The Wintering

by Joan Williams

  “I love you, too,” he said. We linked arms walking on. Then he said, “But I have to tell you things I dream about I hope will happen.” And I let his arm go, wishing he had not said that, and there was this tiny bug crawling along in the snow and I said, “Look at that! Where can it possibly be going?” We bent down to look and he said, “It must know, and I wish I did, so I could help it. It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. It should have expired long ago with winter.” He was going to pick it up. I said, “Let’s leave it alone. Let it find its own way.”

  History was not so bad. I feel sorry about A. coming up here for just an afternoon, but I did have to study. And it was sort of a relief when he left; I felt glad to be back in my own life, as I feel responsible when I’m with him about seeing that he is not bored, though he never seems to be; he’s so quiet it’s hard sometimes to know what he’s thinking. I understand now what people mean when they’ve said that about me. I feel if it’s just friendship there’s nothing wrong in our seeing each other, even if he is married. I kept thinking, suppose he got sick or something when he was at school and I had to notify his family. He said he had tried to warn me of the risks I was taking; did I want to change my mind? I said, “No.” But I don’t know why he wanted to come so far for so short a time; I do want him to be happy; I hugged him goodbye.

  Dear Jeff:

  I felt so depressed after you left, though I was not feeling sorry for myself. I just have been very unhappy, even though I passed all of my exams. Isn’t that wonderful! It’s some sort of unrest, wanting something and not knowing what, I guess. Being this age should be wonderful but it isn’t. It’s terrible not knowing what one is and what one is going to do, if anything at all. Though not knowing, I can still believe in myself, which is one thing about being young, instead of old. Then your violets came. It was as if you had known how I was feeling. It was snowing again. I pinned them on beneath my coat and walked in that calm snow and felt the cold but smelled the violets. In a great rush I thought of you but so much else, my whole life; the little girl I was; wondering what I am now. I thought about people leading different lives in one life, for the first time that my parents have a whole life separate from me, had one before I was born, and I don’t really know them any way except as my parents. I wish you could help my mother find something in her life as you’re helping me. But don’t lie to me either. And promise me you will tell me if you do think I’m stupid, or worthless, and will never become anything. And as you asked, here is a letter with something green in it. One of the violets and its leaves.

  Amy, Amy, he thought; and her grief was his own; it was like her to send the violet. He put it in his wallet. Late spring or early summer, the pavement burned, and the post office had been a cool, brief respite where he had tried to read in a corner, but some grande dame had wanted to talk, or perhaps to peer at the letter. Was, as Inga said, the town full of talk? Somehow, he doubted that. Mud-hived cars clogged the street in the cold, late, wet spring, and the crops were behind; he felt sorry for farmers. “Dogtail cotton again?” he had greeted a farmer whose face was haggard, and then gone on wondering where he could read the letter. He did not want to give any appearance of hiding.

  Dearest Amy:

  Don’t grieve so, though I told you from the first that it is better than vegetating. And believe that something will come of it, though we don’t know as yet what. But never think you are worthless. Out of all I might have, don’t you know I would not have picked you, if you were. You are not, you know, the only young woman ever to write me. And at my age this may be the last cast I can make: don’t you know that? Believe in yourself for me, if for no other reason. Write and say you will in your little girl’s splash all over your lined school paper. I love you, I love you. I meant it that day in the snow. I do.

  You be a little brig and I’ll he the ocean for you to sail on, your sails taut, running free. It’s been a long time, Amy, but I’m writing again, and you did that for me: gave me hack what I had to have, a belief in what I was doing. I’ve needed someone to give something to, which was not money. I was tired of that. I needed someone saying Yes, to me, and to whom I could say it in return.

  Never, never stop believing in yourself. Never write me again as you did. Because, next time, no matter what, no matter where you are, I think I would have to drop everything to come

  Coming in, Inga said, “Do you like it? Do you or don’t you? Jessie does and so does Amelia. She just stood over Billie Jean until she got it right. The older you get, I read, the lighter you should wear your hair, though I would have thought darker, wouldn’t you? But you don’t think it’s too blond, do you? Pleas-s!” She dropped the final e, which jarred him. “Can’t you take yourself out of the paper and look, one minute, Jeff?”

  He said, “I’m buried in the paper wondering why someone’s cut a chunk out of the sports page before I’ve read it.”

  “Be-cause, here’s why.” Vy, she said. Always she reverted more to her first language in anger. She took the ripped piece from an end-table drawer. “I thought you liked blondes.” Her hand went up gracefully toward her hair without touching it.

  “So.” He held the clipping. “She is graduated from college and is attending a cotillion. You hadn’t learned it from your talks with her parents but had to read it in the paper?”

  Vexed, Inga said, “And you didn’t know she was home?”

  “You cut out the news before I saw the paper,” he said.

  “Why tomorrow are you going to Delton?”

  “I told you, to buy fishing gear on sale at Sears.”

  “Amelia and I want to go. We need to shop.”

  “Come ahead. I’m glad for the company. It’s a long drive.”

  Edith, raising a shade, said, “It’s almost noon. Weren’t you meeting someone downtown for lunch? How was the dance?”

  Sighing at the difficulty of waking up excited, Amy knew she would have to. She sat up and touched her head a moment longer to her pillow, resting on her knees. Another moment of silence and her mother would want to know what had been wrong. And nothing had been wrong with the cotillion; it had been planned beautifully, as always. She had been expected to go since she was in kindergarten (it was held to honor those graduating from college), and Amy could not make herself refuse to attend. Now she cried, “It was wonderful!” Equally difficult was being secretive about a day over which she felt expansive. She could avoid more questions by pretending to be the daughter her mother had always wanted, chatty and gay. “Guess who’s engaged,” Amy said. “Quill. Isn’t that wonderful?” Once she had replied, “To Lydia, of course,” she tried to think of other details her mother would like to know. But soon Amy was silent, wondering how Quill had given up or sold out so soon, to be a replica of all he had mocked by wanting to be a painter. She felt sorry for him.

  Edith’s smile wavered, as she worried about Amy’s being left behind. Her voice came weakly. “I know their parents are happy they’re all set,” she said. “Two of Delton’s most prominent families.”

  Amy wondered if other people when they saw themselves in mirrors were as surprised as she? Confronting herself in pajamas, she thought, That’s me. That’s how I look? and then going from the mirror had no image of herself. Though she had not wanted to marry Quill, why didn’t he want to marry her? What was wrong with her? she had asked, staring.

  “You’re going to find yourself left if you don’t watch out,” Edith said, leaving. She meant Amy was too choosy and it was better not to be.

  It would be so much simpler just to get married, Amy thought. Looking from the window, she felt jailed and sentenced to this solitariness. Below, a Negro man knelt weeding zinnias, his loose brown clothes similar to those of an old woman she had seen in New York rummaging in a trash can. Staring into the bright back yard, holding compassionately the two images simultaneously, the one here, the other on the sun-slatted street, having this double image which no one else could have, she felt the impossibility of people ever
knowing one another. What, with all the longing in her heart, was she to do? Amy thought wildly.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Edith waited. Though the weather was scorching, Amy came down in stockings and carrying short white gloves. She held them up gaily, as if they were the recognizable badge of some sister organization, like a sorority. Having belonged to the most proper one in college, Edith went still to alumnae meetings proudly wearing her pin.

  How attractive Amy looked pulled together, Edith thought, smiling back happily. Friends had said Amy would get over whatever phase she had been in. How needlessly she had worried. Though she had one more warning. “The best husband material gets snatched up first,” Edith said.

  Amy mentioned a logical time for coming home. Edith did not need the car, unless maybe she might run to the store later. The back yard seemed emptied, the zinnias all weeded, the Negro had gone. However, the mingled flowers produced a glorious multicolor like the crushed ante-bellum costumes the girls had worn to the cotillion. Lydia had gained weight and with her thicker middle already looked like a matron, Amy thought. Cutting in on her, Quill had said right away, “Guess what?”

  And if he had decided to marry Lydia what was she going to say except, “How wonderful, Quill.” Then she had added, “I know your father’s happy.” And Quill had blushed and turned her over with an air of good riddance to a friend, Billy Walter; she had wanted to cry after Quill’s retreating back, “Lydia never reads!”

  Answering her mother’s final warning, Amy had said, “I don’t want to get married yet.” But didn’t she? The next moment, Edith had taken a package at the front door and opened it to a pair of yellow linen pants and a bright red blazer. “Is he going to wear those together?” Amy had said. Edith had answered, “Why, baby, that’s fun!” Her parents went dancing every weekend now. One Sunday morning, recently, her father could not get up. When someone from the church had called, his lips had turned blue. Walking away from the phone, he had told Edith to talk. “He’s been sick all week,” Edith had said. “We should have phoned. But we thought, until the last minute, he would be better on Sunday.”

  Amy bruised some of the zinnia heads, driving the car recklessly from the driveway. She viewed them in sorrow, as their heads seemed bent. If only she did not want to exceed that from which she had come, ordinarily would have been, how much simpler life would seem. Why should she have more strength than Quill, a man? He had backed down. Tar bubbled in the streets; the pavement shone in the heat. She thought of turning back home. Edith, wandering toward the sunroom, had been eating a bowl of ice cream, and a fan had made an indolent breeze. Staring into the bright day, Amy wondered suddenly if her mother had guessed whom she was meeting, as uncharacteristically she had not asked.

  Her own face, Amy imagined, softened as Almoner’s did whenever they met. And his face, by now, was dear and familiar. She accepted that her presence gave him something because he said it did, though she was still vague about what. In a corner of one eye, he had a small brown scar. Left over from chicken pox when he was small, he had said. The scar darkened when he smiled. Though now it darkened, he looked pale and bothered and as if he had been slightly afraid she was not coming. Twirling his cap around and around in his hand, he stood waiting. Amy realized he had something instantly to tell her.

  “Suddenly they have no summer clothes,” he said. “They’ve come with me.” The scar grew lighter when he was annoyed. “They waited for me to say they couldn’t come, so I had to say they could. They’re shopping here and there. I have to pick them up occasionally and take them somewhere else. That way, they’re keeping an eye on me, I suppose.”

  They would always have obstacles, they said. They had to laugh and went out into the day. “But we don’t have much imagination,” Amy said, as they emerged from the station. Despite a frantic exchange of letters, they had been unable to think of any place else to meet. “Does anyone besides me know you have no imagination?” she teased. “Probably somebody else writes your books.”

  But her light mood changed almost as soon as they reached his car; again, they were confronted with aimless driving. This time, the only differences were that it was hot instead of cold, that he was behind the wheel instead of her. The sun bore down on surrounding cars and came back in blinding flashes. Soon Amy had a headache and observed that at its edges, Almoner’s hair had been turned by perspiration from silver to pewter grey.

  Through plodding, sales-minded crowds, she trailed after him, with nothing she wanted to buy, or even browse among, in the sporting-goods department. Her only accomplishment in life, it seemed, was accompaniment. Being with Almoner was all the importance she had, though in Sears Roebuck no one recognized him. He looked across a counter at her. She smiled back meaning not to worry, that she was not bored, that she did not mind waiting while he picked out a tackle box. He came out with the kind he had always wanted. She said she was glad that he had it at last. Possibly she would never pinpoint what she had learned. Trailing along with him, she only felt her time was not wasted.

  Liking aloneness and often seeking it, Amy was glad, nevertheless, to be sitting in the drugstore with a purpose, though it was only waiting for Almoner. The store’s interior was consumed with the smell of frying hamburger. Smoke roiled and roiled out from the grill, while a gaunt woman stood scraping, over and over, the remains of other patties, without turning the one almost burning. She looked up, then brought Amy more coffee as requested, the saucer sloshed full, and went back to scraping.

  The woman did not even consider running amuck, Amy thought in astonishment, watching her. She could not believe such complacency. There was the outdoors, hot but beautiful and heady as a filled spinnaker, and not once had the woman turned her eyes toward the window. She only kept standing there between the stacks of individual cornflakes boxes with their red roosters crowing and the individual red and white labelled cans of soup, now eating her crusty hamburger. Never, Amy thought, would she reconcile herself to deadliness.

  Irritated and angry, Almoner came in, his blue shirt bearing wet splotches, like dark ink stains. Yet, he had found something humorous. His eyes were full of light. His lips trembled and straightened and trembled again. He and Amy fell against one another laughing, even before he spoke. “They’ll be waiting for me to pick them up again in less than an hour,” he said.

  The woman was nearly asleep, her head bent over a newpaper she had been reading spread out on the counter. Though her customers were apologetic, she was not bothered in the least; at their order, she threw on two thin hamburgers and began to dirty the grill she had just cleaned. Smoke roiled up toward the ceiling, catching there around lights already coated with amber grease. The stool next to Amy was broken. She moved along the counter and Almoner sat down next to her. Soon, the woman would be cleaning the grill again and soon they would exchange these seats. Biting into her untoasted roll, Amy stared toward the door where smoke had rushed seeking escape and had collected, caught instead.

  They drove afterward past their place at the river, it was too hot to stop, and on around the edges of the sweltering city. “You feel it, too, don’t your?” Almoner said. “The pressures here. I feel like we’re two balloons, and you’re drifting off one way and I another. And I can’t do anything but watch you go.”

  “Maybe it is the city,” Amy said wanly. “I get awfully tired of just driving around.”

  “I too,” he said. “We need a place of our own. But that’s too risky here. But someday we’ll walk and find bugs in the snow again, won’t we?”

  “I don’t know.” She felt hopeless about everything. She stared out at luxurious cared-for lawns and at houses with settled looks, where nothing seemed ever to have gone wrong.

  “I don’t seem to be able to get through to you.” He longed to take her hand. But they seemed rather defiantly clasped together and secured to her lap.

  “I’m sorry. That’s my fault,” she said.

  “It’s no one’s fault,” he said. “Or rather, i
t’s the fault of everything. Having to hide, being made to feel guilty. I tried to warn you what it would mean if you wanted to keep seeing me.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m not sorry about seeing you.”

  Drawn up to the station’s elaborate and gritty steps, she sat miserably, her eyes avoiding his. “You might as well go,” he said, reaching past her to open the door. “I know you’re busy, but write anyway. Please.”

  “I will,” she said. “And I’m never busy. Is that postbox really safe?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll keep always writing on Wednesdays. Though maybe not every Wednesday.”

  “No. Even I don’t ask that.” He held her as she pressed against him briefly; their cheeks touched. “I thought I felt your heart beat,” he said, letting her go.

  Jeff:

  I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner. I wasn’t sure you would want me to. I don’t seem to be able to say the things you want me to. And I was moody and not very nice that day in Delton. And now, for the first time, I’ve felt really afraid. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter if we met. I guess it does. Did you know I. called here that day when she was shopping? She told my mother she wanted to ask me to lunch, that since you were so interested in my work, she was. When I got home, my mother asked me if I had seen you. Thank god, I told the truth. Then she told me your wife had called. I’m not, to any of them, a child, am I? To myself, I am. I guess that’s the difference. I never thought of myself as being a threat to anyone; I feel so often threatened myself. You know, as no one else ever has. My mother says letters are proof positive and not to write you any more. She’s afraid of my being named in a divorce suit. She believed me when I told her, on my part, it was only friendship between us. But she does not want gossip. I’ve been trying, of course, not to care about what the people I know think. I guess I have not succeeded. I’m afraid and yet I think we have to go on. This is all too important to me. I’ve never had anyone before; to share our feelings is worth anything to me. I can’t believe she really once almost burned one of your manuscripts. My mother said not to see you any more but, of course, I have to. But where?