by Tom Perrotta
In the early summer, Royce got on a bus and went to visit Grace on her parents’ farm. The bus had to pass the town where Avie lived, and by chance from his window he saw Avie, standing on the sidewalk of the main street, talking to somebody. She was full of animation, whipping her hair back when the wind blew it in her face. He remembered that she had quit college just before her exams. Hugo had graduated and got a job teaching high school in some northern town, where she was to join him and marry him.
Grace had told Royce that Avie had had a bad scare, and it had caused her to come to this decision. Then it had turned out to be all right—she wasn’t pregnant—but she had decided she might as well go ahead anyway.
Avie didn’t look like anybody trapped by a scare. She looked carefree, and in immensely good spirits—prettier, more vivid, than he ever remembered seeing her.
He had an urge to get off the bus and not get on again. But, of course, that would land him in more trouble than even he could contemplate. Avie was sashaying across the street in front of the bus now anyway, disappearing into a store.
They had waited supper half an hour for him, at Grace’s house, and even at that it was only five-thirty. “The cows are boss around here, I’m afraid,” Grace’s mother said. “I suppose you’re quite a stranger to farm life.”
She looked nothing like Grace, or Grace looked nothing like her, thank God. Scrawny, cropped gray hair. She scurried around so, she didn’t ever seem to get a chance to straighten up.
A schoolteacher, she had been, and she looked it. A schoolteacher watching out for whatever wrong thing she hasn’t caught you doing yet. The father seemed anxious to get to the cows. The grown son wore a sneer. So did the younger sister, who was supposed to be a genius on the piano. Grace sat mute and shamed, but lovely, flushed from the cooking.
What were his plans, the mother wanted to know, his plans now that he had graduated? (Grace must have told them that lie; she must have concealed the fact that he’d walked out on his last exam because the questions were idiotic. Had she thought that mere bravado?)
Right now, he said, he was driving a taxi. There was not much to do with a degree in philosophy. “Unless I decide to become a priest.”
“You a Catholic?” the father said, so startled he almost choked on his food.
“Oh. Do you have to be?”
Grace said, “Just kidding.” But she sounded as if all the kidding had gone out of her.
“Philosophy,” the mother said. “I didn’t know you could study just that for four years.”
“Slow learner,” Royce said.
“Now you’re joking.”
He and Grace washed the dishes in silence, then went for a walk in the lane. Her face was still rosy from embarrassment or the kitchen heat, and her teasing nature seemed to have turned to lead.
“Is there a late bus?” he said.
“They’re just nervous,” she said. “It’ll be better tomorrow.”
He looked up at some feathery, slightly Oriental-looking trees, and asked her if she knew what they were.
“Acacia. Acacia trees. They’re my favorite trees.”
Favorite trees. What next? Favorite flower? Favorite star? Favorite windmill? Did she have a favorite fence post? About to inquire, he figured it would hurt her feelings.
Instead, he asked what they would be doing the next day. Maybe a picnic in the woods, he hoped. Somewhere he could get her alone.
She said that they would be making strawberry jam all day.
“You don’t choose here,” she said. “You just deal with what’s ready. Follow the seasons.”
He had counted on helping with some farm work. He was good with machinery, which surprised people, and he had a real interest in how others earned a living, even though he shied away from making a commitment of that kind himself.
In fact, it had occurred to him—of all things—that the father might be getting past it and the brother would prove to be some sort of dunce (Grace had spoken of him scornfully) and that he, Royce, right now at loose ends and neither stupid nor lazy, might slip into a bucolic life amid picturesque dumb animals and bursting orchards, with time on his hands all winter to cultivate his mind. Sabine farm.
But he could tell that the father and the brother were not going to be keen to have him around. No time for him. And they wouldn’t think of farming, even efficient farming, as a restorative for the soul. He would be stuck with the strawberries. Unless the younger sister, the genius piano player, hauled him in to turn her pages.
“All my children have their gifts,” the mother had said to him, as they got up from the table, and the pianist was excused from the dishes. “Ruth has her music, Grace has her history, and Kenny, of course, is the one for agriculture.”
In the lane he tried putting his arm around Grace, but the embrace was awkward, with some stumbling in the narrow ruts of the track.
“Is this how it’s going to be?” he said.
“Never mind,” she said. “I have a plan.”
He couldn’t see what that could be. The room where he would sleep was off the kitchen. The window was stuck about a quarter of the way up—it didn’t open far enough for him to sneak out.
“Tomorrow we make the jam,” Grace said. “All day, likely. Ruth will be practicing—she’ll drive you crazy, but never mind. Next day, Mother has to take her into town for her examination. Then all the kids who have been examined have to sit and wait till the last one’s done, and that’s when they give out the results to everybody. See?”
“I don’t see your mother agreeing to leave us alone,” Royce said. “Or isn’t this the plan I’m thinking it is?”
“It is,” Grace said. “I have to go and see my friend Robina. Robina Shoemaker. I’ll have to go on my bike, so it’ll take a while. She lives on the other side of the highway. We’ve been friends since we were little, and now for two years she’s been crippled. A horse stepped on her foot.”
“Good Christ,” he said. “Rural calamities.”
“I know,” she said, not seeming to care about matching his tone. “So I am supposed to be going to see her, but I actually won’t be. After Mother and Ruth are gone, I’m turning the bike around and coming back and we’ll have the house to ourselves.”
“And this exam is long?”
“I promise you. Long. And then they are going to take some strawberries to Grandma, and that always takes at least an hour. Are you following me?”
“I hope so.”
“Can you be good all day tomorrow? Don’t be sarcastic to Mother.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I promise.”
But he had to wonder. Why now rather than any of those times last winter when he could easily have gotten her up to his room and arranged for his roommate to be out? Or last spring, when she drove him crazy in the dark corners of the park? What about her vaunted virginity?
“I have pads,” she said. “How many do you usually need?”
To his surprise, he had to say he didn’t know.
“Virgins aren’t my cup of tea.”
She hugged herself, laughing, the way he was used to her.
“I didn’t mean to be funny.” Really he hadn’t.
Her mother was sitting on the side steps, but surely she couldn’t have heard. She asked if they’d had a nice walk and said that she herself always looked forward to the cool of the evening.
“We’re lucky here—not holed up in the heat like you city folks.”
When he woke up in the morning he thought that he had ahead of him one of the longest days of his life, but in fact it went easily. The jugs were lowered in their racks into the bubbling hot water. The strawberries were hulled and heated till they boiled and developed a pink froth like midway candy. The work was organized amiably, with the three of them quick to see when another needed help lifting a pot or coming to another’s aid with a handy movement of the strainer. The kitchen was murderously hot, and first Royce, then Grace, then Grace’s mother thrust their faces under the c
old-water tap and came up dripping.
“Why did I never in my life think of that before?” the mother said, standing there with witch tails stuck to her forehead. “It takes a man to think of things that smart, doesn’t it, Grace?”
The piano was being played all day long by the child who was to be examined, reminding each of them, in their different ways, of the trials and promises of the day to come.
At the end of the afternoon Royce was given the keys to the car and drove five miles to the nearest store, where he bought sliced ham and ice cream and ready-made potato salad for supper. It seemed that potato salad not made at home was something unknown in that house.
Warm jam was poured over the ice cream.
The mother in her water-spotted dress was fairly giddy with the labor and the achievements of the day.
“Royce here is the type to spoil a woman,” she said. “Anybody with him around would be getting the work done whiz-bang and then be enjoying ice cream every day. We’d be spoiled.”
The brother said that Grace was spoiled already—she thought she was smart because she had went to college.
“Gone,” the mother said.
Grace threatened to dump a spoonful of potato salad down his shirt. He grabbed it away and ate it from his fingers.
Grace said, “Yuck.”
The mother warned them.
“Manners.”
The next day the father and the brother were stooking early oats in the acres they owned on the other side of the highway. They took lunch with them, and counted on the woman who rented the place to supply them with drinking water. All this Grace had figured out.
Ruth was made to stand very still while her mother fixed her hair up with braids and ribbons to set off her doomed expression. She said she couldn’t eat anything. The mother said, “Nerves,” and wrapped up some soda biscuits in waxed paper. Just a few minutes before the car drove away, Grace got on her bicycle and waved goodbye. The mother said to give her love to the girl who was crippled. A jar of the fresh jam was wrapped up to keep it safe in the bicycle’s basket, to provide a treat for her.
Royce had been told that he deserved a day off, after yesterday’s work. But the tall brick house, so impressive from the outside, had not a scrap of grace or comfort within. The furniture was simply stuck here and there, as if nobody had ever had time for a plan. The front door was partly blocked by Ruth’s piano. At least there were books to read in the living room. He took Don Quixote from a shelf of classics, behind glass, and yelled “Knock ’em dead!” to Ruth, who didn’t answer. His ears followed the car down the lane, then heard it turn toward the highway. He read a few words, letting the house change over, switch itself to his side. The pattern of the oilcloth on the kitchen table seemed to be conspiring, the flypapers were as fresh as Ruth’s curls, the radio turned off, everything waiting. Without any haste, he walked to the room off the kitchen, where he felt it proper to tidy the bed and hang up his few clothes. He pulled the blind down to the sill, took off everything he had on, and got under the quilt.
He had not come unequipped, even knowing that his chances might be slim. No lack of readiness now. The hush felt momentous. How far would she think it necessary to go before she turned back?
The kitchen clock struck one, the time that Ruth was due at the music teacher’s. Now surely, surely.
He heard the bike on the gravel. But the kitchen door did not open as soon as he expected. Then he understood that she was pushing the bike around to the back of the house, to hide it.
Good girl.
Her footsteps entered, very lightly, as if not to waken anyone sleeping in the house. Then a shy movement of the door, which, as he had already noted, had no locks of any kind. He stayed quite still, his eyes open just a slit. He gave her time. He had thought she might get into bed with her clothes on, but no. She was taking off every stitch in front of him, head bowed, lips pressed together, then moistened with her tongue. Very serious.
What a darling.
They were far enough advanced not to have heard the car. At first he had made quite an effort to be quiet, not because he believed in any danger but just because he meant to go easy, be very gentle with her. This notion, however, was on the point of being left behind. She didn’t seem to require such care. They were making enough noise themselves not to hear anything outside.
They would not have heard the car anyway—it had been left a distance down the driveway. Likewise, the footsteps must have been soft, the kitchen door carefully opened.
If they had heard even the kitchen door they might have had a moment to prepare. But as it was, the door of the room was flung open before they could understand that such a thing had happened. And, in fact, it took them a minute to stop and register the mother’s face gaping, somehow huge, right at the foot of the bed.
She was not able to speak. She shook. She stuttered. She steadied herself by holding the bed frame.
“I cannot,” she said when she could. “Cannot. Cannot. Believe.”
“Oh, shut up,” Royce said.
“Do you—do you—do you have a mother?”
“None of your business,” Royce said. He heaved Grace to one side without looking at her, reached down for his pants on the floor, and worked them on under the quilt before he got out of the bed. His movements kicked Grace away from him. He could not help that, hardly noticed it. She had her head buried in the sheets, her bare buttocks now somehow exposed.
“What have you done?” the mother said. “We take you into our family. We make you welcome in our home. Our daughter—”
“Your daughter makes up her mind for herself.”
“You hear him?” the mother cried at Grace’s buried head, her hands clutching at the dress she had put on specially for the piano examination. There wasn’t anywhere for her to sit down, except for the bed, and she couldn’t sit on that.
Royce responded to this by gathering the things that belonged to him, tidied up in Grace’s honor. Once he had to say “Excuse me” to the mother, but his tone was brutal.
When Grace heard him zip up his bag she turned over and put her feet on the floor. She was perfectly naked.
She said, “Take me. Take me with you.”
But he had gone out of the room, out of the house, as if he hadn’t even heard her.
He walked out to the road in such a rage that he could not think where to turn for the highway. When he found it, he hardly remembered to keep to the gravel, out of the way of the cars that might come along on the paved road. He knew he’d have to hitch, but for the moment he could not slow down to do it. He didn’t think he’d be able to talk to anybody. He remembered whispering to Grace the day before when they were doing the strawberries, kissing under the rush of cold water when her mother’s back was turned. Her fair hair turning dark in the stream of water. Acting as if he worshiped her. How at certain moments that had been true. The insanity of it, the insanity of letting himself be drawn. That family. That mad mother rolling her eyes to heaven.
When he got weary enough and sane enough, he slowed down and put out his thumb for a ride. There was little conviction in the gesture, but a car did stop for him.
He continued to be lucky during the day, though most of the rides were fairly short. Farmers wanting a bit of company on their way to town or their way home. There was general conversation. One farmer at the end of a ride said to him, “Say, can’t you drive?”
Royce said sure. “Just recently I’ve been driving taxis.”
“Well, aren’t you getting a bit old, then, to be hitching rides? You got through college and all—aren’t you of the opinion that you should be getting a real job?”
Royce considered this, as if it were a truly novel idea.
He said, “No.”
Then he got out, and he saw across the road in the cut of the highway a tower of ancient-looking rock that seemed quite out of place there, even though it was capped with grass and had a small tree growing out of a crack.
He was on
the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, though he did not know that name or anything about it. But he was captivated. Why had he never been told anything about this? This surprise, this careless challenge in the ordinary landscape. He felt a comic sort of outrage that something made for him to explore had been there all along and nobody had told him.
Nevertheless, he knew. Before he got into the next car, he knew that he was going to find out; he was not going to let this go. Geology was what it was called. And all this time he had been fooling around with arguments, with philosophy and political science.
It wouldn’t be easy. It would mean saving money, starting again with pimpled brats just out of high school. But that was what he would do.
Later, he often told people about the trip, about the sight of the escarpment that had turned his life around. If asked what he’d been doing there, he’d wonder and then remember that he’d gone up there to see a girl.
Avie was near campus for one day in the fall, picking up a few books that she had left behind at her former boarding house. She went up to the university to see if she could turn them in at the secondhand bookshop there, but found that she didn’t really want to. She was surprised at first not to meet anyone she knew. Then she ran into a girl who had sat next to her in her Decisive Battles of Europe class. Marsha Kidd. Marsha told her that they had all been shocked that Avie wasn’t coming back.
“You and Grace, it’s such a shame,” Marsha said.
Avie had written Grace a letter during the summer. Then she’d worried that the letter was somewhat too frank on the subject of her doubts about getting married, and she had written a second letter that was quite witty in denying the doubts of the first. There had been no answer to either one.
“I sent her a card,” Marsha said. “I thought maybe she and I could get a room together. When I heard you weren’t going to be around. Not that I ever got any reply.”
