“I thought you might be here,” Ryder said when she opened the door.
“I’m trying to sleep.” She did not ask him to take off his raincoat but simply stood there, trying for once to examine him closely, to make some final damning judgment. She remembered once seeing in his apartment a postcard from a girl, possibly even Nancy Dupree — it had been signed “XXXX and you know what, from B”—which read “Loved seeing you Saturday nite you looked so sexy in your white pants.” Although “sexy” was not a word she had ever applied to anyone, she had tried to see Ryder that way for several days. But all she had seen, then as now, was Ryder, and when she said, the next time he wore white pants, “You look fat-assed in those pants, Ryder, they don’t flatter you,” it was no judgment, only response.
“What are you looking at,” he said.
“I’ve been trying to sleep,” she repeated, defeated. “I’m not looking at anything.”
Fifteen minutes later he had her down on the floor; she had refused to go near the couch.
“You want it,” he said. She had her legs crossed and her face turned away from him.
“I do not.”
“What difference do you think it makes now.” He pushed her skirt up around her waist. “After I’ve screwed you maybe four, five times a week every week for the past five years.”
“Four and a half years,” she said faintly; his logic remained intact.
“Four and a half years.”
“I never wanted it.” Recognizing immediately that this clear untruth tended only to weaken her position, she amended it: “A lot of times I only pretended to want it.”
“You want it now, all right. You don’t have to start acting half-assed with me.”
After he had gone (Whose girl? Your girl) Martha went upstairs and lay on her bed until she heard, just as it was getting dark, the children’s voices downstairs.
She found Lily in the kitchen, pulling off Julie’s galoshes. “Where’s Everett?” she asked.
“Still working on the levees. I don’t know.”
“I’m going to see if I can find him.” Martha pulled on a raincoat, buttoned it briskly, and then, as if she had forgotten why she wanted the raincoat in the first place, sat down and slowly began to unbutton it again.
“You’re undoing your coat,” Julie said, laying her head in Martha’s lap. “Where you going?”
Martha smoothed Julie’s hair. “I guess nowhere. I guess I couldn’t find him.”
“I guess not,” Julie agreed. She was the kind of child who agreed with anything said by an adult. “You coming to the parade?”
“What parade is that?”
“The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. It’s Saint Patrick’s Day in town.”
“Who all’s going?”
“Me and Mommy and Knight. Only Knight can’t go if he doesn’t apologize for breaking my pedometer.”
“Knight broke your pedometer? However will you figure mileage?”
“That’s the thing. Anyway, two of our cousins are in it.”
“In what?”
“In the parade,” Lily said. “You aren’t following this very closely. Sally Randall’s children are marching and I thought we should go wave at them. We’re going to have hamburgers first. Why don’t you get dressed and come.”
“I guess I’m dressed all right. I don’t guess I have to get all done up for the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, do I. You know what it’ll be. There’ll be a bagpipe band playing ‘The Campbells Are Coming.’ The Air Force Band playing ‘Loch Lomond.’ And a battalion of small girls in spangled two-piece bathing suits and white plastic Stetsons doing close-order drill to ‘Temptation.’ You-came-Ah was a-lone-Ah should-a-known — You were Taymp-tay-shun.”
“Martha,” Julie screamed, throwing herself at Martha’s knees. “Stop making fun.”
“I’m not making fun.” Martha picked Julie up and swung her around. “I am telling you gospel. Because baby, I have seen Saint Patrick’s Day before, seen it all. ‘Temptation’ will be sung—through a public-address system on a truck behind the small girls — by a mother wearing a rose crêpe dress with bugle beads, a short red car coat, and harlequin-framed glasses. So much for that. There will also be the Sheriff’s Posse: fifteen dentists on fifteen palominos. And Julie baby, we’re so wide open out here there’ll probably even be the Masons.”
“The Masons are not our cousins.”
“That’s right, baby. The Randalls are our cousins.”
Lily stood up and picked up a lipstick from the shelf beside the sink. “You coming or not?”
Suddenly listless, Martha did not answer.
“If you’re coming you better put on some shoes.”
“What time is it?”
“Six. A little before.”
“I was supposed to go somewhere. Sam Bradley and his brother were supposed to pick me up at six-thirty.”
Lily blotted her lipstick on a piece of paper toweling and looked at Martha. “Then you can’t come.”
“Yes I can. I can come all right.” Martha stood up and took from the pocket of her raincoat the dark glasses she wore almost constantly now.
“You want to call Sam before we go?”
“If I wanted to call Sam I’d call him, I mean wouldn’t I?”
By the time they had driven into town (“Knight can look for Nevada plates and Julie for Arizona. That’s right, there are more people in Arizona but you forget Nevada is closer. All right, both of you look for Arizona plates”) and stopped at a drive-in for hamburgers (“I said hamburgers, Knight, I did not say steak sandwich and I did not say chicken-in-a-basket. All right, chiliburgers. You don’t even like chili”), the parade was already underway: they had missed, a policeman told them as Lily was locking the station wagon, the Mayor’s Cavalcade and the Knights of Columbus. “Cheer up, sweetie,” he said to Julie. “There’ll be more.”
“You bet there will, sweetie,” Martha whispered, giggling with Julie as fifteen palominos pranced into view, and then Knight was yelling Hey Horse! Why did the chicken cross the road? and Horse turned out to be not a horse at all but the name by which Sally Randall’s son was known to his intimates; not long after Horse Randall and the Elk Grove Firehouse Five passed by, followed by a shivering blond drum majorette and a ragged line of high-school boys whistling and hooting, the rain began again, and when they looked for Martha she was gone. By the time they saw her, standing in front of the Rexall drugstore on the corner, the crowd was breaking up, going for cover, scattering into doorways and automobiles.
“Meet us at the car,” Lily shouted over the idling of motors, the shifting of gears.
Instead Martha ran back down the block to where Lily stood with the children. Rain streamed down her face, across her sunglasses, down the neck of her unbuttoned raincoat.