Plains Song

by Wright Morris

  The voice at the desk was not surprised. “Let me see if I can figure out who’s above you. I’ll call you back.”

  Sharon thanked her, said to Alexandra, “She’s going to call us back.”

  Alexandra said, “I will never know this person, but I hate him. If I had a gun, I would shoot him. There should be more crimes of this type.”

  The phone rang. The voice said, “What you’re hearing, ma’am, is someone practicing on a drum.”

  “You’re asking me to believe someone is beating a drum?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s the Oneida Marching Band in the rooms above you.”

  “It’s going to stop?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. They need the practice. Hold on a minute, will you?” Sharon held on. “I’m back,” she said. “I guess they put you in the wrong wing. Nobody expects to sleep in that wing.”

  Sharon said, “This is the room of Alexandra Selkirk, the distinguished speaker at the convention. Can we have another room?”

  “There’s no more rooms, ma’am.”

  “Let me speak to the manager,” said Sharon.

  “Oh, he won’t be here until eight o’clock.”

  Sharon was not equal to this occasion. She looked for help to Alexandra, who stood smoking with her eyes closed. There was someone at the door. The food Alexandra ordered, covered with gleaming hot lids, was pushed in on a cart. The young woman was huge, with a round, childish face, the body of a circus fat lady. She beamed at Sharon with good humor. Packets of sugar, saccharin, and a dairy substitute were in a plastic glass. Alexandra poured coffee from the thermos into a cup, added three packets of sugar, slurped a mouthful.

  “My God, it’s coffee.”

  “Fresh made,” said the young woman. “I just made it.”

  Alexandra appeared to see her for the first time. “Are you married?” she asked.

  Her head pumped. “We just bought a house in Kearney, near the Greyhound station. He drives a bus. I work nights, he works days for Greyhound. He says what we need a house for since we’re seldom in it?”

  “What do you need it for?”

  “Tax deductions. With two salaries, we pay a lot of taxes.”

  Alexandra held the cup of coffee with both hands, as if to warm her fingers, steam her face.

  “Is that all, ma’am?”

  That was all. As the door closed behind her, Alexandra said, “If I had had a child it would have been like that one.” Sharon wondered in what way she meant it. The gulps of hot coffee seemed to have roused her. “We’ve got the energy,” she said, her voice rising. “We’ve got an atomic bomb right here in this building. Just the energy in this madhouse, you hear me, would put a rocket in space, light up a city!” She raised one hand before her, invoking silence. “And don’t tell me it’s not our energy,” she cried, “more than it is his!”

  Seated on the bed, Sharon watched Alexandra eat a slice of rare prime rib, ignoring the vegetables. Each bite, it seemed to Sharon, was visibly transformed into energy. Her short hair stood on end. “How was your day?” she asked, buttering a roll.

  Of the six days of creation, which one had it been? Alexandra waited for Sharon to speak. “In the hall just now”—Alexandra sipped her coffee; was she listening?—“I was asked what we should do to be saved.” Speaking these words brought a smile of recognition to Sharon’s lips. Alexandra was silent. There was a pause while she filled Sharon’s cup with coffee. “Was it a man or a woman?” she asked.

  “Both, I think,” Sharon replied, as feelings with which she did not pretend to cope rose in her like a fever. She sipped the coffee. Through the film on her eyes the objects in the room appeared to melt.

  Alexandra said, “Do you suppose it’s the sugar? I feel better.” She walked to open the drapes at the patio doors. Someone was swimming laps in the pool. Above the flash of the signs the sky was black. “Did you hear that?” she asked. At some distance a young rooster brazenly crowed. The sound was piercing, but cracked, shrill with young male assurance, transporting Sharon to the hush of a summer dawn, the faint stain of light between the sill and the blind at her window, the house dark as a cave, in the stairwell the sounds of stove lids being lifted, shifted, the pungent whiff of kerosene spilled on the cobs, the rasp of a match, and in the silence following the whoosh and roar of the flames the first clucking of the hens in the henhouse, all of it gone, vanished from this earth, but restored to the glow of life in a cock’s crow.

  “You hear that?” said Alexandra. “The same old tyrant!” Was it a smile she turned to share with Sharon or a grimace? This would be a young tyrant, not an old one, but it seemed unimportant in the context. His voice gained in assurance as the thumping in the ceiling subsided.

  “It just occurred to me it’s Sunday,” Alexandra said, and looked around for her slippers. From a hanger on the door she took her cloak and let it drape loosely about her shoulders. The nightgown beneath it might have been a party frock. Against the light of the bathroom her flat, skeletal figure appeared to be a resurrection of Cora. She faced the mirror to draw a comb through her short coarse hair. As if hallucinating, Sharon seemed to see a wire-handled syrup pail dangling from her hand, weighted with eggs. Glass eggs weighted the pockets of one of Emerson’s sweaters.

  Still facing the mirror, Alexandra said, “I’m going for a walk. I want to see the sunrise. Do you know the sun is perpetually rising? Every moment somewhere. Isn’t that awesome?” What she saw in the mirror led her to smile. She turned to say, “You want to join me?”

  What expression did she surprise on Sharon’s face? For a moment it shamed her, it was so open, betraying her customary independence.

  Alexandra said, “Do I look a sight? Who is there to see me but God?”

  Sharon had already moved to rise from the bed. “I’m coming,” she said. “I’ve not seen a sunrise since I was a child.”