But here, in this cab, there was air-conditioning. Things were sharp and clean — a luxury that took all sense of emergency out of what we were doing. It seemed we had won a little prize, and no matter our sadnesses we got to go on our cool, crisp trip. We said very little. Once in a while Humphrey turned on some music — we heard most of “A Horse with No Name”—but the reception wasn’t good through the mountains, and so mostly he’d turn the radio off again. Ordinarily, we might have sung in the silence, but I wasn’t going to unless Sils did first. I kept looking to see whether she would. “La-la-la-la-la-la,” she sang out once in a joky way, and then stopped.
“Loo-loo,” I sang. “Lee-lee.”
We passed charred old farmhouses, orchards, and cornfields. “We could all do a frog chorus,” I suggested loudly. A frog chorus was where each person said the name of a vegetable over and over, everybody doing it at once, at differing pitches, to create an amusing din. Potato, potato, potato. Carrot, carrot, I don’t carrot all.
Sils gave me a dismal, withering look, one that said, “Don’t be pathetic.” Then she turned back toward the window.
God, how life was full of moments that should have gone differently but didn’t.
“Rutland! We’re here!” called out Humphrey. “What’s the address again?”
“Elm Street,” said Sils quickly, looking a little pale. “Two-seventeen.” She had memorized it like a combination to a lock. When the cab pulled up in front, she got out quickly, swung her shepherd’s bag purse over her shoulder, and walked fast.
“Wait here,” I said to Humphrey, wondering how it felt to be bossed around by two girls.
“Whatever,” he said. I handed him thirty-five dollars, then I too got out fast and followed Sils, and my green shirt, to the sign that said Clinic Entrance.
Inside, after Sils signed in, and I handed the nurse all my money (except two twenties for the cab ride back, in the front pocket of my shorts) and the nurse counted it out on the reception desk in front of us, we sat in old brown leather chairs, waiting for Sils’s name to be called. I’d brought a deck of cards, and we played honeymoon bridge for at least twenty minutes, me winning, and then Sils winning, and then basically a tie.
“Silsby Anne Chaussée?” read a nurse off a clipboard, though there was no one else in the room.
“Bye,” I peeped.
“Bye,” Sils squeaked back.
I waited there for a while, reading pamphlets—“Contraception,” “Venereal Disease and You”—the heat of the room beading in the philtrum of my lip. Then I headed back outside to sit in the air-conditioned cab with Humphrey.
I climbed into the backseat and slammed the door. The air was icy and startling in a nice way. “Hi,” I said. What must he think of us, of what we were doing? He didn’t say. He simply stared out the front windshield and occasionally looked into the rearview mirror.
“Thought I’d wait in here,” I said.
“That’s fine.” He shifted in his seat a little.
“Do you want to play honeymoon bridge?” I asked.
He shifted, twisted around slightly, and smiled in a lopsided, ungainly way. “How’s it go?”
I hoped he wasn’t going to be perverted. You never knew. “I’ll show you,” I said in a teacherly way, and I climbed out with my cards and got into the front seat with him, dealt out the hands, and explained.
After ten minutes, he was shifting excitedly in his seat. “I think I’m getting the hang of this,” he announced. His short legs thrashed with joy.
“It’s a great game,” I said, though I was losing, too timid in the bidding.
After about forty-five minutes there was a knock at the window. It was Sils looking hot and annoyed, and I leaped out to greet her. I put my hand on her thin tan upper arm.
“Are you OK?”
“Where were you?” she asked.
“I came out here where it was cooler.”
Humphrey reached around to unlock the back door and we both piled in, Sils a little gingerly, I with a kind of rushed efficiency, still clutching my bridge hand. Humphrey handed me the rest of the pack. “All set? Time to go back?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Can we stop for a Coke somewhere on the way?” Sils asked a little absently.
“Sure,” I said.
“No problem,” added Humphrey and I simultaneously, like a frog chorus after all.
Through the whole drive back I kept trying to steal glances at Sils to see if she looked any different. She had now gone through so many things that I hadn’t, I wondered more than ever whether she could still like me, be the same as she had been, or even remember things we’d done together. Was there a ghost, an amphibious baby ghost, flying out behind us, above us, all the way home like a kite? Under Sils’s arms there were dark circles of perspiration on my green shirt. Her hair had grown oily and the front had separated into strands. I leaned over to loosen the buckle of my sandals, and when I turned to look up at her, from that angle, I could see a small, golden bugger floating in the dark of her right nostril like a star — odd and alone, speaking dizzily without words.
We found a drive-in — Custard’s Last Stand — five miles past the Vermont state line, and there we all got out for Cokes, all three of us sitting awkwardly on one of the picnic tables outside. We gave Humphrey the money, and he got out of the car, limping from the hip, and fetched the drinks. We had commandeered this round, broken egg of a man — the human omelette! — but he seemed to like it. Back beside us, he sipped his own Coke slowly, expectantly. He looked happily around at us to see what we’d say next, as if we were the source of unending amusement and surprise. The Green Mountains were to the back of us, the Adirondacks to the front, and although the sun set sooner in the mountains, it was still only five o’clock, the very summit of a long summer afternoon, and it wouldn’t be dark until nine. Four more hours of sun and heat and this day — which I was starting to experience with the vertigo of the sick, the way the sick fall beneath the slats of each minute, looking up at things from the spaces in between, the world faraway and in stripes of light — would be over. I felt not myself. I felt beneath somewhere, in a pool of breath and gas.
I had to work at Storyland that night, the seven-to-ten shift, strange for me, but I was taking over for another cashier who needed the night off for a party, she said, though she’d told Isabelle her aunt had died and she had to go to the wake.
“You girls take care” was all Humphrey said, before he dropped us both off at Storyland, where Mike was waiting to pick up Sils.
“Where’ve you been?” Mike yelled over his revving Harley, and I saw her weakly, automatically, get on his motorcycle and forget to wave to me until they were halfway down the road and then she looked back and waved.
Inside, Storyland was mobbed with people, but the dressing room was empty, and I changed into my ludicrous uniform in an open, careless way, no longer hiding myself, no longer letting my shirt form a large wreath around my neck to hide my chest but just letting my whole body briefly live in the air of the room as I never really had, in my shame at looking so little. Seeing my reflection in one of the mirrors on the side of a row of lockers I could see how lanky and thin I was, skeletal; there were dark circles under my eyes, bug bites on my sticklike arms, bruises on my shins. But my hair was in a cloud, bushy in the heat, wild and wavy, and it alone caused me to feel that I was starting to bloom, that I was a blossom bursting out the top of myself, through the skull, like an anemone the very heat of whose thoughts caused appendages to sprout searchingly in water: I was no longer just a girl with nothing to think or do. For a moment, before I walked out with my straw hat and uniform and money box to stand mechanically in the muggy night, I was something else.