by Sue Miller
“Reach around back and see what you find. I think I’ve got a couple of sweaters back there.”
Frankie turned and got up on her knees. The backseat was a mess. There were stacks of papers, shoes, wrappers, several unidentifiable shapeless garments. She felt around. Yes! A sweater. She sat back with it, turning it to get ready to pull it on. Bud got in on his side. “But what about you?” she asked him, the sweater still in her lap. “Aren’t you cold?”
“I’m not, honestly. Go ahead.”
She pulled the sweater over her head and wiggled into it. It was big, and it had Bud’s pleasant smell. The sleeves were so long they covered her hands entirely.
He started the car and it made its preposterous noise as they drove away. “In a couple of minutes, the engine should be warm enough to turn the heat on.”
“I’m okay now.”
They drove down to the town, talking about whom they’d seen, what they’d heard. They’d just started back uphill in the direction of Liz’s and her parents’ houses when he said, “Oh my God!” He swerved suddenly, and they were on the shoulder, stopping, tilted almost into the ditch.
“What! What is it?” A fire, she was thinking, looking around for it on her side.
“Come on, come on,” he said quickly. He got out. She opened her door and he was there, holding his hand out to her.
“What?”
“Come.”
She took his hand and stood up. He put his arm around her, turning her around to face north across the Louds’ field, and she saw it. The night sky was shimmering slowly, green changing to pink, long shining passages of light, like immense, slowly moving colored flames.
“The northern lights!” she whispered.
“Aurora borealis,” he said. “I’ve never seen them.”
“I did. Once. Here. As a child.” Alfie had waked them, and they all went out and sat in the meadow. Now the long pale flames shifted slowly, mysteriously to blue. “Oh!” she cried.
With his arm around her, they walked forward, into the field. She stumbled over the uneven ground, almost dizzy, and his arm pulled her closer against him.
“Let’s sit,” he said. They did, awkwardly. After a minute or so, almost as one, they lay down on their backs. Bud’s arm was under her neck and head, and she turned slightly into him.
They watched. The sky to the north kept shifting, kept changing color, sometimes throbbing close to the horizon, sometimes radiating so far across the heavens that the colors fingered almost overhead.
In between and around the light show, they talked, their voices made whispery by what seemed so vast above them. About the lights, about what caused them—Bud knew, and he explained them to her. About the last fire, at the Cotts’ house. For the first time, Bud hadn’t responded to the page. “I feel like I’ve seen the fire. And I wanted to sleep, more than anything.”
After a silence, she said, “Did you know you had a reputation in this town?”
“I did not. A reputation for what?”
“My mother told me you were—and I believe I am quoting directly—‘a bit of a womanizer.’ ”
There was silence for a moment. “Just a bit?”
“This is what they say, apparently.”
“And it’s not going to help, showing up with you tonight. Yet another woman.”
“So you plead guilty?”
“I plead guilty to living in a small town, mostly. And being an unmarried, and therefore pretty visible, male.”
“It would work that way, wouldn’t it?”
“You wait.”
“I probably won’t.”
“Won’t wait?”
“Yes.”
“Meaning, won’t wait around to see?”
It felt as though they’d come around to this point in their conversations before, that she’d told him this before—that she didn’t think she was staying. She said that to him. There was a long silence.
“I suppose it’s something I’d like to know for sure, one way or another, before I … what? Decide to put my womanizer’s moves on you.”
“A true womanizer would need no such assurances.”
“There you have it.”
“Have what?”
“Proof that I am not a true womanizer.” His body shifted next to hers. “Should you need it.”
“Though you got me horizontal pretty easily.”
“But arranging the aurora borealis—that took a long time.”
“Thank you, then. It’s really spectacular.”
They lay still for a while. Occasionally one of them raised a pointing hand to be sure the other saw some changing aspect of it—the flickering motion of one licking light, the abrupt change in color of another, green to pink, pink to blue.
He leaned over her and kissed her. Her whole body seemed to soften inside, and she moved her face, her mouth, against his. He made a noise, and she pulled back, just slightly. Enough so that, after a moment, he did, too. She felt torn, wanting him, not wanting to start another unfinishable thing.
They lay silent for a while.
“Why did you leave Africa, anyway?” he whispered.
“I told you. I don’t know where to be. Where I want to be.”
“Was there a guy?”
Frankie smiled in the dark. “I must be transparent. My mother asked me that, too.”
“And what did you tell your mother?”
“There was, yes. But he mattered less than, I guess, the nature of our relationship.”
“Which was?”
“Temporary. Impermanent. All the people I met—I guess I mean men, but women, too, actually—were impermanent. Fugitives. From divorces or boring careers or too much sorrow. Or themselves, maybe. I had one affair after another with people essentially in transit. And I was in transit.”
He didn’t say anything.
After a minute, she said, “And my work life was the same. You fix one thing over here, and then there’s another one over there, and while you’re in the second place, bad stuff happens and the first place falls apart again.” Bud shifted next to her, rose up on his elbow. She could barely see his face in the dark, but she felt his breath, his presence, warm over her. “Sometimes I felt … complicit in that. And sometimes we were. We were complicit. If you flood a place with free food, for instance, farmers don’t bother to plant. What would be the point? So you perpetuate hunger, in a way, by trying to alleviate it. And sometimes you end up feeding fighters. Prolonging conflict. Or they prolong the conflict because they see it as a means of access.”
“Access to?”
“Aid: Food. Money. Medicine. Sometimes, and I only slowly understood this, they used hunger, they used starvation, as a way to get aid, to position themselves. Famine as a weapon.” She took an audible breath, then shook her head. “But that’s only part of it.
“Oh!” she said, and pointed. He turned. A kind of low, warm incandescence spread out across the horizon, as if some new, brilliant, midnight sun were about to rise.
When it shifted, she spoke again. “Philip, the man I was involved with, used to say that it was better to know your role, to know your place. You get in, you get out. He didn’t pretend he was changing things. I think it made it easier for him in some ways.”
What Philip had said to her was Whatever I’ve learned from doing this work—and I’m not sure what I’ve learned—I don’t delude myself. Exactly the opposite. It’s instruction in how fucking useless I am, in any larger sense. As you are also, my darling.
Now Bud said, “So did that make it easier for him than it was for you? That … that attitude? What was his name?”
“Philip.” She said, “In some way, yes, I think it did. In the short run, I know what kept me there. The people. The children, especially. Seeing them get better. It was like a transformation. In the mothers, too. Saving lives, after all.
“But in the long run, less and less did. And I suppose I’d begun to notice the long run. He helped me with that. Both his … philosophy
, I suppose you could call it, and then, actually, the very nature of our relationship. Because it seemed like more of the same.”
“A metaphor for your dilemma.”
“You might say so. I felt I was temporizing, as I’ve told you. With my life.”
“Yes,” he said.
Frankie was ashamed, suddenly. She felt she’d talked too much. She’d complained, when she had no right to.
After a long silence, she said, “And you?”
“And me what?”
“And you. Your history. Work. Women. Are you temporizing?”
He seemed to be pondering it. Finally he said, “No. I don’t feel I am. I have a kind of stake in things, I guess you’d say. Literally, having bought the paper. Actually, I think that was my answer to that notion.”
“The notion of temporizing.”
“Yes. Coming here. Making it my home. Writing about it, so making it my work, too.” Bud lay down, flat on his back again. “You know Pete, the guy who owned the paper before me?”
“Mmm.” She was glad he was talking, glad to be hearing about him.
“He said an interesting thing to me. That he couldn’t have stayed here without the paper. That it gave him a way to be here, a way to be at home here—without, maybe, buying into everything involved. So, maybe like your friend …”
“Philip?”
“Yeah. Old Philip. A way to be in and out at the same time.”
After a moment, she said, “And women?”
“What about women?”
“Don’t be coy. I told you.”
“In a general way you told me.”
“I ask no more from you. Just, generally, you’ve had girlfriends here before.”
“Girlfriends here, yes. Though I’ve slowed way down. And wives before.”
“Wives? Multiple wives?” This startled Frankie. Though why should it?
“Two. One that doesn’t count. The starter marriage. Isn’t that what Margaret Mead called it? We’re allowed that, right?”
“I guess.”
“And then one serious mistake.”
After a long moment, she said, “But I thought the point of the starter marriage was that you didn’t need to make the big mistake.”
“Ah, I think I wanted the big mistake, somehow. The drama. But in the end it wore me out. And then it was over.”
Frankie wanted to ask more about it, but she wasn’t sure she should. And the lights were leaving the sky anyway. They might have been lying in the field for an hour by this time. The sky was turning black and starlit again. Bud was shivering, and she’d curled against him to try to help him stay warm. “You’re cold now,” she whispered.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“This was … so astonishing.”
“All of it.”
“We should go,” she said.
“Should we?”
“You’re cold.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m cold.”
“Ah.”
He rolled against her; he kissed her. For a moment her whole body moved, rejoiced, in response to the length of him, the size of him against her. Her mouth answered the warmth of his.
And then she checked herself, she pulled just slightly back and smiled at where his face was. “I should go.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“But the show is over.”
“Is it? It is. I guess.”
“I should go. I’m actually worried about Liz’s place.”
“Okay.”
She sat up, and he did, too, and then they stood. He put his arm around her again, and she leaned against him as they walked slowly, bumping oddly over the rough ground, back to the car.
They drove up the dark hills without talking. He pulled in at Liz and Clark’s, where the porch light was on. He turned to her. “Thank you for this evening. For being my date.”
“I liked being your date. Thanks for being my date.”
“I think the date is the one who got asked. Not the asker, I don’t think.”
“Well, what are you then, to me?”
He grinned in the half-light of the porch light, a slow, widening grin. “We shall see, shan’t we?”
Frankie didn’t have an answer. After a moment, though, she leaned over and kissed him. Just their faces touching. His flesh was cool, but his mouth, opening, was warm, and tasted sweet. He made a noise, a sigh.
She sat back and turned to open her door. She got out of the car. The night was cold. At the door to Liz’s house, she turned under the light to wave, but he was already in gear, just starting to drive away.
Some part of her was disappointed, ridiculously.
13
THE RIDING MOWER had been sitting in the middle of the overgrown lawn for three hours now. The pickup truck with its ramps set out was smack in the middle of the driveway. If she’d wanted to go somewhere, Sylvia would have had to drive over the unmown grass to get out. Not that she wanted to go anywhere, but it was the idea. The principle.
The boy—the young man—Tink, had driven up at about eleven, and with what seemed to Sylvia his usual deliberated, elaborate slowness, set the planks out, backed the mower down, donned ear protectors and goggles and started the engine up.
Alfie had been having a bad day anyway today, and this clearly tipped the balance. He’d come almost immediately into the kitchen, where Sylvia stood at the door watching Tink.
“Tell that …” He pointed out the window. “Tell him to go away.”
Sylvia turned to him. His face was working, agitated, his jaw moving up and down, his head almost palsied.
“It’s just the mower, Alfie. He’s doing the lawn.”
“No! That machine.”
“Yes, the machine that mows the lawn. The mower. He comes every week, to cut the grass.”
“It’s too loud.”
“Well, I agree with you.” She stepped over to him, touched his elbow. “But come, let’s shut the windows in your study. Come on. That will help.” And perhaps it would. They were new windows, double-glazed, tight. She took Alfie down the hall, matching her gait to his unsteady one. As she shut and locked the last of the windows, the noise was suddenly domesticated. It was as though someone were mowing off in the distance—an almost pleasant sound. She shut the curtains, too, so Alfie wouldn’t see the machine as it passed around the house again and again, and she turned the desk lamp on over Alfie’s work. Her eye fell on the papers scattered around, filled with Alfie’s vertical handwriting, almost completely illegible now.
“There!” she said. “Cozy and quiet. Perfect for working.” She hated herself—this tone, this condescension. Next she’d be using the nurse’s first person plural: Now we’re going to sit down and we’ll just get at it.
May I die first.
“But I don’t know where my books are,” Alfie protested. He sounded like a child.
“They’re right here.” Sylvia gestured at the stacks he’d placed on his desk, four or five of them, sloppy towers of different heights lurching this way and that.
“No, I mean the other books.”
“These?” She pointed to the bookcases lining the three walls of the room where there were no windows. They held the several hundred books Alfie had culled from his libraries at the college and the house in Connecticut.
“No, no.” He was angry at her now. “The others.” You idiot.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said, willing herself to patience, to cheerfulness. “You sit down and do your work, and I’ll go get the other books.”
He looked dubious.
“Okay?” she said. “Okay,” she answered herself. And she was grateful to see, as she walked to the doorway, that he was complying, that he had sat down and was pulling in, to do his “work.”
She shut his door behind her. She was thinking that this would give her a chance to get all the piles of books that were now messily stashed around the house into his study, at least for a little while. She started to gather
them onto the kitchen table, beginning with the two piles from the porch, thickened with damp. She had just bent to pick up the pile on the floor by his living room chair when a motion outside flickered at the edge of her vision. She stood up and went to the window.
It was the police car, the big green star taking up the whole driver’s-side door. It had driven right across the lawn to Tink’s mower and stopped in front of him. Now the mower stopped, too, and Tink dismounted, though he didn’t turn the motor off.
Loren stayed in his car. She could hear their voices, yelling, though not what they said. She assumed he was asking about her—he’d come to her house, after all—but it didn’t make sense to her. Why hadn’t he just parked his car and come to the back door?
Ah. Perhaps because that would have been difficult with the truck taking up so much of the driveway. She felt a helpless irritability rise in her. She wanted to slam Alfie’s books down. She wanted the noise of the mower to stop.
She crossed to the porch door and stepped outside. She walked through the lanky grass to Loren’s car and greeted him and Tink. She had to shout to be heard, and she could barely hear Loren’s shouted greeting in return. She wasn’t sure whether Tink said anything at all. His face stayed impassive. Dull. It was dull, she thought. Dull and sullen and pretty. She stepped toward him and shouted, “Could you please turn off your mower.” She gestured at it.
It seemed to her he paused just a beat too long before he turned back to the mower. A beat meant to tell her he could goddamn well choose or not choose to do as she asked.
The silence that fell when the mower went off seemed shocking. Embarrassing, really. Loren was grinning up at her.
“Hope you’re well, Sylvia,” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said, ignoring Tink, who was coming back to stand by the car. And then she saw that there was someone in the backseat. She lowered herself a little to look in. His head, too, was ducked, to see her. “Gavin!” she said.
“Hi, Miz Rowley.”
“Are you boys in trouble? What is this, Loren?” She had stood back up and was looking at Loren levelly.