"It's horrible here," Polly finally whispered. "Let's go."
"Yeah. Let's go." Luke pulled her up.
The flashes of sunlight had dimmed, fading from the metal buildings. When they reached the edge of the marsh, they turned back to see the gray glint of metal flickering from behind the trees. Luke shook his head in disbelief.
"I told you it was there," Polly said again.
In the Firebird, Miss Dingley and Mrs. O'Neal sat with the win- dows rolled up. Gnats, mosquitoes, and moths crowded to swirl in the headlight beams. "Where are they? Where are they?" muttered the old woman. "Idiot to let them go off like that!"
"Yes, it's so dark, they might have fallen into the pond or been attacked by something wild, that's what's been worrying me."
"Orchid. Please!" Miss Dingley hit her thighs hard. "Absurd, crippled old busybody. Sometimes I think I have no more brains than the rest of the Dingleys. Me playing Hardy Boys with their legs."
(God knows what was out there, a ring of car thieves, drug smugglers, a maniacal hermit, kidnappers, and rapists.)
A sudden rap at the front window sent Mrs. O'Neal into a loud scream. Ramona flung open the door. "It's just them, it's them, Orchid, good God, calm down! You two! Get in before they eat you alive. Oh, my God, look at you! Are you all right?"
Luke and Polly huddled in the backseat. Their eyes, eerily light, looked fluorescent in their mud-brown faces. Their skin was blistered with scratches. "It got dark so fast," Polly mumbled. "And then we got lost." Her mouth was stiff with dried mud.
"Poor things, poor things," sighed Mrs. O'Neal.
Miss Dingley twisted around. "Was it there?"
"Yes." Polly nodded.
"Now, these children have to get some food in them, Miss Dingley. And some dry clothes, that's for certain, first things first," advised Mrs. O'Neal as she backed the Firebird into a careful three-point turn at the road's end.
"Have you got some water, or something you could give Polly?"
Luke asked.
"Come on, I don't need anything, I'm okay." Polly was shivering.
"Here." Miss Dingley reached down into her hamper. "Here, Miriam. Luke. Give her that." It was a bottle of port.
"It's not missiles," Polly said. "It is restricted. It's the federal government. Something's funny. There're dead dogs lying there. We took the pictures."
Enclosed in unbroken blackness, the car lights moved slowly along the silent expanse of an abandoned highway. The old woman who represented her town, both in her name and in her elective capacity, sat beside her driver and tried to decipher the meaning of what the girl and boy were telling her. She reminded herself that she was powerless even to get out of her car without the help of sticks and wheeled chairs.
chapter 40
As people were beginning to remember, Beanie Abernathy was a woman who acted on her impulses. She did so again today by hiking to Grand Central earlier than planned and boarding the first train to Argyle. She arrived there nearly two hours before Winslow expected to meet her. Dingley Falls was seven miles away, the next bus wouldn't leave before 4:00 P.M., there was no answer at home or at the office, nor was Lance at the Club. Beanie ate a bowl of chili at the diner, then walked to the bar where on Monday she had sat with Richard Rage. She had a Scotch. Finally she phoned Tracy Canopy, who was happy to come get her, even when Beanie made it clear that she had not returned forever, but only for the day; even when she added that she preferred not to talk about her plans. She had made no plans.
"Yes, I understand." Tracy nodded as they drove back toward Dingley Falls. She did not understand at all actually; plan-making was an integral and automatic part of her personality, and so she assumed that Beanie meant she had as yet made no full, no final, or no airtight plan, whereas Beanie meant just what she said. "We're very concerned, Beanie," Tracy went on, "and want what's right and best for you. My, I've been so worried, you can imagine. And Evelyn, we'll have to tell her right away that you're fine. You are, aren't you? Poor Evelyn, her patio, the vandalism I was telling you about, it's shattered her nerves. She's always been susceptible to the worst imaginings."
"But she didn't imagine this. Somebody did it."
"That's true. Really makes you wonder. My, here we are already.
I'll just wait in the car, in case."
Seeing the Abernathy house, its lawn, the steps, the black shutters, all exactly the same when everything else had changed so much, was a shock to Beanie. She felt she no longer had the right to use her key. She pressed the doorbell, and when no one answered, she walked back to the car. So Mrs. Canopy insisted on driving her into town, where they parked (too far from the curb, Beanie thought without thinking, and then thought that she had always held Winslow's poor driving against him) in front of Limus Barnum's store, which was closed. "The point is," Tracy said, "you never know whether Mr. Barnum is going to be there or not. Or whether Prudence is going to be at the Tea Shoppe or not. Or Sammy at the pharmacy. Or anyone. And then the selectmen criticize all of us for not patronizing local businesses!"
The ladies walked to the little cream brick building that Dingley Falls's law firm shared with Dr. Scaper. Abernathy & Abernathy was open, but neither partner was in. The young secretary thought Mr. Abernathy Sr. was already in Argyle.
"Oh, are you sure, Susan? I wanted to stop him before he left for the station."
"I haven't seen him since eleven this morning, Mrs. Abernathy.
I had the impression he was going to Argyle right then. Gee. I could call—"
"Hello!" Otto Scaper squeezed through the door. "Beanie!" he yelled. "Hell's bells, you're looking nice and healthy. It sets me up to see you. Whole damn town's going under on me, one thing after another. I'm old, it's not fair. Tracy, hello there. What in hell's the matter with your hands?"
"I don't know! Oh. Clay."
"What?" He cupped his ear with his enormous palm.
"Clay. You know." She formed a pot in air.
"Oh. Looked like liver trouble from here. I gotta run." The doctor lunged at the secretary's desk and scooped up a pack of cigarettes.
"Gimme these, okay? Thanks, beautiful, and I'll pay you back tomorrow. Now don't tell Ida you saw me smoking or she'll run out and buy me a damn book on how to stop. Is that a new hairdo? I like it. Well, so long, girls." Susan Packer was embarrassed, for it was not her hair style that was changed, but her hair color—from brown to strawberry blond. All day she'd felt like rushing home to dye it back or hang herself. Oh, she'd never find a husband in Dingley Falls! Beanie was thinking that Susan should have left her hair brown but cut it short.
Tracy was talking now, suggesting that they drive back to Argyle.
They were standing in the doorway of the office building.
"Maybe we'll pass him on the road. Really, Beanie, I swear, it's no trouble at all. I don't have anything to do. Not until five; it's only a quarter past three."
Beanie saw Arthur's green Audi drive into Dingley Circle. It stopped in front of the post office. She saw Winslow step out and open the door for a woman in a black dress. The two spoke for a moment, then he watched the woman enter the double doors.
Beanie was trying to recall the postmistress's name when Tracy tapped her shoulder and said, "Oh, look, there's Winslow now, right over there."
The lawyer turned toward them. Startled, he stopped. Beanie came down the steps and hurried over to offer an explanation. "I took an earlier train," she said. "Tracy gave me a ride."
"Beanie."
"I was worried you'd make a useless trip to the station."
They stood in the middle of the sidewalk. Abernathy squinted into the sun. "Tracy," he called. "Thank you for getting her."
Quickly Mrs. Canopy joined them to help out. "Oh, no trouble.
I was just potting. See." She held out her hands with a laugh. "What a messy hobby! Otto thought I had some dread disease a minute ago."
"I'm sorry I inconvenienced you. I gave Pru a ride home,"
Winslow began to
explain. He felt in his jacket pocket for his pipe.
"She closed early. She and Mrs. Haig here at the post office, they're trying to help a girl who's working for Pru. Her husband's in jail."
Abernathy took out his pipe, then put it back in his pocket. He buttoned all the buttons on his jacket, caught himself, and unbuttoned them.
"What a shame," said Tracy. "Oh, that pretty girl from Vietnam?"
"Yes. It's a bit complicated, I'm afraid." He turned to Beanie now.
"Your trip all right, I hope?"
"Yes, thank you, fine."
Tracy looked noticeably at her watch. "I should hurry. I'm never prepared for that remedial class, no doubt make such a fool of myself.
Beanie, you call me. Winslow, bye-bye." Mrs. Canopy hurried down the street to her car. At five on Thursday she taught remedial reading at Dingley Optical Instruments to a small group of factory workers who believed they could better themselves and stop being factory workers.
As Tracy got into her Volvo, she looked around. The Abernathys still stood on the sidewalk where she'd left them. Sun flamed in Beanie's auburn hair. With his hand Winslow shaded his eyes.
In her off-beige bedroom Mrs. Ernest Ransom was trying some- thing new. She was a woman of education, one who was, if not before the times, then at least, she liked to think, not behind them. Indeed, her Sundays were spent keeping up with the Times, at least everything but the sports section, which she always folded like a giant napkin on the breakfast table beside Ernest's sculpted grapefruit. Current affairs rarely got past her.
All her life Priscilla Hancock had kept herself modern. As a teenager she'd been a fan of John Dos Passos, of Chanel, Picasso, the Lubitsch touch, and the Spanish Civil War. At boarding school she'd attended meetings to keep America out of the Second World War, then at Mount Holyoke meetings to help America win it. Always in the first wave, even in a backwater like Dingley Falls, Connecticut, Priss had timely taken up, among other things, theater of the absurd, Dr. Spock, minimal art, psychoanalysis, Ingmar Bergman, the sack dress, banning the bomb, modern dance, Antonioni, John Kennedy, Danish cookware, Ralph Nader, Mandarin restaurants, Pierre Cardin, solar energy, and belief in the guilt of Richard Nixon. The last was a painful subject between herself and Ernest, who would not relinquish faith (in the office, and so of necessity in the man) until the resignation itself. Far, far later than Priss.
One wave, however, she appeared to have missed. The women's movement. It had rushed past her, gathering speed and volume until now she watched it smash into house after house, while she bobbed out at sea. Of course, she'd read de Beauvoir long ago, and all the others, more or less, and while what they said was no doubt true, wasn't it a bit beside the point, not to mention defensive? Mrs. Ransom was not one of those with a passionate capacity to inflame her bosom by pressing to it all the injustices ever committed against women since Eve thumbed her nose at a chauvinist God. When Kate Ransom read her mother anecdotes from the setbacks and humiliations endured by great women of the past and asked if the stories didn't make her want to "blow men's balls off," the answer was frankly, no, they did not.
The second wave, the militant bra burners, had amused, then irritated Priss, as had "hippies" in general. She could barely forgive Sidney Blossom for having once been one. As a group, they had struck her as not only unkempt and ill-bred, but insolently naïve. She quoted Moliere: "C'est une folie a nulle autre seconde, / De vouloir se mêler à corriger le monde." There is no greater folly than the desire to dabble in reforming the world. And these dogmatic, inarticulate innocents, handing out flowers one minute, throwing rocks the next, would no doubt have read that play and thought the misanthrope was a g.d. tragic hero. Here she and Ernest had been quite in agreement. The sixties had been a mistake. A loud, long, deliberate fart in a public place.
But women had swum out of the sixties. Now the very mainstream, in the buoyant camaraderie of their long-suppressed hatred for everyone, had paddled past Priss. Housewives in Little Rock had memorized ideological diatribes against their husbands, schoolgirls campaigned for the ERA, Playgirl magazine was in the Madder A&P, all the children were in daycare programs, and there wasn't a bra left to burn. That she was behind the times was a mortifying realization to Mrs. Ransom, but she faced the fact squarely after a catechism by Kate on The Joy of Sex, which their daughter had given her parents for their thirtieth anniversary. How often, Kate asked, did she "screw"? When had she started? Was she multiorgasmic? Was she orgasmic? How often did she masturbate? When had she started?
Had she ever had anal sex? Why did these questions make her so uptight? Why couldn't she be open and honest with her own daughter about desires that all women shared? Weren't they sisters?
"No, we are not," Mrs. Ransom had replied. "I have the honor of being your mother. Emerald is your sister."
"Yeah, crap, well, I can't talk to her. Do you know what she's doing right now? She's got olive oil on her hair and over that, aluminum foil, and she's got a face mask of honey and oatmeal on. I don't think Emerald even has a vagina. I don't think she even pees."
Kate's attitude had disturbed Mrs. Ransom. Then had come the obscene accusations made by the anonymous letter. Then Beanie's astonishing cri de coeur that she had "never felt like this before"
Richard Rage. Felt like what? Priss didn't know whether she was orgasmic or not. Perhaps it would have been of some comfort to her to know that she had somehow managed to raise two perfectly, multiplicatively orgasmic daughters, to know that in fact at this very minute Emerald was lying with Arthur Abernathy on his sofa, where they had been having sex for four years. Lying with Arthur's hand in her lace panties and her hand around a handkerchief around his phallus. Shuddering from time to time, shaking off her climaxes like crinolines. But Mrs. Ransom had never asked about Emerald's sex life, or anyone else's. As for her own, there was little to say. Perhaps once a month now, Ernest pressed up against her after he turned out the light. He thrust his tongue in her mouth, then he massaged her breasts briefly, then he climbed on top of her and pulled down his pajama bottoms while she pulled down hers. Then he rubbed his penis against her crotch until it was fully erect. Then he or she or both of them positioned it to slide inside her. Sometimes it felt reasonably pleasant, other times decidedly less so. Certainly she did not writhe and moan, and frankly she found it farcical when actresses did so in films. No doubt, Ernest was not a very good lover. But did she want a good lover? And what would one be? In the past month she had begun to purchase magazines and paperbacks on the subject of her sensuality. They strongly advised her to cultivate autoeroticism, to practice it diligently. Finally she sent away for one of the vibrators that doctors in the field had recommended to women.
Now, behind the locked door of her bedroom, the house empty, Priss sat on the edge of her queen-sized bed with her purchase. She drank half a martini, then, after a deep breath, tugged her slacks, panty hose, and panties down to her feet. Should she take off her tunic and blouse? She decided not. Spreading her legs, she pressed the white plastic cone against her pubis and pushed the switch.
Nothing happened. Batteries had not been included. "This is g.d. ridiculous," muttered Mrs. Ransom as she hopped to her bathroom closet, where she removed the batteries from a portable makeup mirror. Seated on the toilet cover, she turned on the vibrator again. Her hand spasmed. Very gently she touched the tip of the machine to what the instructions called her climactic zone. The sensation resembled high E on a violin. She warmed the tip in her hand, then tried again, more firmly. Eventually the irritation faded. The whole area was numb. Leaning farther back, Priss eased the end of the vibrator into her vagina. The motor was quite hot now and she was slightly concerned about the possibility of its exploding inside her.
She caught a glimpse of her face, rather red, in the mirror that ran the width of the room above twin sinks. The outside wall of the bathroom had sliding glass doors that opened onto a fenced balcony, where one could sunbathe (Kate did so nude) and from which Ernest had b
uilt a safety ladder in case of fire. Mrs. Ransom's eyes were drawn to the bamboo blinds lowered over the doors. Something drew her attention there. She looked back, then back again, then gasped.
In a gap between the loosely woven slats, a pair of eyes stared at her.
When they moved, she saw teeth flicker in a grin. She flung the vibrator at the eyes. It thudded on the safety glass. The eyes vanished. Simultaneously she heard someone driving into the garage on the other side of the house. On the balcony footsteps scrambled, falling down the ladder. There was a thud. A muffled grunt.
Mrs. Ransom pulled up her wad of clothes, then stood to listen.
The only noise was the buzz of the vibrator. Turning it off, she began to shake. Her legs trembled as she walked to unlock her bedroom door.
She lay down on the bed, got up. From the medicine chest she took a Valium, cut it in half with a fingernail file, swallowed the half with the martini on her night table, climbed back into the bed, and pulled the Marimekko coverlet around her. She was certain that the eyes were not those of anyone she knew well. That would have been worse.
"Your mother has a headache and won't be joining us for cock- tails. Emerald, your Gibson. Arthur, one Scotch and soda coming up." Ernest Ransom mixed highballs at the ebony liquor cabinet.
He had showered and changed from his suit to madras slacks and a yellow knit shirt. "So. To the end of another day, Arthur. How was yours?"
"Frustrating. I spent the public part of it going around in circles about when are we ever going to reinforce Falls Bridge. And the private part going around in circles with management at Optical Instruments. They don't need a lawyer over there, they need an Industrial Revolution." Arthur Abernathy hoped he had not previously made this remark, one of his favorites, to his future father-in-law. He had, however, and Ernest Ransom was thinking that Arthur was not going to get very far in politics until he learned to remember what he'd said to whom. "Yes, yes. Poor O.I." Ransom sipped his Scotch and soda. "It's a complete shambles now. But in your great-grandfather's day, remember, Arthur, O.I. was one of the major manufacturers of precision optics in New England. Telescopes, periscopes, everything, each one miles ahead of the competition in just plain quality."
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