"She loves you."
"And I love her, too. I couldn't love her any more than I do. God help me, she was a great kid, but she never left. She's going to be thirty years old in a couple of weeks. I've been telling her to marry Haas since the first week she started going out with him, and that was six years ago. Nothing comes in balance, Sabine. Your kids either vanish or they won't go away. You pray that one daughter will get married and the other one will get divorced, and there's not a damn thing you can do about either one of them."
Sabine knew that if she stayed long enough, she would hate Howard Plate like the rest of them did. She knew there were stories and reasons, and even without them he made a particularly bad impression. Yet there was a strange way in which she felt almost sorry for him now. The way he couldn't sit comfortably in any room. The way he was outside of his own family. "Do you think Kitty would ever leave him?"
Dot took her eyes off the road to look at Sabine. There was no traffic, only soft snow stacked into banks on either side. "She leaves him all the time. She leaves him, he leaves her. The boys move in, they move out. Kitty can go, she just can't stay away."
Sabine saw Kitty going to the car in the middle of the night, a few items carelessly thrown into a bag, the boys, bleary-eyed from having been woken up, trailing behind her. "I wonder why not."
"You can't really leave somebody in a town like this. There are only ten thousand people here. No matter where you go, you keep seeing them. You can't ever start over again. I understand that. I wanted to leave Al, but where was I going to go? I'd never lived anyplace but Alliance. I didn't have any money, I had kids. Howard and Kitty may well hate each other, but it's their habit to be together, so they keep going back. You want to stop doing something, you have to get away from it. You have to put it behind you."
"And you think that's what Kitty wants?"
"Sure it's what she wants, but she doesn't have any confidence now. She's used up all her confidence on leaving. Kitty doesn't feel young anymore. She doesn't think, Well, I could still start over and do something else. It makes me sad. We've been talking about it for more than twenty years now, how she's going to leave Howard. It makes me tired to think about it still going on."
Dot stopped the car, but they weren't at the house and they weren't in town. They were up on a knoll, a swell of land no more than ten feet high with nothing on it. "This is where all the kids come to neck," Dot said. "Not in the winter, though, only the really hardy kids come here in the winter. There are all sorts of stories about people leaving their engines going to keep the heater on and then running out of gas and freezing to death. But in the summer you have to take a number and wait in line. In the summer this is all corn as far as you can see in any direction. My father had been to the ocean once when he was a young man and he said that the ocean looked exactly like this corn, only blue. He probably said it just to make me feel better about being here."
Even without the corn it was like the ocean. The ocean on some impossibly calm night when the water looked white in the moonlight. The ocean in every direction, as far as anyone could see; which made the knoll an island, which made them shipwrecked. "I did some necking here myself in my day," Dot said dreamily. "I love it here. I come by myself now and people think I'm crazy. I come up here to think things out. When I can see everything like this it gives me perspective."
"So what's the perspective?"
"That everything is pretty much the same no matter where you are. That everyone has their problems, everyone has a couple of things that make them happy, and that if I went someplace else or knew other people it wouldn't really change. Of course now I don't want it to change, now I like where I am, but when I was younger, that used to give me real comfort."
There was never any point in taking someone else's comfort away, even if it was comfort from another time, but Sabine did not agree with Dot's assessment of the view. Things were better in other places. People had different lives. Many suffered less. Many were happier. Sabine knew without question that Parsifal must have come to this spot. What he saw was not a life that was the same in all directions. He saw New York when he faced east, Montreal when he faced north and when the sun came down over the never-ending yellow ears of com, he faced south and west and looked towards Los Angeles. This was the very spot Nebraska youth would come to re-imagine their lives. Even if his father had dodged the bat and the Nebraska Boys Reformatory had remained nothing but an idle threat, he would have found Los Angeles. And yet surely Kitty came here with him, looked out at the flatness and dreamed about the west, so why didn't she get to go along? Why did she have to stay behind and marry some fool who slipped off a train? Kitty could have been the magician's assistant. She had all of her brother's potential, his humor and beautiful bones. Looking out at the flatness until it folded down against the earth's natural curve, Sabine thought it was the one thing Parsifal had done wrong. He should have taken his sister with him.
"It's getting late," Sabine said. "We should be getting home." We should be getting home before Kitty leaves.
"I'm just sorry that there was no one here to see us. Old Dot Fetters finally got somebody to ride out to Park Place with her. Imagine what the talk would have been."
The windows were dark and the driveway was empty when they returned. Without someone inside, the house could not possibly distinguish itself and Sabine looked down the street, trying to remember which one was home. Sabine had been so sure they would still be there. Howard was at work, there was no reason for them to leave. Wouldn't Kitty have waited to hear about her sister? Wouldn't she have waited?
"Looks like we have the place to ourselves," Dot said cheerfully.
But Sabine didn't want the place. She was tired, the hospital had done that. She was used to spending her days at home now. Sabine took the nightcap Dot poured, their secret ritual, formerly saved until Bertie was safe in bed; but even without the ice the bourbon failed to warm her. She took the rest down in a clean sweep, some tedious dosage of medicine, told Dot good-night, and went to her room. Sabine stood at the door and looked at the twin beds for a long time before choosing the one by the window. It was hard for her to imagine now, such a little bed holding two people.
"Mother?" It had been well over a week since Sabine called home.
"What a relief to hear someone call me that. Your father has been trying to teach the rabbit to say it, just to make me feel better, but the poor thing just isn't getting it."
"How is the rabbit?"
"Fat. Fatter-than-usual fat. You know, your father peels him grapes. It takes him half the morning. You can't buy peeled grapes anywhere."
"So give them to him with the peels on, that's what I do."
"He says the peels upset the rabbit's digestion."
"I never noticed."
"Then maybe your father is right, maybe it is happier with us. Tell me something, does this poor creature have a name?"
"His name is Rabbit. Parsifal named him. He thought it was minimalist."
"Minimalist," her mother said. "That's good. We thought maybe he had some sort of racy name you didn't want to tell us."