When they announced to his family their engagement, Nora had the sensation of being surrounded by a herd of curious cows: parents, aunts, uncles, and sisters all crowded around, looking at her, chewing on their impressions. Finally, they smiled and clapped Ron on the back. His mother, a sentimental woman with ponderous hips, alternated between crying and squeezing Nora’s hands, looking down at them beseechingly, as if an agreement might be forged within her grasp.
Nora’s father only said, “It’s about time, at the rate you two have been going.” He pretended to be indifferent, but she knew he was relieved. A widower who had yet to live alone, he’d long ago given up hope that anybody would ever take this sad, strange daughter off his hands.
Even in a small town, news doesn’t stay fresh for long. People move on. And that summer, the LeDivic kidnapping was only one of several alarming events. On the same day as the Dewey boy was released from the hospital, a disagreement over communism spilled out of the dancehall and somebody was stabbed, staining the cement with blood. Elsewhere in the country, college students took over campus buildings, shouting about civil rights and the war. They stomped and chanted until their anger was heard in the smallest backwaters, and by the least involved citizens, including Nora’s father, who’d never paid much attention to anything save for his crops. Now he spent evenings listening to the radio with his chin on his fist. Society itself seemed ready to blow apart, but it was hard to pinpoint the danger — whether it was the Viet Cong or the black radicals or the women tearing off their bras. And in the midst of it all, an astronaut stuck an American flag into the moon. The event was broadcast on every television across the country, into every hushed living room. Nora didn’t understand why anybody would want to go to the moon in the first place, and seeing two puffy men meander over the surface clarified nothing at all. Her father would accept no part of it. “It’s a damned fake,” he said, and would continue saying for years. “It said ‘simulated’ right there on the screen. Am I the only person in this goddamned country who can read?”
In the newspaper, Nora learned of a pregnant starlet who’d been killed in California. Her murder was described as “ritualistic,” and Nora shuddered to think of LeDivic, with his notebook of bizarre drawings and his carefully tied noose. Was LeDivic a sadist, like the hippie they suspected in the Tate murder? And how many sadists were there in any given town, driving down any given road? For every missing person there was someone who knew where they could be found, in flesh or in bones, and it bothered Nora to think the culprits walked around with this dark knowledge, hiding it, possibly even treasuring it. As a girl, she’d seen a boy disembowel a toad that had been lured onto the playground by spring rain, and perhaps what was most disturbing — she explained to Ron as they sat eating in a local diner — was the boy’s glee, his obvious enjoyment of the toad’s suffering.
“Woman,” Ron said. “You sure know how to throw a man off his feed.” He wiped his mouth and dropped his napkin onto his plate.
“I think everybody is capable of cruelty, don’t you?” she went on. “Given the right circumstances, anybody could be. But it’s different when people enjoy it. That’s the part I don’t like to think about, whether Clay LeDivic enjoyed what he did to those kids.”
“So quit thinking about it.”
“That’s easy for you to say. None of it happened to you.”
Ron made a noise in his throat. “None of it happened to you either, Nora. You’ve made too much of it. I think you’re the one who’s enjoying it, if you want to know the truth.”
This stung so badly that she stood up from the table and stared at him through brimming eyes, unable to speak. Then she fled the diner for the parking lot, where she roamed for a while but ultimately had nowhere to go but Ron’s Plymouth, since home was too far to get to on foot. She sat fuming in the passenger seat for a chilly half hour, and when Ron still didn’t emerge, she had no choice but to go back inside the diner to get him.
She hadn’t even reached the door when she saw he wasn’t alone. Through its big rectangular window she could see two girls sharing his booth. One she recognized — a cheerful Italian girl who went to Grange Hall dances. But the other was unfamiliar. She had a head of springy blond curls, and she was sitting so close to Ron their shoulders touched. Rather than coming out to find her, he was telling a story or a joke, gesturing with his hands, regarding the girls with a serious, confidential expression. When he finished, the blonde laughed wildly, throwing her head back so that the overhead lamp made her throat look smooth and white as marble. Ron seemed pleased with himself, and while Nora watched from the darkness, he leaned in to plant a kiss on the strange girl’s neck.
Woman — that’s what he’d taken to calling her in the months leading up to the incident in the diner, as though they were the only two humans on earth. Don’t sass me, woman. Or, woman, don’t give me any more of your lip. He was making fun of a certain type of man, she realized, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t also making fun of her. He sometimes called her Neither Nora, and Nora Noreen. And he had a habit of twisting the lyrics of songs that came on the radio, making them dirty and about her and belting them out the truck window. He had a strikingly good voice, and it was a shame he wouldn’t just sing the songs as they were meant to be sung. Sometimes, when she cooked Sunday supper, he tried to lure her into dancing by the stove.
“I’m cooking,” she’d protest.
“Ah, well. It doesn’t look too complicated.”
“It’s Beef Wellington!”
“I’ll beef your Wellington.”
This he’d say loudly enough for her father to hear, if he was in the next room. He’d take her hands and shuffle her around the creaky old floor. Rarely could Nora bring herself to enjoy it. She was busy with the details of the recipe, or thinking about the book she was currently reading, or some scrap of gossip she’d overheard, or just nothing, a comforting blankness.
Of course, these were differences they might’ve worked out between them in the course of forty or fifty years. Married, they might have grown toward each other, she becoming looser and softer, Ron growing quieter, more contemplative, losing some of his boyish imprudence. They might’ve had children that combined their natures, a smiling daughter and a tall, gray-eyed son.