“What did he say?”
“Just how he was, and he asked about everybody here, you and everybody. He’s got a car, too.”
“Why doesn’t he drive it over to see us?”
“He’s working very hard,” said the mother, turning away to close the doors of the dish cupboard.
So he’s working hard, Irene thought, he could come see his mother once a year. But telephoning’s a big enough favor for Big Mister Man to do. And Mister Man’s mother laps it up and says thanks…
I can’t take it, I really can’t take it any more. Now I just hurt mama saying that about why doesn’t he drive over to see us. Everybody I know just hurts each other. All the time. I have got to get out. I can’t keep coming home. Next time Victor tries to cop a feel or even touches me or treats her like shit I’m going to blow, I can’t shut up any more, and that’ll just make it worse and hurt her more, and I can’t do anything, and I can’t take it. Love! What good is love? I love her. I love Michael, just like she does. So what? God help me, I’ll never fall in love, never be in love, never love anybody. Love is just a fancy word for how to hurt somebody worse. I want to get out. Clear out, clear out, clear out.
That night when she left her mother she did not go down the road to Chelsea Gardens, but turned left from the house, walking up the gravel road till she was out of the glare of Victor’s floodlight and then cutting off left again across the fields. It was unpleasant walking in the dark, for the ground was hard and uneven under the tangled grass, and she carried no flashlight for fear of attracting the attention of a bunch of leatherjackets or the suburban weirdo gang that sometimes hung around near the factory. The same stupid fear that spoiled all walks alone since her school friend Doris had been raped by a gang in a half-built house in Chelsea Gardens, the stupid fear that left no free place except the sweet desolation of the ain country.
But in the woods the path did not lead down between the laurels and the pine into the clear, eternal evening. It was warm, dark; crickets sang loud and soft, near and far; under that singing was a heavy, continual sound or vibration, cars on the highway perhaps or the sound of the whole city, whose glow in the heavy night sky made it possible to walk even here in the woods. But there was no sound of water running. She walked a few steps past where the threshold should have been, and then turned back. There was no way.
She remembered then how she had watched him go through the gate, across the threshold, the heavy stranger, how he had walked on and the twilight had flowed on before him like a wave. That had been frightening; she did not like to think of it. It had been his fault. It had happened to him, not to her. She could always get back. She had brought him back. It was from this side that she could not always cross.
Could he? Was he there now, where she could not come?
Dogged, she came back to Pincus’s woods the next afternoon after work, and every two or three days for a week, two weeks, as if it were a contest that must be won by willpower, by refusal to give up. At the end of the second week she began to drive every afternoon after work first to the paint factory parking lot, leave the car there, and cross the fields to the wood. She found she was beating a path in the dry August grass and changed her route, going round about one way or another each time, so as to leave no track for others, that other, to follow. But there was nothing to hide. The woods; blackberry thickets; a path; a culvert; after a while a barbed-wire fence straggling across the foot of a hill among the trees. A couple of sparrows chirping, the faint drum of the cars on the highway, and the sound of the city like the breathing of an animal thirty miles long, so big you couldn’t hear it. The hot, late sunshine and the soft, bluish air. Usually she stood a minute where the path came down, where the threshold should have been, then turned around, plodded back across the fields to her car, drove to the apartment, a few blocks west of Chelsea Gardens Avenue.
Patsi and Rick had been having a hectic sexual reconciliation, the last flare-up. On a Saturday night after a visit with her mother she got back in the middle of the biggest fight yet. She could not get out of it. She was part of the family. When Patsi accused Rick of sleeping with Irene she had to defend him and herself; when Rick accused Patsi of not sharing fair on the money she had to stand up for Patsi, who then turned on her for pushing everybody around. After hours and hours of it she realised that the only thing to do, and she should have done it hours ago, was to pack up, pay up, and get out.
Patsi and Rick were sullen, shellshocked. Patsi made an elaborately fair division of the raspberry preserves they had put up together last month, insisting that Irene take exactly half the jars; she kept crying, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks, but she did not say goodbye. Rick helped Irene carry her stuff down to the car and kept saying, “Ah, shit. Well, shit.” It was after eight on Sunday morning when Irene got away. She drove her car, loaded with her worldly goods in two grocery cartons and a handleless suitcase, down Chelsea Gardens Avenue and Chelsea Gardens Place across the road to the farm. The three little dogs began to yap and the Doberman to bellow at the sound of the car in the Sunday-morning silence. Except for the dogs, the farmhouse, surrounded by gutted automobile carcasses, looked derelict. She backed out of the yard, turned right on the gravel road, drove to the parking lot below the paint factory, and parked there. She locked the car and set off once more across the weedy fields already simmering in the heat of what was going to be a fierce day. If the way’s closed I’ll wait there, she thought. I’ll sit down and wait there till it opens. I don’t care if it takes a month…She was crazy-headed from the endless night of quarreling, arguing, explaining, recriminating, excusing. She had had no breakfast, though between four and five A.M. she had eaten a box of pretzel sticks and drunk a quart of milk while Rick was telling Patsi how she played power games and she was telling him that he was a male chauvinist…I’ll go to sleep there in front of the threshold, and wake up every now and then and see if it’s open yet, Irene told herself. Open, open, open, the word jolted in her head as her steps jolted her body. Hot daylight glared in her eyes. Open, eyes. Open, door. There’s the woods, there’s the way into the woods. There’s the ditch, there’s the ivy patch. There’s the big thicket, there’s the path down, the pine with the red trunk, the gateway and the gate, the opened door, the way into my country, my own country, my heart’s home.
She entered into the twilight. She drank from the stream, then crossed and went a little way upriver to a nook sheltered by two big elder bushes where, years ago, she had used to sleep. She lay down there, and made a little moaning sob in pure weariness and the bewilderment of a wish fulfilled; and slept.
Sleep in the ain country was so deep it had no dreams. I am the dream, she thought drowsily, the dream am I. I am the mare but there’s no night. What’s that?—and she was awake sitting bolt upright and her heart pounding, for it had been a noise that waked her, a high gobbling scream far off in the woods—had there been a noise?
Nothing but the sound of water running and the sighing of wind high up in the trees. The sky was quiet. Nothing moved in the forest.