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  And sometimes, of course, when you tell people, they look at you suspiciously. Does it run in the family? Is it catching? Is it something you all did? Once you told someone who got up and left the room. That person was Melinda, Skip’s sister. Skip’s mother handled it more gracefully. She just looked at you with her hard green eyes, eyes the fresh green of new-minted bills, and one corner of her thin red mouth drew in. She said, “Thass too bad.”

  I said to Shauna, “Schizophrenia. They say he has schizophrenia.”

  She made a noise like a grunt—“oof”—and then nodded. “I know about that,” she said. “I know what that is. For a while I was a case worker in a mental hospital. You’d see these families struggling. How long were your parents married?”

  I thought. “Let’s see, they were married in September, 1938. Thirty-four years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was.”

  The day my mother came up to The Farm I’d said that to her. She’d breezily waved her hand and said, “Oh it went fast. But you know what’s funny?”

  “What?”

  “You got me thinking back, and then, just a moment ago, as I stood here, I felt that if I concentrated, I could remember everything. My life has always been so busy I’ve never had much time for nostalgia, but just now I felt as if I’d unlocked the entire file. I remember the first time your father took me out—we went to the movies, and later we had black raspberry ice cream cones. We were married three months later. What perfect weather we had on our wedding day—warm and sunny—I can still feel the sun on my arms. I remember the way my dress felt, smooth and silky, expensive! I paid a fortune for it at Bonwit Teller. It was white silk with a print of red cherries and green leaves. It had puffed sleeves and a sweetheart neckline—they were just coming into style. With it I wore a big white picture hat. For our honeymoon, we drove through New York State. We stopped at a guest house in Cherry Valley, New York. The radio was full of Hitler and Munich. The lady of the house was canning tomatoes and I said something to her about war coming. She turned around and wiped her hands on her gingham apron, looking at me as if I were crazy. ‘War?’ she said. She said it so sourly. ‘Not here it ain’t.’ Now I wonder what happened to my wedding dress?”

  And then my mother grimaced and shrugged and she said in a wistful voice, “But oh, what happened to lots of things?”

  9.

  Skip never showed up for the party at the Monitor’s new office, so first thing on Saturday morning I packed my suitcase and put it in the hall, next to my door. Finally, I said to myself in the bathroom mirror, you have had enough. In the mirror, my face looked gray and I turned away from it with relief. But gray was the truth, wasn’t it. I had always somehow lacked color. I was intelligent and possibly resourceful but I lacked color. I was quiet and always screwed up the punch line of jokes. When I tried to tell people the facts I knew they thought I was pedantic, and when I kept still, they thought I was stupid. All through school I had surprised my teachers by getting A’s on my final exams. And then they were miffed and said I’d been holding back the rest of the year. It wasn’t laziness. I always did other things, things I wanted to do. My junior year in high school I worked as a vet’s assistant. My mother couldn’t understand it. She didn’t have that feeling for animals, something that ran all through my father’s family. “What on earth do you get out of it?” she’d ask me. I didn’t know precisely what to tell her. I liked the simplicity of animal reactions, how a good meal, a romp in the snow, a roll in the hay occasioned obvious bliss. And their patience when they’re old and ill. They expect nothing, but they trust you and know when you mean well. And besides, there they are, needing your care.

  I brushed my hair and went downstairs. It was after nine, everyone else was up and about. Shauna sat on the wicker sofa doing her short fingernails with an orange-pink polish. “Like it?” she asked. “It’s called ‘Dream-Tangerine.’” Leonard was reading The Star-Ledger, looking dour, as usual. Wayne was sitting in a wicker rocker reading my copy of To the Lighthouse. When I passed by he clapped the open book to his chest as if he were holding a good poker hand. He looked at me over his gold-rimmed glasses. “You don’t think the lighthouse is phallic?”

  “Please,” I said. “I haven’t had my coffee.”

  “It’s clearly phallic,” he said, and went on reading.

  Skip was sitting at the trestle table eating a plateful of scrambled eggs. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down across from him.

  “Morning,” he said. His face looked puffy as if he’d been up all night. “Sleep okay?”

  I looked at him. “I don’t know what to do.”

  He swallowed coffee and looked at me over the china mug with narrowed eyes, as if the light hurt. “About what?”

  Today his eyes reflected the green of his cotton knit sports shirt. Strange eyes, they always took on the color of their surroundings, as if in protective mimicry. “About staying here. Is there any point?”

  “Why not stay? It’s a pretty place.” Was he teasing me? I didn’t answer. I was afraid that I’d shout, or cry. He said, “Tell you what, let’s go for a ride today. We can talk then. We’ll pack a lunch and go for a picnic on the river.” His smile was lazy and suggestive. “I have a lot to tell you.”

  “About what?”

  “About what I’ve been doing all week.”

  “Skip …” I wove my fingers around my coffee mug. Oh what was the good of this?

  “Hmmm?” He carefully spread raspberry jam on whole-wheat toast. “This is homemade jam. There’s a lady up the road who makes twenty-five different kinds of jam.”

  “I thought you’d come to the party last night.”

  He took a bite of toast and then carefully wiped his mouth with the paper napkin. “I thought so, too. Unfortunately, there were things I had to get done.”

  “Until midnight?”

  “Oh it wasn’t that late.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Let’s not do this, Liz. We’ve agreed all along not to do the boa constrictor bit.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Let’s not squeeze each other to death.”

  “How am I squeezing you? We haven’t exchanged two words all week.” I could hear my voice wobble and escalate in pitch while in the next room everything had come to a halt. And then someone coughed and Leonard said “Listen to this!” and he began reading an article out loud from the newspaper.

  I said, in a low voice, “What are you doing? I’ve come here and now you avoid me.”

  “Christ, that’s absolute nonsense. I’ve been completely involved in two projects which have everything to do with you. I’ll explain later, only you know—this drives me nuts, the way you have to know where I am all the time.”

  I laughed. “All the time? My God, I never know where you are. Or who you are.”

  “Nobody ever knows anybody,” he said coldly. “You know that.”

  “That’s total bullshit. Most people know something about each other. In a relationship. Do we have a relationship?”

  “Don’t we?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’ve come to find out.”

  His jaw was beginning to tense. How well I knew this particular metamorphosis. First came the tricky banter, then the exaggerated patience, as if he were instructing a small intractable child, and then if one didn’t acquiesce, but stubbornly persisted in this untoward direction, chagrin, and finally, if you asserted a claim, any claim at all, immense irritation, followed by that slight but evident tensing of the mandibles, which preceded an actual thrusting-out of the jaw, accompanied by a narrowing of the hazel-green eyes so that the lights in them felt condensed, as if he had you fixed at the wrong end of binoculars—and you winced because he sat there viewing you coldly, as if you were literally diminished—a specimen.

  At various times, I had different reactions, according to my need of the moment and how much, just then, I loved him. Often, at first, I s
imply withered, drooped my head like some poor blasted flower. This reaction evoked a cool triumph, and he distanced himself even more so as not to be taken in by pity. Jumping up and leaving the room was risky and near-fatal. It infuriated him to the point of himself taking leave; but since his goodbyes were colder and more absolute-sounding than mine, I never had the guts to take that risk. The best course, I’d found, was a stubborn waiting it out. Sit and say nothing and after a while his face would undergo the reverse transformation. The eyes would slowly widen, the jaws would loosen somewhat; often, eventually he’d yawn, and do his characteristic stretch, trying to place his right palm on his spine. And then all of him would visibly soften, and he’d say, jocosely, “Christ, yer an awrful gal. What the hell do I see in you? Hard? You make Medusa look like Betty Crocker.” And then, if no one were in the room, he’d come around in back of me and stake his claim by putting both his hands on my breasts and nuzzling into my neck.

  Now I didn’t know which course to consider. I was tired of it all, and yet felt desolate, abandoned and miserable. I twitched a shoulder, meaning, don’t care, and looked away. Outside, people were swimming in the pond. Their voices echoed and boomed, flying disembodied but resonant over the glinting surface of the water. I knew it now: I would never be happy. I would never have a life.

  “One o’clock, then,” I said dimly. He picked up his breakfast plate and came around the table. He put his plate down and picked up my hand. “Lizzy,” he said. “Don’t look so depressed. Everything’s going to be fine.” He turned my hand over in his, kissed the palm, and laid my hand gently upon the table.

  It was always so hard not to believe him. I looked down at my hand, my left hand, thin and tanned, with the silver and turquoise ring he had given me three years ago. A friendship ring. Three years and nothing had changed.

  Sometimes I hated the way he made me feel, as if I were a puppet with no life of my own except whatever life he chose to lend me. Maybe after all there was something wrong with me. Why was it I couldn’t break loose? He gave me so little, and then, each time, just when I’d determined to go, he would do one small endearing thing and I would feel perfectly satisfied and content. I was like a bird gratefully living on crumbs. Perhaps after all I was wanting in courage. Or emotionally lazy.

  That afternoon, we went up and down a winding mountain road that climbed and crossed the Kittatiny Ridge. Whenever we got to a height, Skip slowed so that we could look down and see the Delaware River far below, crawling between the wooded mountains like a shining and emerald-skinned snake. The road passed through woods so silent we might have dreamed them out of another time: ash, oak, birch, whole acres of mountain laurel just past blooming, steep walls of rhododendron dotted with the last of the faint pink blossoms, banks of giant ferns which seemed to be prayerfully reaching up from the reddish forest floor for the scattered drops of sunlight that fell so sparsely through the densely latticed trees.

  We turned at last onto a deeply gouged dirt road and drove straight down to the river bank. Here the land was flatter, alluvial. There were fields of young green corn and some pastures roughly fenced, the weathered cedar posts entwined with pink and white roses. We passed tall patches of sword-shaped iris leaves and a long border of day lilies, not yet in bloom, and saw across a stone wall a small orchard of apple trees.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Just an old farm.”

  “There aren’t any buildings.”

  “They were bulldozed. You can see the foundations. They plan to build a dam on the river—Tocks Island Dam. All this would be flooded, the whole Delaware Valley.”

  “Ye gods. Why?”

  “Flood control.”

  I laughed. “It’s the same thinking. It’s just like Vietnam. In order to control something, you have to destroy it.”

  “I don’t think we set out to destroy Vietnam. We got sucked into it. Further and further into it, and we couldn’t get out. We’re still not out.”

  “We got entangled by all those commitments, but basically, the reason it went on so long was that it could. Because we were big and wealthy and strong and could do it.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean. Because it was possible. We had the power so why not use it?”

  We pulled the car up next to a crumbling stone foundation that had on one side a windbreak of Norway spruce trees. We got out of the car and he began clearing a space on the rough grassy knoll. Kneeling, he tossed sticks and small stones out of the way. He swept the area with his square hand and then spread out the old car quilt. I well remembered its pattern of red, green and calico print squares. We’d made love on it many times, and once, in November in some chilly woods, under it.

  We anchored the quilt’s corners with the beer cooler and our paper bag lunches. He lay down on the quilt with his hands under his head. “Man,” he said, “this is the life. If only we didn’t have to work.”

  “God gave us work so we wouldn’t be bored to death.”

  “Are you bored to death without work?”

  “Yes. Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I kind of like a free-fall existence. I like moving around and doing whatever comes to hand.” He had put on his sunglasses and lay looking up at the blue sky. “Sometimes it’s hard to grasp the point of working.”

  “Most people work so they won’t starve.”

  “Very true. Going back to your school next year?” Again, it seemed to me, there was a teasing tone in his voice. What was it he meant?

  “No.” It was the first time since I’d arrived that he’d asked me anything about myself.

  “I thought you liked the school.”

  “I liked it all right until just lately. But I’m not going back.”

  “Why not?”

  “They brought in someone else for the English Department. For starters, they’re paying him three thousand more than me.”

  “Does he have graduate degrees?”

  “He’s just out of college. You know what? I was actually hurt. I thought I was doing such a fantastic job. I had the kids reading stuff you wouldn’t believe. We had started a school magazine together.”

  “Then why not stay?”

  “I don’t like the feeling that I’m getting used.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Not go back there. Not teach.”

  “Why don’t you stick around here for a while and work on the newspaper?”

  “I might. I don’t know. I like the group pretty much. Except for Wayne.”

  “Wayne?” He rose on his elbows, shook his head, flopped down again. “What’s wrong with Wayne?”

  “He’s so pompous.”

  “Not really. It’s an act. Hey, but you know, the newspaper could really work out well. We need some more people … you’re perfect.”

  “Haven’t you got enough staff?”

  “No. See, I’m out of the picture.”

  “You are? How come?”

  “Because I’m going to be working in another office. Glynn, Rosoff, Crane and Lender. It’s a law firm in Stanton.”

  “Really?” I was pleased. “Oh Skip, that’s marvelous.” After he’d graduated from law school he’d pretty much just puttered. It had irritated me—such a spoiled rich kid kind of trick—‘Look, Ma, I kin do it, but I don’t wanna.’ “I really really think that’s tremendous.”

  “I knew you’d be pleased. I know your bourgeois feelings about sloth.”

  I leaned over him. “I’m proud of you.” I bent and kissed his forehead.

  He grasped my wrists. “That’s the very point,” he said.

  “I didn’t know you cared so much about what I thought.”

  “See? Surprise, surprise, you’re wrong again. Shall we eat? I’m starved and in about sixty seconds it’ll be you, or those sandwiches.”

  We had lunch—egg salad and tomato sandwiches—and drank beer and then stretched out sleepily on the quilt. The usual picnic accoutrements—flies, ants,
wasps and yellow jackets—were kept away by a small but persistent riverside breeze. It was a perfect summer’s day, I couldn’t remember one finer. When I turned my head to the left I could see, through the scrim of trees, the opposite riverbank, and the curving hills above it. Out on the dark green river two men in floppy hats were sitting in a rowboat fishing. I turned on my side to sleep and Skip curled carefully next to me. I could feel him turn so that he was close but not touching; I could feel his breath on my hair.

  We woke up and without saying anything stretched toward each other and began kissing, deep, liquid kisses that made me dizzy. We sat up and pulled off our clothes and made love with silent intensity. Once I risked looking into his eyes. It seemed to me there was something fierce and angry there; the gold lights in his eyes were like sparks from a forge, and I lost it, couldn’t concentrate, wanted only for him to finish, but he thrust into me again and again as if he were beating me. Overhead blue jays clamored and cawed.

  He collapsed onto me at last, his face and neck covered with sweat. His weight was heavy on me, I felt as if he were squeezing the breath out of me. I pushed at his shoulders with my hands.

  “Sometimes I want to fucking kill you,” he said. “Hard woman.” He sat up and grimaced.

  “Why?” I asked. It seemed to come out in a whine. Whyyy? I coughed.

  He pulled on his shirt and hiking shorts. He rolled a joint and asked me if I wanted some but I shook my head. I’d given up smoking pot. I didn’t like how it changed me and made me feel about myself. Two years ago, I had done almost nothing but smoke pot, and then one day I gave it up. I didn’t want it, I didn’t need it, it didn’t matter to me anymore.

  We drove back to the Farm in a golden twilight. On my right, the river glided between the darkening green hills, a flow of burnished gold that seemed to be running straight into the western sky. This time, making love—no, having sex—had made things worse. I felt estranged from him. I thought I should leave. Where would I go? This awful question. Where to go? Well. Give it another week.