“Yes, certainly.”
The bus wheezed past a dismal hotel with tattered windowshades. It stopped in front of the Caro Mill Diner. Place couldn’t have a regular terminal, no. Out they had to climb, in the middle of the street. The driver did not so much as give Justine a hand down the steps, or either of the other ladies; Daniel had to do it. He touched his temple for each one in turn as he let go of her arm. “Why, thank you,” one lady told him. The other didn’t say a word, or else he missed it.
In front of the diner sat the Ford, three feet from a hydrant, battered and dusty and bearing a long new dent in the rear bumper. He studied the damage. In the old days people left notes about such things, giving their names and telephone numbers. Not any more. When he finally climbed into the car he said, “Conscience has vanished.”
“Excuse me?”
Justine looked at him, one hand outstretched toward her own door which was flapping open and snarling traffic. “What’s vanished?”
“Conscience, I said. They dent your bumper and don’t even leave a note.”
“Perhaps I,” said Justine, and something else.
“No, if you had done it I would have noticed. Besides, you’ve had this week’s accident.” His little joke. He laughed, covering his mouth with his fist to turn it into a cough.
Then, wham! He was jarred and knocked into the windshield. Aches and pains started up all over, instantly. It seemed that someone had reached down a gigantic hand and flung him like a doll. “Grandfather?” Justine asked. There was a long red welt on the inside of her arm, and a few dots of blood. Just past her, a car had stopped and a man was climbing out. And where the door had been swinging open there was nothing now at all, just clear blank air and then the man’s angry face. The man was shouting but all his words were a blur. It didn’t matter; Daniel was just relieved to see the cause of his shake-up. Of course, a door torn off! Yet he continued to feel disoriented. When the man had driven away, and Justine stepped out to drag the door to the trunk and heave it in, he was still so dazed that he didn’t offer to help. He watched numbly as she slid behind the wheel again. “At least we’re well ventilated,” she told him. A strange thing to say, or perhaps he had misunderstood. He wished he were home. He raced through the hallways of his mind calling out for Laura, his father, Caleb, Margaret Rose. But really he should never have married Margaret Rose. A shared background was the important thing. If he had not been such a fool for her chuckling laugh and the tender, subtle curve at the small of her back he would have made a more sensible choice, a person he had known all his life. Who was that little girl who used to come visiting with her parents? Melissa, Melinda? But he had wanted someone new and surprising. A terrible mistake. How he hated Margaret Rose! The thought of her made him grind his teeth. He would like to know where she was now so that he could do something dreadful to her, humiliate her in front of all her fancy, tinkling friends. But no, she was dead. He was so disappointed to remember. As usual she had done something first, run ahead of him laughing and looking back at him over her shoulder, and for once he could not refuse to follow.
“Once you’re alive, there’s no way out but dying,” he told Justine.
She looked over at him.
“You’ve set a thing in motion, you see.”
“It’s like being pregnant,” said Justine. Of course she couldn’t really have said that. His ears were bad. His mind was bad. He was going to have to get a hold of himself. He straightened his back and looked out the window, a respectable elderly gentleman admiring the view as they rattled homeward.
Meg Peck and the Reverend Arthur Milsom were sitting in the living room waiting for Meg’s parents. Or Arthur was sitting; Meg kept moving around. First she chose the armchair because she wanted to look proper and adult. Then she thought it was more natural to sit next to Arthur on the couch. They were about to ask permission to get married; what would they be doing across the room from each other?
Arthur had on his clerical collar, which wasn’t absolutely required but it looked very nice. He was a young, pale, tense man, small but wiry. When he was nervous he cracked his knuckles and his brown eyes grew so dark and sober that he seemed to be glaring. “Don’t be nervous,” Meg told him sitting back down on the couch. She reached over and took his damp hand.
This visit had been planned for weeks. The first Monday after she turned eighteen, he said, he would come talk to her parents. (Monday was a slow day at the church.) They had worked it out by letter. It was Arthur’s feeling that Duncan was the important one, but as Meg pointed out they needed Justine there to smooth things over. For certainly Duncan would be at his sharpest. He didn’t like Arthur. (How could anyone not like Arthur?) What they hadn’t counted on was Justine’s vanishing, taking Grandfather on one of his trips. Now there was no telling when she would be back, and meanwhile Duncan was coming home from work at any minute. They would have to handle him alone after all.
Meg always thought of her parents as Duncan and Justine, although she didn’t call them that. It might have been due to the way they acted. They were not very parent-like. She loved them both, but she had developed a permanent inner cringe from wondering how they would embarrass her next. They were so—extreme. So irresponsible! They led such angular, slap-dash lives, always going off on some tangent, calling over their shoulders for her to come too. And for as long as Meg could remember she had been stumbling after, picking up the trail of cast-off belongings and abandoned projects. All she really wanted was to live like other people. She tried to keep the house neat, like her friends’ houses, and to put flowers in the vases and to hide, somehow, whatever tangle of tubes and electrical wires Duncan was working on at the moment. But then it seemed so hopeless when she knew how soon they would be moving on. “We’re nomads,” Justine told her, “think of it that way”—as if making it sound romantic would help. But there was nothing romantic about this tedious round of utility deposits, rental contracts, high school transcripts and interrupted magazine subscriptions. “He’s ruining our lives!” she told Justine. Justine looked astonished. “But Meggie darling, we can’t be the ones to say—” Then Meg’s anger would extend to her mother, too, who was so gullible and so quick to give in, and she closed herself up in her room (if they were in a house where she had a room) and said no more.
She kept herself occupied with sewing, or pasting pictures in her scrapbook full of model homes—French windows and carpeted kitchens and white velvet couches. She straightened up her closet with all her shoes set side by side and pointing in the same direction. She ironed her own dresses, as she had since she was nine. (Justine thought there was no point to ironing, as long as things were clean.) At the age of ten she had baked her first cake, which everyone admired but no one ate because they were too busy rushing off somewhere; they seemed to live on potato chips from vending machines. Nothing ever worked on a schedule. She was encouraged to bring her friends home at any hour of the day or night. “This family is not a closed unit,” Duncan told her—apparently his only rule, if you could call it that. But how could she bring friends when her parents were so certain to make fools of themselves? “Oh, I just love your folks,” girls were always saying, little dreaming what agony it would be to have them for their own. For Justine might be found barefoot and waving her dirty playing cards, or sitting at the kitchen table with three or four unsuitable friends, or racing about looking for her broken straw carry-all in order to go to the diner whose food she preferred to her own. She had a high-handed, boisterous way of acting sometimes and she was likely to refer to Duncan publicly as “Meg’s second cousin,” her idea of a joke. And Duncan! Spouting irrelevant, useless facts, thinking out loud in startling ways, leaving her friends stunned and stupid-looking. His idea of a joke was to hang idiotic newspaper and ladies’ magazine pages all over the house, bearing what he thought were appropriate messages. On Justine’s birthday he pasted up a bank ad saying WE’RE INCREASING OUR INTEREST, and after Meg spent too much money on a dress (only becau
se she wanted to look like the other girls for a change, not all homemade and tacked together) she found a page Scotch-taped to her closet door:
HAVE YOU EVER HAD
A BAD TIME IN LEVI’S?
Then she had snatched up the page and stalked in to where Duncan sat inventing a new keyboard arrangement for the typewriter. “Act your age!” she told him. But when he looked up his face was so surprised and unguarded, and she saw that he really was aging, there were dry lines around his eyes and two tiny crescents left by his wide, dippy smile. So she laid the paper down gently, after all, and went away defeated.
Now she sighed, remembering, and Arthur squeezed her fingers. “In an hour this will all be over,” he told her.
“It will never be over.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re going to be demolished,” she said. “I feel it.”
But now she had insulted him. He straightened up, which made him look smaller. He said, “Don’t you think I can have a reasonable discussion with my own girl’s parents?”
“Yes but—”
“You forget, I’m a minister. I’ve convinced families who swore they’d cut off their daughters without a penny. I’ve convinced fathers who claimed that—”
“But it wasn’t you their daughters were marrying.”
“Now don’t worry. If worst comes to worst we’ll just go away quietly and have the ceremony in my own church.”
But neither of them wanted that. They wanted everything perfect. Arthur wanted her to be happy, and Meg would only be happy with a white dress that dipped to a point at the waist, Sarah Cantleigh’s veil, and a bouquet of baby’s breath. She wanted to walk down the aisle of the family’s church in Baltimore where her mother had been married; she would like to be guarded by rows and rows of aunts and uncles and second cousins, grave Peck eyes approving her choice. Bridal showers, long-grained rice, Great-Grandma’s sixpence in her shoe. Arthur waiting beside the minister, turning his pale, shiny face to watch her procession. Whenever he looked at her, she felt queenly. All right, so he was not a handsome man, but would a handsome man treat her as adoringly as Arthur Milsom did? When they went to lectures she looked at the lecturer and Arthur looked at her. She felt the thin moon of his face turned upon her. He assisted her in and out of cars, through doorways, up the shallowest steps, his hands just barely brushing her. (The aunts would love his manners.) He devoted his entire attention to her, so much so that sometimes, he said, he worried about his jealous God. Nobody had ever, in all her life, felt that way about her before.
A car drove up in front of the house, chugging and grinding familiarly. “There’s Mama now!” Meg said. “Look, she beat him home after all.” She rose and went out to the porch. Justine was still seated behind the wheel, straight-backed and prim, unguarded by even the vestige of a door. The car looked like a cross-section of something. But, “Certainly makes it easier to get in and out!” she called to Meg, and she waved gaily and stepped onto the sidewalk. “Coming, Grandfather?”
“Mama, I want to talk to you,” Meg said.
But then up spoke Dorcas Britt, the lady next door, calling over the hedge in a large, rich voice that seemed to mock Meg’s. “Justine, honey! I got to talk to you.”
“A man came along doing eighty and flung Grandfather into the windshield,” Justine said.
“Mama.”
The house was swept suddenly with a variety of colors and shapes—the white, tottering grandfather, Justine flicking back her yellow hair, Dorcas all chartreuse and magenta on red patent-leather spike-heeled sandals. Arthur stood up with his fingers laced in front of him, as he did when greeting church members after the sermon. He wore a determined smile. Meg felt a twist; was she doomed to be embarrassed by everyone, all her life, even Arthur? “Mama, Grandfather, you remember Arthur,” she said. “Mrs. Britt, this is Arthur, my—Arthur Milsom.”
“My baby has been kidnapped,” Dorcas told him.
Her baby was nine years old and she was kidnapped regularly, always by her father, who did not have visiting rights, but Arthur didn’t know that and he grew white around the lips. “Oh, my heavens!” he cried.
“Arthur. It’s all right,” Meg told him.
“All right?” said Dorcas. “To you, maybe.”
“Grandfather was zonked in the forehead,” Justine said.
Which caused Arthur to spin next in the grandfather’s direction, full of a new supply of horror and sympathy. He hadn’t learned yet. Such an expenditure of emotion would drain you in no time, living here. “Arthur,” Meg said.
“The man was going eighty, at least,” said Justine. “How else could he have ripped a door clean off like that?”
“It was already hanging by one hinge, Mama.”
“ ‘You were going eighty,’ I told him, but guess what he said? It’s against the law to open a car door on the street side. Did you know that? How are we supposed to get into our cars?”
“Perhaps from the sidewalk side,” Arthur said carefully.
Justine paused, in the middle of removing her hat, and looked over at him. “Oh. Arthur,” she said. “Why, how are you?”
“I’m just fine, thank you, Mrs. Peck. How are you?”
“And Meg! Meggie, did you find my note? I forgot to tell you I was going off today. Did you have anything to eat when you came home from school?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She kissed Meg on the cheek—a breath of Luden’s cough drops. Whenever she kissed people she gave them quick little pats on the shoulder. Meg drew away, trying to regather her dignity. “Mama, when you get a moment,” she said.
“But I have a moment. All the time in the world. What can I do for you?”
“Don’t you have to start supper?”
She meant, Can’t you come out in the kitchen and talk without Dorcas? But Justine said, “Oh, I thought we would just have pick-ups tonight.” The only one who understood Meg was Dorcas, who drew herself in while remaining, somehow, as billowy and bosomy as a featherbed. A fat blonde with tiny hands and feet. “You are not a mother,” she said. “You have never had your baby kidnapped. This is not something I can just go home and forget until a more convenient time.”
“Perhaps if you called the police,” said Arthur.
“Police! Ha!”
“Mama, I want to talk to you a second.”
“All right.”
“I mean, privately.”
“Honey, can’t you talk here? Dorcas is a friend, we don’t have to be private from her.”
“I should say not,” said Dorcas.
“Well, I’ll wait till Daddy comes home,” Meg said.
“Oh, Duncan! Where is he? Shouldn’t he be here by now?”
And off she flew to the window, with Dorcas tripping behind her on her ridiculous shoes. “Look here, Justine, you got to help. Won’t you lay the cards? I got to know where Ann-Campbell is.”
“Oh, well, I’m sure she’s all right.”
Ann-Campbell would be all right anywhere. Meg pitied her kidnapper. But Justine gave in, soft-hearted as usual. “But maybe just a quick reading,” she said. And off they went to the kitchen for the cards. Grandfather Peck stood teetering from heel to toe, peering after them. “Are they going to make supper?” he asked Meg.
“They’re doing a reading, Grandfather.”
“A what?”
“Reading.”
“What would they be reading now? It’s suppertime.”
He sat down suddenly in the armchair. There was a long knot growing on his forehead. “Grandfather, you’re turning purple,” Meg said.
“Ah?”
“Perhaps he needs medical attention,” Arthur whispered.
But the grandfather, who could sometimes hear astonishing things, slapped his knee and said, “Nonsense!”
Then there was a blue-and-yellow flash in the door—Duncan, wearing the jeans Mr. Amsel had asked him not to. He sprinted across the hall and into the coat closet. “Daddy?” Meg said.
r /> “Meg, where is that magazine I was reading last night?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have to put everything away all the time?”
“I didn’t put it anywhere.”
“Never mind, I found it.”
Off he went again. The door slammed. Arthur began stroking his chin thoughtfully.
“Was that Duncan?” the grandfather asked.
“Yes, Grandfather.”
“You’re a pastor,” he told Arthur.
“Assistant pastor, yes sir.”
“Here’s an idea for a sermon.”
“Grandfather.”
“All our misery comes from the length of our childhood. Ever thought of that?”
“No, sir, I don’t believe I have.”
“Look at it this way. Everything arises from boredom, right? Irritation, loneliness, violence, stupidity—all from boredom. Now. Why are we bored? Because the human childhood is so durned lengthy, that’s why. Because it takes us so durned long to get grown. Years. Years and years just hanging around waiting. Why, after that just anything would be an anticlimax.”
“Sugar,” Duncan called, crossing the front hall again.
“How’s that?”
“Eat more sugar.”
“What’d he say?”
Duncan stuck his head in the living room door. “Sugar hastens puberty,” he said. “All the Eskimos are growing up faster now they’ve switched to carbohydrates.”
Grandfather Peck scratched his head.
“Daddy,” said Meg, “we want to talk to you.”
“Ah so, Meggie.” But then he saw Arthur. “Why, looky there, a man of the cloth.”
“Daddy, when Mama gets through—”
“Where is your mother?”
“She’s reading the cards for Dorcas.”
Arthur stood up. Next to Duncan he looked very small and stalwart. “Actually, Mr. Peck,” he said, “I feel it would be quite enough just to talk to you.”