As Lenore is stretching the loaves onto the cornmeal-covered baking sheet, she hears the rain start. It hits hard on the garage roof.
After a few minutes Julie comes into the kitchen. “They’re caught in this downpour,” Julie says. “If Sarah had left the car keys, I could go get them.”
“Take my car and pick them up,” Lenore says, pointing with her elbow to the keys hanging on a nail near the door.
“But I don’t know where the store is.”
“You must have passed it driving to our house last night. Just go out of the driveway and turn right. It’s along the main road.”
Julie gets her purple sweater and takes the car keys. “I’ll be right back,” she says.
Lenore can sense that she is glad to escape from the house, that she is happy the rain began.
In the living room Lenore turns the pages of a magazine, and Maria mutters a refrain of “Blue, blue, dark blue, green blue,” noticing the color every time it appears. Lenore sips her tea. She puts a Michael Hurley record on George’s stereo. Michael Hurley is good rainy-day music. George has hundreds of records. His students used to love to paw through them. Cleverly, he has never made any attempt to keep up with what is currently popular. Everything is jazz or eclectic: Michael Hurley, Keith Jarrett, Ry Cooder.
Julie comes back. “I couldn’t find them,” she says. She looks as if she expects to be punished.
Lenore is surprised. She is about to say something like “You certainly didn’t look very hard, did you?” but she catches Julie’s eye. She looks young and afraid, and perhaps even a little crazy.
“Well, we tried,” Lenore says.
Julie stands in front of the fire, with her back to Lenore. Lenore knows she is thinking that she is dense — that she does not recognize the implications.
“They might have walked through the woods instead of along the road,” Lenore says. “That’s possible.”
“But they would have gone out to the road to thumb when the rain began, wouldn’t they?”
Perhaps she misunderstood what Julie was thinking. Perhaps it has never occurred to Julie until now what might be going on.
“Maybe they got lost,” Julie says. “Maybe something happened to them.”
“Nothing happened to them,” Lenore says. Julie turns around and Lenore catches that small point of light in her eye again. “Maybe they took shelter under a tree,” she says. “Maybe they’re screwing. How should I know?”
It is not a word Lenore often uses. She usually tries not to think about that at all, but she can sense that Julie is very upset.
“Really?” Julie says. “Don’t you care, Mrs. Anderson?”
Lenore is amused. There’s a switch. All the students call her husband George and her Lenore; now one of them wants to think there’s a real adult here to explain all this to her.
“What am I going to do?” Lenore says. She shrugs. Julie does not answer.
“Would you like me to pour you tea?” Lenore asks.
“Yes,” Julie says. “Please.”
George and Sarah return in the middle of the afternoon. George says that they decided to go on a spree to the big city — it is really a small town he is talking about, but calling it the big city gives him an opportunity to speak ironically. They sat in a restaurant bar, waiting for the rain to stop, George says, and then they thumbed a ride home. “But I’m completely sober,” George says, turning for the first time to Sarah. “What about you?” He is all smiles. Sarah lets him down. She looks embarrassed. Her eyes meet Lenore’s quickly, and jump to Julie. The two girls stare at each other, and Lenore, left with only George to look at, looks at the fire and then gets up to pile on another log.
Gradually it becomes clear that they are trapped together by the rain. Maria undresses her paper doll and deliberately rips a feather off its hat. Then she takes the pieces to Lenore, almost in tears. The baby cries, and Lenore takes him off the sofa, where he has been sleeping under his yellow blanket, and props him in the space between her legs as she leans back on her elbows to watch the fire. It’s her fire, and she has the excuse of presiding over it.
“How’s my boy?” George says. The baby looks, and looks away.
It gets dark early, because of the rain. At four-thirty George uncorks a bottle of Beaujolais and brings it into the living room, with four glasses pressed against his chest with his free arm. Julie rises nervously to extract the glasses, thanking him too profusely for the wine. She gives a glass to Sarah without looking at her.
They sit in a semicircle in front of the fire and drink the wine. Julie leafs through magazines—New Times, National Geographic—and Sarah holds a small white dish painted with gray-green leaves that she has taken from the coffee table; the dish contains a few shells and some acorn caps, a polished stone or two, and Sarah lets these objects run through her fingers. There are several such dishes in the house, assembled by George. He and Lenore gathered the shells long ago, the first time they went away together, at a beach in North Carolina. But the acorn caps, the shiny turquoise and amethyst stones — those are there, she knows, because George likes the effect they have on visitors; it is an expected unconventionally, really. He has also acquired a few small framed pictures, which he points out to guests who are more important than worshipful students — tiny oil paintings of fruit, prints with small details from the unicorn tapestries. He pretends to like small, elegant things. Actually, when they visit museums in New York he goes first to El Grecos and big Mark Rothko canvases. She could never get him to admit that what he said or did was sometimes false. Once, long ago, when he asked if he was still the man of her dreams, she said, “We don’t get along well anymore.” “Don’t talk about it,” he said — no denial, no protest. At best, she could say things and get away with them; she could never get him to continue such a conversation.
At the dinner table, lit with white candles burning in empty wine bottles, they eat off his grandmother’s small flowery plates. Lenore looks out a window and sees, very faintly in the dark, their huge oak tree. The rain has stopped. A few stars have come out, and there are glints on the wet branches. The oak tree grows very close to the window. George loved it when her brother once suggested that some of the bushes and trees should be pruned away from the house so it would not always be so dark inside; it gave him a chance to rave about the beauty of nature, to say that he would never tamper with it. “It’s like a tomb in here all day,” her brother had said. Since moving here, George has learned the names of almost all the things that are growing on the land: he can point out abelia bushes, spirea, laurels. He subscribes to National Geographic (although she rarely sees him looking at it). He is at last in touch, he says, being in the country puts him in touch. He is saying it now to Sarah, who has put down her ivory-handled fork to listen to him. He gets up to change the record. Side two of the Telemann record begins softly.
Sarah is still very much on guard with Lenore; she makes polite conversation with her quickly when George is out of the room. “You people are so wonderful,” she says. “I wish my parents could be like you.”
“George would be pleased to hear that,” Lenore says, lifting a small piece of pasta to her lips.