Runaway (13 page)

“I’m not,” said Juliet.

“We did have it hanging up. It was in the back hall by the dining-room door. Then Daddy took it down.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say anything about it to me. He didn’t say that he was going to. Then came a day when it was just gone.”

“Why would he take it down?”

“Oh. It would be some notion he had, you know.”

“What sort of a notion?”

“Oh. I think—you know, I think it probably had to do with Irene. That it would disturb Irene.”

“There wasn’t anybody naked in it. Not like the Botticelli.”

For indeed there was a print of
The Birth of Venus
hanging in Sam and Sara’s living room. It had been the subject of nervous jokes years ago on the occasion when they had the other teachers to supper.

“No. But it was
modern
. I think it made Daddy uncomfortable. Or maybe looking at it with Irene looking at it—that made him uncomfortable. He might be afraid it would make her feel—oh, sort of contemptuous of us. You know—that we were weird. He wouldn’t like for Irene to think we were that kind of people.”

Juliet said, “The kind of people who would hang that kind of picture? You mean he’d care so much what she thought of our
pictures?
”

“You know Daddy.”

“He’s not afraid to disagree with people. Wasn’t that the trouble in his job?”

“What?” said Sara. “Oh. Yes. He can disagree. But he’s careful sometimes. And Irene. Irene is—he’s careful of her. She’s very valuable to us, Irene.”

“Did he think she’d quit her job because she thought we had a weird picture?”

“I would have left it up, dear. I value anything that comes from you. But Daddy …”

Juliet said nothing. From the time when she was nine or ten until she was perhaps fourteen, she and Sara had an understanding about Sam.
You know Daddy
.

That was the time of their being women together. Home permanents were tried on Juliet’s stubborn fine hair, dressmaking sessions produced the outfits like nobody else’s, suppers were peanut-butter-and-tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches on the evenings Sam stayed late for a school meeting. Stories were told and retold about Sara’s old boyfriends and girlfriends, the jokes they played and the fun they had, in the days when Sara was a schoolteacher too, before her heart got too bad. Stories from the time before that, when she lay in bed with rheumatic fever and had the imaginary friends Rollo and Maxine who solved mysteries, even murders, like the characters in certain children’s books. Glimpses of Sam’s besotted courtship, disasters with the borrowed car, the time he showed up at Sara’s door disguised as a tramp.

Sara and Juliet, making fudge and threading ribbons through the eyelet trim on their petticoats, the two of them intertwined. And then abruptly, Juliet hadn’t wanted any more of it, she had wanted instead to talk to Sam late at night in the kitchen, to ask him about black holes, the Ice Age, God. She hated the way Sara undermined their talk with wide-eyed ingenuous questions, the way Sara always tried somehow to bring the subject back to herself. That was why the talks had to be late at night and there had
to be the understanding neither she nor Sam ever spoke about.
Wait till we’re rid of Sara
. Just for the time being, of course.

There was a reminder going along with that.
Be nice to Sara. She risked her life to have you, that’s worth remembering
.

“Daddy doesn’t mind disagreeing with people that are
over
him,” Sara said, taking a deep breath. “But you know how he is with people that are
under
him. He’ll do anything to make sure they don’t feel he’s any different from them, he just has to put himself down on their level—”

Juliet did know, of course. She knew the way Sam talked to the boy at the gas pumps, the way he joked in the hardware store. But she said nothing.

“
He has to suck up to them
,” said Sara with a sudden change of tone, a wavering edge of viciousness, a weak chuckle.

Juliet cleaned up the stroller, and Penelope, and herself, and set off on a walk into town. She had the excuse that she needed a certain brand of mild disinfectant soap with which to wash the diapers—if she used ordinary soap the baby would get a rash. But she had other reasons, irresistible though embarrassing.

This was the way she had walked to school for years of her life. Even when she was going to college, and came home on a visit, she was still the same—a girl going to school. Would she never be done going to school? Somebody asked Sam that at a time when she had just won the Intercollegiate Latin Translation Prize, and he had said, “ ’Fraid not.” He told this story on himself. God forbid that he should mention prizes. Leave Sara to do that—though Sara might have forgotten just what the prize was for.

And here she was, redeemed. Like any other young woman, pushing her baby. Concerned about the diaper soap. And this
wasn’t just her baby. Her love child. She sometimes spoke of Penelope that way, just to Eric. He took it as a joke, she said it as a joke, because of course they lived together and had done so for some time, and they intended to go on together. The fact that they were not married meant nothing to him, so far as she knew, and she often forgot about it, herself. But occasionally—and now, especially, here at home, it was the fact of her unmarried state that gave her some flush of accomplishment, a silly surge of bliss.

“So—you went upstreet today,” Sam said. (Had he always said
upstreet?
Sara and Juliet said
uptown.)
“See anybody you knew?”

“I had to go to the drugstore,” Juliet said. “So I was talking to Charlie Little.”

This conversation took place in the kitchen, after eleven o’clock at night. Juliet had decided that this was the best time to make up Penelope’s bottles for tomorrow.

“Little Charlie?” said Sam—who had always had this other habit she hadn’t remembered, the habit of continuing to call people by their school nicknames. “Did he admire the offspring?”

“Of course.”

“And well he might.”

Sam was sitting at the table, drinking rye and smoking a cigarette. His drinking whisky was new. Because Sara’s father had been a drunk—not a down-and-out drunk, he had continued to practice as a veterinarian, but enough of a terror around the house to make his daughter horrified by drinking—Sam had never used to so much as drink a beer, at least to Juliet’s knowledge, at home.

Juliet had gone into the drugstore because that was the only
place to buy the diaper soap. She hadn’t expected to see Charlie, though it was his family’s store. The last she had heard of him, he was going to be an engineer. She had mentioned that to him, today, maybe tactlessly, but he had been easy and jovial when he told her that it hadn’t worked out. He had put on weight around the middle, and his hair had thinned, had lost some of its wave and glisten. He had greeted Juliet with enthusiasm, with flattery for herself as well as her baby, and this had confused her, so that she had felt her face and neck hot, slightly perspiring, all the time he talked to her. In high school he would have had no time for her—except for a decent greeting, since his manners were always affable, democratic. He took out the most desirable girls in the school, and was now, as he told her, married to one of them. Janey Peel. They had two children, one of them about Penelope’s age, one older. That was the reason, he said, with a candor that seemed to owe something to Juliet’s own situation—that was the reason he hadn’t gone on to become an engineer.

So he knew how to win a smile and a gurgle from Penelope, and he chatted with Juliet as a fellow parent, somebody now on the same level. She felt idiotically flattered and pleased. But there was more to his attention than that—the quick glance at her unadorned left hand, the joke about his own marriage. And something else. He appraised her, covertly, perhaps he saw her now as a woman displaying the fruits of a boldly sexual life. Juliet, of all people. The gawk, the scholar.

“Does she look like you?” he had asked, when he squatted down to peer at Penelope.

“More like her father,” said Juliet casually, but with a flood of pride, the sweat now pearling on her upper lip.

“Does she?” said Charlie, and straightened up, speaking confidentially. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. I thought it was a shame—”

Juliet said to Sam, “He told me he thought it was a shame what happened with you.”

“He did, did he? What did you say to that?”

“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he meant. But I didn’t want him to know that.”

“No.”

She sat down at the table. “I’d like a drink but I don’t like whisky.”

“So you drink now, too?”

“Wine. We make our own wine. Everybody in the Bay does.”

He told her a joke then, the sort of joke that he would never have told her before. It involved a couple going to a motel, and it ended up with the line “So it’s like what I always tell the girls at Sunday school—you don’t have to drink and smoke to have a good time.”

She laughed but felt her face go hot, as with Charlie.

“Why did you quit your job?” she said. “Were you let go because of me?”

“Come on now.” Sam laughed. “Don’t think you’re so important. I wasn’t let go. I wasn’t fired.”

“All right then. You quit.”

“I quit.”

“Did it have anything at all to do with me?”

“I quit because I got goddamn sick of my neck always in that noose. I was on the point of quitting for years.”

“It had nothing to do with me?”

“All right,” Sam said. “I got into an argument. There were things said.”

“What things?”

“You don’t need to know.

“And don’t worry,” he said after a moment. “They didn’t fire me. They couldn’t have fired me. There are rules. It’s like I told you—I was ready to go anyway.”

“But you don’t realize,” said Juliet. “You don’t
realize
. You don’t realize just how
stupid
this is and what a disgusting place this is to live in, where people say that kind of thing, and how if I told people I know this they wouldn’t believe it. It would seem like a joke.”

“Well. Unfortunately your mother and I don’t live where you live. Here is where we live. Does that fellow of yours think it’s a joke too? I don’t want to talk any more about this tonight, I’m going to bed. I’m going to look in on Mother and then I’m going to bed.”

“The passenger train—,” said Juliet with continued energy, even scorn. “It does still stop here. Doesn’t it? You didn’t want me getting off here.
Did you?
”

On his way out of the room, her father did not answer.

Light from the last streetlight in town now fell across Juliet’s bed. The big soft maple tree had been cut down, replaced by a patch of Sam’s rhubarb. Last night she had left the curtains closed to shade the bed, but tonight she felt that she needed the outside air. So she had to switch the pillow down to the foot of the bed, along with Penelope, who had slept like an angel with the full light in her face.

She wished she had drunk a little of the whisky. She lay stiff with frustration and anger, composing in her head a letter to Eric.
I don’t know what I’m doing here, I should never have come here, I can’t wait to go home
.

Home.

When it was barely light in the morning, she woke to the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Then a voice—Sam’s—interrupted this noise, and she must have fallen asleep again. When she woke up later, she thought it must have been a dream. Otherwise Penelope would have woken up, and she hadn’t.

The kitchen was cooler this morning, no longer full of the smell of simmering fruit. Irene was fixing little caps of gingham cloth, and labels, onto all the jars.

“I thought I heard you vacuuming,” said Juliet, dredging up cheerfulness. “I must have dreamed it. It was only about five o’clock in the morning.”

Irene did not answer for a moment. She was writing on a label. She wrote with great concentration, her lips caught between her teeth.

“That was her,” she said when she had finished. “She woke your dad up and he had to go and make her quit.”