As the bus rolled out of the Coast Range and into the heat of the Valley, Lily stopped thinking altogether, lulled by the even rhythm of the telephone poles against field after dry yellow field, by the regular rise and fall of the woman’s voice, by the grinding and shifting of gears as the bus swung off the highway and down the streets of towns in which she seemed to have spent her life: Fairfield-Suisun, Vacaville, Dixon. Although she did not suppose that she had driven through any one of the towns more than on the outside twenty times, they had about them an imprint which to perceive once, especially if that once was on an August afternoon when the streets looked abandoned and the frame buildings as fragile as tinder, was to possess forever. She could close her eyes and tick it off: the Bank of America building, the W.T. Grant store, the Lincoln-Mercury agency; the lone woman in a shapeless dress and flowered straw hat, sitting on the porch of the hotel until her husband was through in town. Off the main street there would be a few blocks of houses, three-storey houses in need of paint, each fronted by a patch of dry grass, maybe a tricycle overturned on the cracked concrete walk. The blinds would be drawn and there would not be any people, anywhere. The afternoon heat could bleach those towns so clean that the houses and the buildings seemed always on the verge of dematerializing; there was the sense that to close one’s eyes on a Valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which had blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible: More Yield from Every Acre with Seeds from Northrup-King.
It was a great comfort, watching the towns come and go through the tinted window of the Greyhound bus. The heat drained the distinctions from things — marriage and divorce and new curtains and overdrafts at the bank, all the same — and Lily could not at the moment imagine any preoccupation strong enough to withstand the summer. At least any preoccupation of hers; Sue Ann, now, was another case. There would be nothing ambiguous about Sue Ann’s responses, nothing ambivalent about her wants: Sue Ann would have kissed Joe Templeton goodbye with no second thoughts. Sue Ann’s problems, unlike her own, offered the compression, the foreshortening of art; her own were inadvertent, makeshift affairs at best, and there with her head resting against the bus window she could not think why she had gone to San Francisco or why she had caused a scene with Everett or how she had gotten pregnant in the first place by somebody she did not much like or why, the heart of the matter, she had thought it made any difference.
When the bus arrived in Sacramento at six o’clock, however, she emerged as if from a darkened theater into the sudden glare, the sudden presence of people, and the sudden recollection of why it made any difference. Standing on the loading platform, holding her raincoat and her overnight bag, she could remember just about everything except why she had chosen a four-hour bus ride over two air-conditioned hours in a Southern Pacific club car. For reasons now lost to her, it had seemed in San Francisco the thing to do; had seemed the way of the Cross.
I’ve been worried, Joe said when she called him from the bus station. There seemed to her reproof in every syllable.
“I’m sorry. I just got into town.” She did not want to talk to Joe and did not know why she had called him, except that she had promised to.
“I worried,” he repeated. “I couldn’t sleep. I yelled at Francie.”
“You yelled at Francie.” She leaned against the wall of the telephone booth and tried to open the glass door with her foot, succeeding only in catching her heel between the door and the jamb.
“How are you?”
“I’m all right.” Working her foot free, she let the shoe drop. “I’m fine.”
“You sound pretty good.”
“How did you expect me to sound?”
In the prolonged silence which followed she reached to retrieve her shoe and saw that she had snagged her stocking on the lock of her overnight case.
“Damn it.” She jammed her foot into her shoe and brushed her damp hair from her face.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. I was just putting my shoe on.”
“Putting your shoe on? Why did you have your shoes off?”
“No reason, Joe, no reason. I’m just down here in the Greyhound bus station barefoot, see.”
“Cut it out.”
“I’m sorry.”
After a silence Joe said tentatively: “You saw the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“How did it go?”
“It was fine. Everything was just fine.”
“I told you it would be.”
She did not say anything.
“He didn’t charge you any more, did he?”
“No. It went all right.”
“I told you it would. He didn’t want any more money?”
“No, I said.” She was irritated by his preoccupation with the money; it had been her five hundred dollars in the first place. To get the cash she had sold ten shares of an oil stock her father had given her as a wedding present, and she did not like to be reminded of it. Although she had not thought of it before, there was something about Joe’s inability to put his hands on five hundred dollars without Francie’s knowing about it which summed up all his rather aggressive weaknesses.
“I would have cut off my right arm if I could have gone down there for you.”
“Now you cut it out,” she said, and was immediately touched with remorse: if he was dishonest so was she. If she were honest she would not even be talking to him on the telephone.
“There was nothing you could do,” she added, ashamed.
“It’s been pretty bad. You know how bad I felt about it.” He paused. “Maybe I could see you tomorrow.”
“No,” she said rapidly. “I mean I can’t. I have to rest.”
“I guess you better.” He sounded relieved. “I just thought you’d want to talk to someone.”
“Oh Christ. No. I don’t want to talk to someone. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
She clicked off the connection with her finger and dropped the receiver in her lap. Her silk suit was damp with perspiration and stained not only with dust but tea, spilled at the counter in the San Francisco bus station. She should have let the waitress sponge it off but her bus had already been called and she had not wanted to run; she had been afraid that if she moved too quickly the bleeding would begin again.
If she had not wanted to talk to Joe, she certainly did not want to talk to Everett. Nonetheless, she had to get home and felt incapable of explaining to anyone else what she was doing with her suitcase in the Greyhound bus station. She had meant to take the river bus out to the ranch, but the drivers had gone on strike. If it was not one thing it was another. Fumbling in her bag for a cigarette, she dropped two coins in the telephone and dialed her mother’s number. When her mother answered she felt tears rising, hung up without saying anything, and smoked the cigarette down to her fingers. I would have cut off my right arm, she thought viciously. He knew what he could cut off. She blew her nose, snapped her bag shut, and called the ranch.
Everett answered on the first ring. “Sweet Jesus, Lily. You all right?”