Return Trips (16 page)

She seated herself on a stone bench near the edge of the parking area—in the sun, beside a bright clump of bougainvillea, and she told herself that by now, surely, the dog had turned around and gone on home, or back to the beach. And that even if she and Sandy had turned and gone back to her, or stopped and waited for her, eventually they would have had to leave her, somewhere.

Sandy came out, unenthusiastic about the church, and they drove into town to buy sandwiches and wine.

In the grocery store, where everything took a very long time, it occurred to Molly that probably they should have checked back along the river beach road, just to make sure that the dog was no longer there. But by then it was too late.

They drove out into the valley; they found a nice sunny place for a picnic, next to the river, the river that ran on to their beach, and the sea. After a glass of wine Molly was able to ask, “You don’t really think she was lost, do you?”

But why would Sandy know, any more than she herself did? At that moment Molly hated her habit of dependence on men for knowledge—any knowledge, any man. But at least, for the moment, he was kind. “Oh, I really don’t think so,” he said. “She’s probably home by now.” And he mentioned the collar.

Late that afternoon, in the deepening, cooling June dusk, the river beach was diminishingly visible from their cabin, where Molly and Sandy sat with their pre-dinner drinks. At first, from time to time, it was possible to see people walking out there: small stick figures, against a mild pink sunset sky. Once, Molly was sure that one of the walkers had a dog along. But it was impossible, at that distance, and in the receding light, to identify an animal’s markings, or the shape of its ears.

They had dinner in the inn’s long dining room, from which it was by then too dark to see the beach. They drank too much, and they had a silly outworn argument about Sandy’s smoking, during which he accused her of being bossy; she said that he was inconsiderate.

Waking at some time in the night, from a shallow, winey sleep, Molly thought of the dog out there on the beach, how cold it must be, by now—the hard chilled sand and stinging waves. From her bed she could hear the sea’s relentless crash.

The pain that she experienced then was as familiar as it was acute.

They had said that they would leave fairly early on Sunday morning and go home by way of Santa Cruz: a look at the town, maybe lunch, and a brief tour of the university there. And so, after breakfast, Molly and Sandy began to pull their belongings together.

Tentatively (but was there a shade of mischief, of teasing in his voice? Could he sense what she was feeling?) Sandy asked, “I guess we wont go by the river beach?”

“No.”

They drove out from the inn, up and onto the highway; they left Carmel. But as soon as they were passing Monterey, Pacific Grove, it began to seem intolerable to Molly that they had not gone back to the beach. Although she realized that either seeing or
not
seeing the dog would have been terrible.

If she now demanded that Sandy turn around and go back, would he do it? Probably not, she concluded; his face had a set, stubborn look. But Molly wondered about that, off and on, all the way to Santa Cruz.

For lunch they had sandwiches in a rather scruffy, open-air place; they drove up to and in and around the handsome, almost deserted university; and then, anxious not to return to the freeway, they took off on a road whose sign listed, among other destinations, San Francisco.

Wild Country: thickly wooded, steeply mountainous. Occasionally through an opening in the trees they could glimpse some sheer cliff, gray sharp rocks; once a distant small green secret meadow. A proper habitat for mountain lions, Molly thought, or deer, at least, and huge black birds. “It reminds me of something,” she told Sandy, disconsolately. “Maybe even some place I’ve only read about.”

“Or a movie,” he agreed. “God knows it’s melodramatic.”

Then Molly remembered: it was indeed a movie that this savage scenery made her think of, and a movie that she herself had done the screenplay for. About a quarrelling, alcoholic couple, Americans, who were lost in wild Mexican mountains. As she had originally written it, they remained lost, presumably to die there. Only, the producer saw fit to change all that, and he had them romantically rescued by some good-natured Mexican bandits.

They had reached a crossroads, where there were no signs at all. The narrow, white roads all led off into the woods. To Molly, the one on the right looked most logical, as a choice, and she said so, but Sandy took the middle one. “You really like to be in charge, don’t you,” he rather unpleasantly remarked, lighting a cigarette.

There had been a lot of news in the local papers about a murderer who attacked and then horribly killed hikers and campers, in those very Santa Cruz mountains, Molly suddenly thought. She rolled up her window and locked the door, and she thought again of the ending of her movie. She tended to believe that one’s fate, or doom, had a certain logic to it; even, that it was probably written out somewhere, even if by one’s self. Most lives, including their endings, made a certain sort of sense, she thought.

The gray dog then came back powerfully, vividly to her mind: the small heart pounding in that thin, narrow ribcage, as she ran after their car. Unbearable: Molly’s own heart hurt, as she closed her eyes and tightened her hands into fists.

“Well, Christ,” exploded Sandy, at that moment. “We’ve come to a dead end. Look!”

They had; the road ended abruptly, it simply stopped, in a heavy grove of cypresses and redwoods. There was barely space to turn around.

Not saying, “Why didn’t you take the other road?” Molly
instead cried out, uncontrollably, “But why didn’t we go back for the dog?”

“Jesus, Molly.” Redfaced with the effort he was making, Sandy glared. “That’s what we most need right now. Some stray bitch in the car with us.”

“What do you mean, stray bitch? She chose us—she wanted to come with us.”

“How stupid you are! I had no idea.”

“You’re so selfish!” she shouted.

Totally silent, then, in the finally righted but possibly still lost car, they stared at each other: a moment of pure dislike.

And then, “Three mangy cats, and now you want a dog,” Sandy muttered. He started off, too fast, in the direction of the crossroads. At which they made another turn.

Silently they travelled through more woods, past more steep gorges and ravines, on the road that Molly had thought they should have taken in the first place.

She had been right; they soon came to a group of signs which said that they were heading toward Saratoga. They were neither to die in the woods nor to be rescued by bandits. Nor murdered. And, some miles past Saratoga, Molly apologized. “Actually I have a sort of a headache,” she lied.

“I’m sorry, too, Mol. And you know I like your cats.” Which was quite possibly also a lie.

They got home safely, of course.

But somehow, after that trip, their friendship, Molly and Sandy’s, either “lapsed” again, or perhaps it was permanently diminished; Molly was not sure. One or the other of them would forget to call, until days or weeks had gone by, and then their conversation would be guilty, apologetic.

And at first, back in town, despite the familiar and comforting
presences of her cats, Molly continued to think with a painful obsessiveness of that beach dog, especially in early hours of sleeplessness. She imagined going back to Carmel alone to look for her; of advertising in the Carmel paper, describing a young female with gray markings. Tall ears.

However, she did none of those things. She simply went on with her calm new life, as before, with her cats. She wrote some poems.

But, although she had ceased to be plagued by her vision of the dog (running, endlessly running, growing smaller in the distance) she did not forget her.

And she thought of Carmel, now, in a vaguely painful way, as a place where she had lost, or left something of infinite value. A place to which she would not go back.

Four North American tourists are walking through the interior of a small church, near Oaxaca: one square room, shabby but strictly decorous, with its white lace altar cloth and intricate silver candlesticks; its outsize, bright floppy flowers, and vague, dark holy pictures. Single file, the tourists tiptoe: three large fair-haired people, a woman and two men, followed by another woman, who is small and dark, named Miriam. Miriam lags slightly behind the others, in the gray stone shadows.

The group of three which Miriam trails is led by Eric, her husband, a doctor. Next comes Eric’s twin sister, Joan, also a doctor, and after Joan bearded Russell, a physicist, husband of Joan. Earlier that morning the two couples visited a splendid cathedral, very near the pretty hotel where they are all staying. This little church seems drab, comparatively. “It’s sort of dreary, for a church,” Joan whispers ahead to her brother Eric. Eric laughs, very quietly.

The group is all related, then, although Miriam is aware that the others are more related to each other than to her; and they look so alike, those three, so blond and full-fleshed. Before she met them (they were all at Stanford together),
Miriam imagined them to be a family, two brothers with their sister, and she thought she had never seen such glamorous, such quintessentially
California
people. Small dark Miriam, from Quincy, Mass., on a scholarship, was dazzled, and she remained dazzled after they met—or, rather, after she met Eric (at a swimming party at Lake Lagunitas, of all odd circumstances; Eric said she looked like a goldfish, in her small yellow bathing suit). She and Eric fell in love, and he introduced her to his twin sister, Joan, in medical school along with him and married. And she met Joan’s husband, Russell, studying physics.

And so, in addition to their similar looks, those three have science in common. Miriam, who studied English, now does volunteer work at the public library in Seattle, where she and Eric have moved. However, it is Miriam who has, just then, in the church, a weird science-fiction thought: she thinks that all the dust particles in Mexico could be silicon chips, programmed for some violence. She thinks that anything at all could happen there, and she is suddenly afraid.

Still tiptoeing behind the others, Miriam then notices a small crucifix, in a deeply recessed niche. Even in those dark shadows, though, she can see that the sagging figure of the Christ is lined with blood; red blood (well, paint, of course) seeps down from the gaping wound, just below his ribs.

Or did Miriam’s peripheral vision catch that image, that blood, just before her strange, quite uncharacteristic thought about dust and violence? She is not sure, not then or later on, when she considers everything.

Usually—almost always, really—Miriam finds it wonderful to be associated with those others, to be with them. When she is with them she has, even, a sense of being assimilated by them, with them, into them. It is as if by sufficiently gazing
up at them, at Eric, Joan, and Russell, she could absorb—could take on their qualities, even their blondness and height.

And in their separate and collective ways they cherish her, too, Miriam feels; even her differences from themselves are appreciated. “How small you are!” Eric sometimes laughingly, lovingly remarks, even now, after eight years of marriage. And Joan: “What heaven it must be to shop for size-3 clothes!”

It has sometimes occurred to Miriam, though, that she could do with fewer remarks about her size; so much attention to it makes her feel rather like their mascot. She is simply small, a fact not terribly interesting to herself.

And she does have to argue with them all, when the four are together, about her library volunteer work, her arguments being the obvious ones: tax cuts are killing the libraries, libraries need all the help they can get. And, she adds, with only a B.A. in English lit., what sort of job could she get these days? Also, Eric’s cardiology practice brings in plenty of money. Everything she says is true, they have to agree. Still, they all—especially Joan (who earns more than either Eric or Russell)—seem to wish that she did something else. That she had a career.

Being alone with Eric is not at all the same as being with Eric and Joan and Russell; of course not. Alone, in Seattle, Miriam and Eric have domestic conversations: what needs to be fixed (their house is old, and large). And food: big Eric eats a lot, and on her way home from the library Miriam often stops to shop at the Pike Place Market (she loves it there, the beautiful open displays); Eric likes to hear about that, what she saw, what looked best. Their dinners are the high points of their days.

She occasionally feels, though, that Eric is more himself when they are with Joan and Russell than when there are only the two of them. With Joan and Russell, Eric talks more, expresses opinions, makes jokes. Mostly medical jokes. (Russell collects dirty limericks; he knows thousands.)

However, since Eric and Miriam have been in Seattle, they see Joan and Russell considerably less, Joan’s practice being in Palo Alto; Russell works on the linear accelerator, at Stanford.

But they still have these trips: by tradition the four of them take vacations together. Joan and Russell do not come up to Seattle; they have let it be known that they really can’t stand the Northwest. Miriam has not let it be known that she is not truly fond of San Francisco, where they sometimes meet. Everything so pretty, so “cute,” she thinks, and does not say. She also thinks (silently) that cable cars are dangerous. But: one year a barge trip in France, another the small towns of Umbria and Tuscany. Last year Scotland, this year Mexico.

Miriam’s features are rather small, and her face has a curious flatness to it. A small mask. Dark eyes in shallow sockets, freckles across unprominent cheekbones. Small pointed nose, small mouth. Longish black-brown hair, which she sometimes knots up, to give herself more height.

Miriam.

On the day after she has her curious intimation of violence in the dusky church, Miriam and the others go out to the ruins at Monte Alban in a hired car, with a guide. Magnificently preserved flattened stone pyramids, rising up from the broad flat plain, at mystical intervals.