Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [249]
“Ugh,” Oliver said, unmoving.
Half uncovered, she lay on her back. The night air moving sluggishly from the window tightened her damp skin. She tried to speak casually, and heard how badly she failed–what a bright falseness was in her voice. “How did you know he’d been here?”
“He left his gloves on the railing.”
He reared up and leaned and found her cheek with his lips. She did not turn her head, or respond. Quietly he lay back.
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
Her cheek burned as if he had kissed her with sulphuric on his lips.
6
For several weeks now I have had the sense of something about to come to an end–that old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air. But different now. Then, during prep school and college, and even afterward when teaching tied my life to the known patterns of the school year, there was both regret and anticipation in it. Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes and failures had been wiped clean by summer. But now it is not an ending and a beginning I can look forward to, but only an ending; and I feel that change in the air without exhilaration, with only a heaviness and unwillingness of spirit. With a little effort I could get profoundly depressed.
Part of my uneasiness comes as a direct result of living my grandmother’s life for her. For the last few days I have been studying the Xeroxed newspaper stories that finally arrived from the Idaho Historical Society, and though they do straighten out for me some facts that I have never until now understood, they also raise some questions that are disturbing. There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.
But another part of what obscurely bothers me is the probability that Shelly will be leaving very soon, with consequences to me and to my routines that I can only contemplate with anxiety. And yet there is a sort of comic relief in Shelly, too. One result of throwing away all the maps of human experience and the guides to conduct that a tradition offers, and flying by the seat of your moral or social pants, is that you fly into situations that are absurd or pitiful, depending on how indulgently one looks at them. My own indulgence is wildly variable. Witness this afternoon.
Through most of the summer Shelly has worked seven days a week, the way I like to work, but the last two weekends she has taken off. I supposed she was getting organized to go back to college, but Ada tells me she has been seeing Rasmussen. “She don’t tell me, but I know. Ed saw him over in Nevada City last week, purple pants and all. Honest to John, what she sees in that . . . What’s he hanging around for? What’s he want?”
“Maybe he’s really fond of her.”
But that only got a glare from Ada. She doesn’t want him to be fond of her.
Nevertheless, neither Ada nor I should expect a girl of twenty to sit in this quiet place very long, working seven days a week for the Hermit of Zodiac Cottage. For reasons best known to herself, she chose to cut away from the Berkeley scene and rusticate herself here. But here she is a stranger to everybody she used to know, including her old schoolmates. They have nothing to offer her, she has nothing to give them except an occasion for a lot of lurid gossip. Probably she was the brightest student in Nevada City High, as Ada resentfully says. Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything–though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly’s crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she’s a long way from wise.
Anyway, this afternoon when I was sitting on the porch after lunch she came in and without a word, with only a prying, challenging sort of look, puckering up her mouth into a rosebud, handed me a sheet of paper. It was mimeographed on both sides, with stick figures and drawings of flowers scattered down its margins