It’s a pretty color,” Lily said.
“Everett doesn’t like it. I told you.” Martha began drumming her fingernails on the metal tray.
Lily did not say anything.
“You’ll miss Everett,” Martha said finally.
“Yes.”
“A whole lot?”
“Of course.”
Martha looked out the window. “How much?”
“A whole lot,” Lily said, faintly irritated. “What did you mean about the boy who asked you to the Miami Triad? Why don’t you go?”
“Daddy thinks I should get married.”
“What’s that got to do with the Miami Triad?”
Martha did not answer.
“Who do you want to marry?” Lily said.
“I don’t know. Somebody.” Elaborately, Martha lit a cigarette. “It doesn’t much matter who, does it?”
Lily shrugged, and after a while Martha reached in front of her and flicked on the lights to call the carhop.
“I better take my midterm.”
When Lily stopped in front of the dormitory, Martha opened the door but did not get out. “Listen,” she said. “Do you think I should?”
“Not unless you want to. Not unless you love someone.”
“Come off it, Lily. I didn’t expect you to talk like such a fool. Whoever loved anybody for more than two weeks. Except your own family. Or maybe somebody you’ve lived with for years and years, I don’t know about that.”
“There’s a lot of time.”
“ ‘There’s a lot of time,’ ” Martha mimicked. “There’s no time at all. That’s exactly the point. Everybody’s going away, and half of everybody’s going to die, and the war may go on twenty years, and Everett’s gone away—”
“Anyway,” she added. “I’m sure I don’t know who I’d marry. I’m sure I don’t know anyone who could take care of me.”
“Maybe,” Lily said after a while, “you could marry someone you could take care of. Maybe that’s the same thing in the end.” As she said it, it occurred to her that she might well have happened, while fumbling through platitudes for Martha’s benefit, upon an actual fact, a profound truth: someone could take care of you or you could take care of someone; you could be told or you could tell the comfortable loving fictions (If you loved me you would steal for me, and tell me fairy tales of a happy land, it was, she thought, a German song), and in either case what was involved — all that was involved — was a commitment. Perhaps it did not matter much who made it, or how or why: it might very well be the same thing in the end. It doesn’t much matter who does it.
Martha picked up one of the chrysanthemums and began rolling and shredding the petals into small balls.
“Maybe it would be the same for you,” she said finally. “You’re so strong.”
“I am not,” Lily said, jarred by Martha’s moodiness and by the note in her voice. “I’m not a bit strong.”
Martha shrugged and got out of the car. “All right, you’re not a bit strong. It’s your act, Lily baby, you play it any way you want. Anyway,” she added, “you’re strong enough to make people take care of you.”