Later, Sarah and George come back to the house. It is still raining. It turns out that they took a bottle of brandy with them, and they are both drenched and drunk. He holds Sarah’s finger with one of his. Sarah, seeing Lenore, lets his finger go. But then he turns — they have not even said hello yet — and grabs her up, spins her around, stumbling into the living room, and says, “I am in love.”
Julie and Lenore watch them in silence.
“See no evil,” George says, gesturing with the empty brandy bottle to Julie. “Hear no evil,” George says, pointing to Lenore. He hugs Sarah closer. “I speak no evil. I speak the truth. I am in love!”
Sarah squirms away from him, runs from the room and up the stairs in the dark.
George looks blankly after her, then sinks to the floor and smiles. He is going to pass it off as a joke. Julie looks at him in horror, and from upstairs Sarah can be heard sobbing. Her crying awakens the baby.
“Excuse me,” Lenore says. She climbs the stairs and goes into her son’s room, and picks him up. She talks gently to him, soothing him with lies. He is too sleepy to be alarmed for long. In a few minutes he is asleep again, and she puts him back in his crib. In the next room Sarah is crying more quietly now. Her crying is so awful that Lenore almost joins in, but instead she pats her son. She stands in the dark by the crib and then at last goes out and down the hallway to her bedroom. She takes off her clothes and gets into the cold bed. She concentrates on breathing normally. With the door closed and Sarah’s door closed, she can hardly hear her. Someone taps lightly on her door.
“Mrs. Anderson,” Julie whispers. “Is this your room?”
“Yes,” Lenore says. She does not ask her in.
“We’re going to leave. I’m going to get Sarah and leave. I didn’t want to just walk out without saying anything.”
Lenore just cannot think how to respond. It was really very kind of Julie to say something. She is very close to tears, so she says nothing.
“Okay,” Julie says, to reassure herself. “Good night. We’re going.”
There is no more crying. Footsteps. Miraculously, the baby does not wake up again, and Maria has slept through all of it. She has always slept well. Lenore herself sleeps worse and worse, and she knows that George walks much of the night, most nights. She hasn’t said anything about it. If he thinks she’s simple, what good would her simple wisdom do him?
The oak tree scrapes against the window in the wind and rain. Here on the second floor, under the roof, the tinny tapping is very loud. If Sarah and Julie say anything to George before they leave, she doesn’t hear them. She hears the car start, then die out. It starts again — she is praying for the car to go — and after conking out once more it rolls slowly away, crunching gravel. The bed is no warmer; she shivers. She tries hard to fall asleep. The effort keeps her awake. She squints her eyes in concentration instead of closing them. The only sound in the house is the electric clock, humming by her bed. It is not even midnight.
She gets up, and without turning on the light, walks downstairs. George is still in the living room. The fire is nothing but ashes and glowing bits of wood. It is as cold there as it was in the bed.
“That damn bitch,” George says. “I should have known she was a stupid little girl.”
“You went too far,” Lenore says. “I’m the only one you can go too far with.”
“Damn it,” he says, and pokes the fire. A few sparks shoot up. “Damn it,” he repeats under his breath.
His sweater is still wet. His shoes are muddy and ruined. Sitting on the floor by the fire, his hair matted down on his head, he looks ugly, older, unfamiliar.
She thinks of another time, when it was warm. They were walking on the beach together, shortly after they met, gathering shells. Little waves were rolling in. The sun went behind the clouds and there was a momentary illusion that the clouds were still and the sun was racing ahead of them. “Catch me,” he said, breaking away from her. They had been talking quietly, gathering shells. She was so surprised at him for breaking away that she ran with all her energy and did catch him, putting her hand out and taking hold of the band of his swimming trunks as he veered into the water. If she hadn’t stopped him, would he really have run far out into the water, until she couldn’t follow anymore? He turned on her, just as abruptly as he had run away, and grabbed her and hugged her hard, lifted her high. She had clung to him, held him close. He had tried the same thing when he came back from the walk with Sarah, and it hadn’t worked.
“I wouldn’t care if their car went off the road,” he says bitterly.
“Don’t say that,” she says.
They sit in silence, listening to the rain. She slides over closer to him, puts her hand on his shoulder and leans her head there, as if he could protect her from the awful things he has wished into being.
Colorado
Penelope was in Robert’s apartment, sitting on the floor, with the newspaper open between her legs. Her boots were on the floor in front of her. Robert had just fixed the zipper of one of the boots. It was the third time he had repaired the boots, and this time he suggested that she buy a new pair. “Why?” she said. “You fix them fine every time.” In many of their discussions they came close to arguments, but they always stopped short. Penelope simply would not argue. She thought it took too much energy. She had not even argued with Robert’s friend Johnny, whom she had been living with, moved out on her, taking twenty dollars of her money. Still, she hated Johnny for it, and sometimes Robert worried that even though he and Penelope didn’t argue, she might be thinking badly of him, too. So he didn’t press it. Who cared whether she bought new boots or not?
Penelope came over to Robert’s apartment almost every evening. He had met her more than a year before, and they had been nearly inseparable ever since. For a while he and Penelope and Johnny and another friend, Cyril, had shared a house in the country, not far from New Haven. They had all been in graduate school then. Now Johnny had gone, and the others were living in New Haven, in different apartments, and they were no longer going to school. Penelope was living with a man named Dan. Robert could not understand this, because Dan and Penelope did not communicate even well enough for her to ask him to fix her boots. She hobbled over to Robert’s apartment instead. And he couldn’t understand it back when she was living with Johnny, because Johnny had continued to see another girl, and had taken Penelope’s money and tried to provoke arguments, even though Penelope wouldn’t argue. Robert could understand Penelope’s moving in with Dan at first, because she hadn’t had enough money to pay her share of the house rent and Dan had an apartment in New Haven, but why had she just stayed there? Once, when he was drunk, Robert had asked her that, and she had sighed and said she wouldn’t argue with him when he’d been drinking. He had not been trying to argue. He had just wanted to know what she was thinking. But she didn’t like to talk about herself, and saying that he was drunk had been a convenient excuse. The closest he ever got to an explanation was when she told him once that it was important not to waste your energy jumping from one thing to another. She had run away from home when she was younger, and when she returned, things were only worse. She had flunked out of Bard and dropped out of Antioch and the University of Connecticut, and now she knew that all colleges were the same — there was no point in trying one after another. She had traded her Ford for a Toyota, and Toyotas were no better than Fords.