When she and Peter arrived, Gena had had to go out to a shed for two more chairs for her kitchen table.
Outside her window she heard Peter and Gena, their voices approaching and receding as they walked around the house.
“Someday I’d like to plant things out here.” Gena was saying.
“I can help you,” Peter said.
A few days later she heard Peter say, “I really thought I was in love with her.”
Another time, as they lay in the grass after lunch, he said, “Just looking at a palm tree makes me happy. Isn’t that weird?”
She heard Gena tell him about a dream she’d had about her boyfriend in Senegal. “And he pulled up into the driveway, just like you did, and I went running out to him and I was crying and laughing at the same time and I said, Look, look at my beautiful scars.”
If they were outside, Vida walked about the cool house, made a bowl of cereal, spied on them through the small windows, but when they came in she retreated to her room. She found a sketchbook and a charcoal pencil in a drawer, and remembered how well Gena had drawn as a child. But all the pages were empty. Vida sketched the tree outside her window, a tall palm with spears for leaves. When they checked in on her, she hid the book and pretended to be asleep. Sometimes she did doze during the day, but at night she stopped sleeping altogether. Her old fear had new power now and she lay in the dark, blindsided by panic. Her heart vibrated, its beats barely separate. She couldn’t get enough air; her skin felt like it would peel off. She turned on the light and focused on the pillow, the faded blue flowers and their sprigs of leaf. She tried to put Joyce back in her head, When I makes tea, I makes tea, but it wouldn’t stick. She could not get her pulse to come down. She was going to have a heart attack, a heart explosion.
She dreamed about the mansion. The appendages were gone — no hockey rink or tennis bubble or science wing. She drove up to the front door, Walt in her lap, a puppy again. Her grandfather came out, carrying the bust of himself. He didn’t see her. He followed a path along the side of the house to a garbage can, and he dropped the head in. Then he went back into the house and shut the door. Down in the fields girls in white dresses were holding hands and dancing, some raising their arms high and others dipping their heads through, making intricate tangles then pulling back out to a large, perfect circle. The May Dance, she thought, looking for Tess but seeing, at the crest of the rise beyond, Angel Clare. He was walking away. No, she cried out. Not again. Not again. The sound of her own voice woke her up, but still she could not stop screaming.
On their eighth day in California, Gena drove her to a shrink. In the corner water bubbled over black rocks. Toward the end of the hour, Vida managed to say it out loud.
“I’ve always been scared that I’d kill him in my sleep.” She waited for the woman to call the police or the nuthouse. They locked up people who said things like that.
Instead the woman said calmly, “What feels truer than that?”
Vida felt a small loosening in her body. This was what she was always asking of her students, to see beyond the words on the page.
“I’m so scared,” she said, and even just saying those words shrank the feeling slightly, “of losing him.”
The next day she agreed to go to lunch with Gena and Peter. “It’s just a few blocks away,” Gena reassured her.
She trailed behind Peter and Gena on the sidewalk. It was hot and sweat soaked into her turtleneck and the waistband of her skirt. She’d left her tights behind, and the canvas shoes Gena had lent her scraped the skin off her swelling ankles.
Gena pointed out a house and said the owners were extremely peculiar, as if she herself didn’t live alone in a dark empty house with guinea pigs.
“Why did you come to California?” Peter asked.
Gena looked around. “I suppose it reminded me of Africa.”
“Africa? Really?”
“Something about the flatness of the light. At dusk the sun just sets, like a light being put out. No afterglow, no in the gloaming.” She glanced back at Vida, who decided to play her part.
“‘In the gloaming, Oh my darling!
When the lights are dim and low,
And the quiet shadows falling
softly come and softly go …’”
They both smiled at her encouragingly. She had a stab of paranoia. Were they scheming something? Was Tom going to be at the restaurant?
But the restaurant was nearly empty, every booth along the wall free. Through the doorway in back was a bar.
“Everything’s yummy,” Gena said, “But the soups are their specialty. Perhaps I’ve mentioned the spicy artichoke—”
“Yeah, I think you did,” Peter said. “About a hundred times.” They were smiling at each other. They already had their little jokes.
The waitress came and went, a tiny creature in turquoise ballet shoes. Stuart’s kind, more sprite than girl. She couldn’t stop the great chasm of failure, of shame, that opened up beside the thought of Tom’s children. She pulled herself quickly from it.
Peter peppered Gena with questions: did she know how to surf, did she like the Giants, did it ever snow? He got her to describe her work at the nursing home and what an earthquake felt like. And yet their voices were too animated for the context; they were saying other things beneath their words. They shared a secret, an anticipation. Vida forced herself to look each time someone came through the door. He was coming; they had asked him to come. She was sure of it.
Gena was right. The soup was good, but Vida only brought a few spoonfuls to her mouth before she lost the energy and interest. Peter and Gena polished their bowls clean with the thick slices of sour bread from a basket the poor little waitress had to keep running back to refill. Vida slid her soup over to them and it was gone within minutes. Then they ordered ice cream sundaes, enormous goblets with chocolate, caramel, and pineapple sauces cascading down the sides. Peter giggled and raised the long spoon to the top. Gena said, “We’ve concocted an idea,” and Peter put the spoon down again.
“I could tell,” Vida said. Was Tom at the house now? What was happening?
“How about Peter stays with me for a while?” Gena said. Her round cheeks were red as apples.
It wasn’t Tom. It was all about them, all the excitement in the air.
“Gena says there’s a good school just a few blocks from her house.”
Everything was a just a few blocks from her house, it seemed. In Peter’s eyes, in his voice, was the same enthusiasm he’d had just before she’d married Tom. She’d misinterpreted it then. Now she understood. Getting away from her had always been the goal.
“That’s fine with me.”
They had been ready for a battle; their list of reasons twitched on their fingers. She needed to be away from them, in the bar through the beaded doorway.
Stools turned when she came in. She looked each one in the eye, the blond in flowered shorts, the old guy with the pink cap, the two college kids hoping she’d be someone else. They might not have seen many gaunt English teachers from New England, or turtlenecks, but she knew them, each one of them. She knew the feeling that brought a person to a strong drink at noon on a Thursday.