“The McElroys really don’t care about seeing us anymore—aren’t you aware of that?” Jonathan Ferris rhetorically and somewhat drunkenly demands of his wife, Sarah Stein.
Evenly she answers him, “Yes, I can see that.”
But he stumbles on, insisting, “We’re low, very low, on their priority list.”
“I know.”
Jonathan and Sarah are finishing dinner, and too much wine, on one of the hottest nights of August—in Hilton, a mid-Southern town, to which they moved (were relocated) six months ago; Jonathan works for a computer corporation. They bought this new fake-Colonial house, out in some scrubby pinewoods, where now, in the sultry, sulfurous paralyzing twilight no needle stirs, and only mosquitoes give evidence of life, buzz-diving against the window screens.
In New York, in their pretty Bleecker Street apartment, with its fern-shaded courtyard, Sarah would have taken Jonathan’s view of the recent McElroy behavior as an invitation to the sort of talk they both enjoyed: insights, analyses—and, from Sarah, somewhat literary speculations. Their five-year marriage has always included a great deal of talk, of just this sort.
However, now, as he looks across the stained blond maple table that came, inexorably, with the bargain-priced house, across plates of wilted food that they were too hot and tired to eat—as he focusses on her face Jonathan realizes that Sarah, who never cries, is on the verge of tears; and also that he is too drunk to say anything that would radically revise what he has already said.
Sarah does begin to cry. “I know we’re low on their list,” she chokes. “But after all we only met them a couple of months before they moved away. And they’d always lived here. They have family, friends. I’ve always accepted that. I even said it to you. So why do you have to point it out?”
If he could simply get to his feet, could walk around the table and say, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it—then at least temporarily there would be an improvement in the air between them, a lifting of the heavy night’s burden. But Jonathan cannot move; it is so hot his shirt is still stuck to his back, as it has been all day. And he is exhausted.
Besides, what he just said about the McElroys (who at first seemed an instrument of salvation; Sarah was crazy about them) is all too true: Hugh and Hattie McElroy, who moved to Santa Fe in June, now are back for the wedding of a son, and Sarah has barely seen them. And she used to see Hattie almost every day. On this visit, though, the McElroys have come to Sarah and Jonathan’s once for dinner, and Sarah saw Hattie at a large lunch party (given by Hattie’s old friend Popsie Hooker).
Of course, having lived here forever, the McElroys are indeed involved with family and friends, as Sarah has just said. But really, Jonathan now furiously thinks (as Sarah must have thought), at least they could call her; they could meet for tea, or something.
Weeping, Sarah looks blotchy, aged, distorted; her fine, just-not-sharp features are blurred. “Piquant” is the word that Jonathan’s mother has found for Sarah’s face. “Well, I wouldn’t call her pretty, in any conventional way, but her face is so intelligent, so—piquant.” To Jonathan, her face is simply that, her own; he is so close to her that he rarely thinks about it, except that a sudden, unexpected sight of her can deeply move him still. She simply looks like a young woman who is crying, almost any young woman.
Thinking this, it occurs to Jonathan that he has never seen another man cry, and he himself would like to weep, at this moment; it is so hot, they are both so unhappy, everything seems lost. He pulls himself together, though, after this frightening thought, and then he remembers that in fact he did see his own father in tears, as he lay dying, in Mass. General Hospital; big heavy tears ran down his father’s long lined white face.
“You must think I’m really stupid,” Sarah gets out.
No, you’re the brightest girl I ever met, Jonathan does not say. Nor does he add, But that was a stupid remark.
Stupid is the last thing that Sarah is, actually, and during their New York married life (before this) she had no trouble getting the part-time editorial jobs that she liked, or books to review. Those occupations used to absorb much of Sarah’s time, and her plentiful energy, and Jonathan knows that lack of any such work down here contributes to her unhappiness; it is not just disappointment with the McElroys.
In New York, in a vague, optimistic way (they have been generally happy people, for these times), as they discussed the projected move to Hilton, Sarah and Jonathan assured each other that since it was a university town, not just any old backward Southern city, there would be work of some sort available to her, at the university press, or somewhere. Saying which they forgot one crucial fact, which is that in or around any university there are hundreds of readily exploitable bright students’ wives, or students, who grasp at all possible, however low-paying, semi-intellectual work.
And so for Sarah there has been little to do, in the too large, uncharming house, which (Jonathan has unhappily recognized) Sarah has been keeping much too clean. All her scrubbing and waxing, her dusting and polishing have a quality of desperation, as well as being out of character; his old busy Sarah was cheerfully untidy, which was quite all right with Jonathan, who did not mind housework.
Unsteadily, they now clear the table and wash up. They go upstairs to bed; they try to sleep, in the thick damp heat.
Sarah and Jonathan’s first month in Hilton, February, was terrible for them both. Cold, dark and windy, and wet, a month of almost unrelenting rains, which turned the new red clay roads leading out to their house into tortuous slicks, deeply rutted, with long wide puddles of muddy red water, sometimes just frozen at the edges. Cold damp drafts penetrated their barnlike house; outside, in the woods, everything dripped, boughs sagged, and no birds sang.
March was a little better: not yet spring, none of the promised balmy Southern blue, and no flowers, but at least the weather cleared; and the blustery winds, though cold, helped to dry the roads, and to cleanse the air.
And, one night at dinner, Sarah announced that she had met a really wonderful woman, in a bookstore. “My new best friend,” she said, with a tiny, half-apologetic laugh, as Jonathan’s heart sank, a little. They both knew her tendency toward somewhat ill-advised enthusiasms: the charming editor who turned out to be a lively alcoholic, given to midnight (and later) phone calls; the smart young film critic who made it instantly clear that she hated all their other friends. The long line of initially wonderful people, the new best friends, who in one way or another became betrayers of Sarah’s dreams of friendship.
However, there was another, larger group of friends she’d had for years, who were indeed all that Sarah said they were, smart and loyal and generous and fun. Jonathan liked those friends, now his friends, too. Life with Sarah had, in fact, made him more gregarious, changing him from a solitary, overeducated young man with a boring corporation job, despite an advanced degree in math, into a warmer, friendlier person. Sarah’s talkative, cheery friends were among her early charms for Jonathan. He simply wondered at her occasional lapses in judgment.
Hattie McElroy, the new best friend (and the owner, it turned out, of the bookstore where they had met), was very Southern, Sarah said; she was from Hilton. However, except for her accent (which Sarah imitated, very funnily), she did not seem Southern. “She reads so much, I guess it gives her perspective,” Sarah said. And, with a small pleased laugh, “She doesn’t like it here very much. She says she’s so tired of everyone she knows. They’re moving to Santa Fe in June. Unfortunately, for me.”
After that, all Sarah’s days seemed to include a visit to Hattie’s bookstore, where Hattie served up mugs of tea, Sarah said, along with “super” gossip about everyone in town. “There’s an old group that’s unbelievably stuffy,” Sarah reported to Jonathan. “People Hattie grew up with. They never even want to meet anyone new. Especially Yankees.” And she laughed, happy to have such an exclusive connection with her informative and amusing new friend.
“Any chance you could take over the bookstore when they leave?” asked Jonathan, early on. “Maybe we could buy it?” This was during the period of Sarah’s unhappy discovery about the work situation in Hilton, the gradually apparent fact of there being nothing for her.
“Well, the most awful thing. She sold it to a chain, and just before we got here. She feels terrible, but she says there didn’t seem any other way out, no one else came around to buy it. And the chain people are even bringing in their own manager.” Sarah’s laugh was rueful, and her small chin pointed downward as she added, “One more dead end. And damn, it would have been perfect for me.”
The next step, Jonathan dimly imagined, would be a party or dinner of some sort at the McElroys’, which he could not help mildly dreading, as he remembered the film critic’s party, at which not only was almost everyone else gay (that would have been all right, except that some of the women did seem very hostile, to him) but they all smoked—heavily, some of them pipes and cigars—in three tiny rooms on Horatio Street.
However, it was they who were to entertain the McElroys at dinner, Sarah told him. “And I think just the four of us,” she added. “That way it’s easier, and I can make something great. And besides, who else?”
All true: an imaginative but fluky cook, Sarah did best on a small scale. And, too, the only other people they knew were fellow-transferees, as displaced and possibly as lonely as themselves, but otherwise not especially sympathetic.
The first surprise about Hattie McElroy, that first April night, was her size: she was a very big woman, with wild bleached straw-looking hair and round doll-blue eyes, and about twenty years older than Jonathan would have imagined; Sarah spoke of her as of a contemporary. Hugh McElroy was tall and gray and somewhat dim.
And Hattie was a very funny woman. Over drinks, she started right in with a description of a party she had been to the night before. “I was wearing this perfectly all-right dress, even if it was a tad on the oldish side,” Hattie told them, as she sipped at her gin. “And Popsie Hooker—Can you imagine a woman my age, and still called Popsie? We went to Sunday school together, and she hasn’t changed one bit. Anyway, Popsie said to me, ‘Oh, I just love that dress you’re wearing. I was so sorry when they went out of style five years ago.’ Can you imagine? Isn’t she marvellous? I just love Popsie, I truly do.”
For such a big woman, Hattie’s laugh was small, a little-girl laugh, but Jonathan found himself drawn to her big friendly teeth, her crazy hair.
Sarah, it then turned out, had met Popsie Hooker; early on in their stay in Hilton she had gone to a luncheon that Popsie gave for the new corporation wives. And, Sarah told Hattie, “She made a little speech that I didn’t quite understand. About how she knew we were all very busy, so please not to write any thank-you notes. It was odd, I thought.”
Hattie’s chuckle increased in volume. “Oh, you don’t understand Southern talk, not at all! I can tell you don’t. That meant you were all supposed to write notes, and say you just couldn’t resist writing, even if she said not to, since her lunch party was just so lovely.”
Sarah laughed, too. “Well, dumb me. I took her at her word, and didn’t write.”
“Well, honey, you’ll larn. But I can tell you, it takes near ’bout a lifetime.”
Dinner was not one of Sarah’s more successful efforts: veal Orloff, one of her specialties, but this time a little burned.
Hattie, though, seemed to think it was wonderful. “Oh, the trouble you must have gone to! And you must have a way with your butcher. I’ve just never seen veal like this—not down here.”
Jonathan felt that she was overdoing it, but then chided himself: Hattie was Southern, after all; that was how they talked. He must not be negative.
“These mushrooms are truly delicious,” Hugh McElroy put in. In Jonathan’s view, a truer remark. Hugh was a kind and quiet man, who reminded Jonathan of someone; in an instant, to his mild surprise, he realized that it was his own father, whose shy manner had been rather like Hugh’s.
A good evening, then. Jonathan could honestly say to Sarah that he liked her new best friends; they could even laugh over a few of the former candidates for that title.
Their return invitation, to a party at the McElroys’, was less fun all around: too many people, in a cluttered but surprisingly formal house, on a too hot night in May. But by then it was almost time for the McElroys to leave, and Hattie had explained to Sarah that they just had to have all those people.
“They’re really so loved around here,” Sarah somewhat tipsily remarked, as they drove home from that party. “It just won’t be the same town.”
“It’s still very pretty,” Jonathan reminded her. “Smell the flowers.”
The spring that had finally arrived, after so much rain, had seemed a reward for patience, with its extraordinary gifts of roses, azaleas, even gardenias, everywhere blooming, wafting sweetness into the light night air. And out in the woods white lacings of dogwood had appeared.
For some reason (“I can’t think why! I must be going plumb crazy!” Hattie had confided to Sarah), Hattie and Hugh had agreed to be photographed over local TV on the day of their departure, and that night, on a news program, there they were: big Hattie, in her navy linen travelling suit, her white teeth all revealed in a grin for the camera, as she clutched an overflowing tote bag and tried to pin on a cluster of pink camellias; and tall Hugh, a shy smile as he waved an envelope of airline tickets.
As, watching, Sarah, who never cried, burst into tears.
And then they were gone, the McElroys. Moved out to New Mexico.
Sarah moped around. Indifferent housekeeping, minimal efforts. She made thrifty, ordinary meals, so unlike her usual adventurous, rather splashy culinary style, and she lost all interest in how she looked. Not that she was ever given to extravagance in those matters, but she used to wash and brush her hair a lot, and she did something to her eyes, some color, that Jonathan now recognized as missing, gone.
She often wrote to the McElroys, and Hattie answered, often; Sarah produced the letters for Jonathan to read at dinner. They contained a lot about the scenery, the desert, and fairly amusing gossip about what Hattie referred to as the Locals. “You would not believe the number of painters here, and the galleries. Seems like there’s an opening most every night, and the Local Folk all come out in their fancy silver jewelry and their great big silver belts. Whole lots of the men are fairies, of course, but I just don’t care. They’re a lot of fun, they are indeed gay people.” Funny, longish letters, with the sound of Hattie’s voice, always ending with strong protestations of love and friendship. “Oh, we love you and miss you so much, the both of us!” cried out Hattie, on her thin flowered writing paper.
Jonathan observed all this with dark and ragged emotions—Sarah’s deep sadness and the occasional cheer that Hattie’s letters brought. He cared about Sarah in a permanent and complex way that made her pain his; still, what looked like true mourning for the absent McElroys gave him further pain. He had to wonder: was he jealous of the McElroys? And he had to concede that he was, in a way. He thought, I am not enough for her, and at the same time he recognized the foolishness of that thought. No one is “enough” for anyone, of course not. What Sarah needs is a job, and more friends that she likes; he knew that perfectly well.
And then one night at dinner, near the first of August, came the phone call from Hattie; Jonathan over heard a lot of exclamations and shouts, gasps from Sarah, who carne back to the table all breathless, flushed.
“They’re here! The McElroys are back, and staying at the Inn. Just for a visit. One of their boys suddenly decided to marry his girlfriend. Isn’t that great?”
Well, it turned out not to be great. There was the dinner at Jonathan and Sarah’s house, to which the McElroys came late, from another party (and not hungry; one of Sarah’s most successful efforts wasted), and they left rather early. “You would not believe the day we have ahead of us tomorrow! And we thought marrying off a son was supposed to be easy.” And the luncheon at Popsie Hooker’s.
Jonathan and Sarah were not invited to the wedding, a fact initially excused (maybe overexcused) by Sarah: “We’re not the Old Guard, not old Hiltonians, and besides, it’s the bride’s list, not Hattie’s, and we don’t even know her, or her family.”
And then two weeks of the McElroy visit had passed, accurately calculated by Jonathan. Which calculation led to his fatal remarks, over all that wine, about the priorities of the McElroys.
On the morning after that terrible evening, Jonathan and Sarah have breakfast together as usual, but rather sombrely. Hung over, sipping at tea, nibbling at overripe late-summer fruit, Jonathan wonders what he can say, since he cannot exactly deny the truth of his unfortunate words.
At last he brings out “I’m really sorry I said that, about Hattie and Hugh.”
Sarah gives him an opaque, level look, and her voice is judicious as she says, “Well, I’m sure you were right.”
One of the qualities that Jonathan has always found exciting in Sarah is her ability to surprise him; she rarely behaves in ways that he would have predicted. Nevertheless, having worried intermittently during the day over her sadness, her low spirits and his own recent part in further lowering them, he is delighted (ah, his old astonishing Sarah) to find her all brushed and bright-eyed, happy, when he comes in the door that night.
“Well, I decided that all this moping around like an abandoned person was really silly,” she tells him, over cold before-dinner glasses of wine, in the bright hot flower-scented dusk. “And so I just called Hattie, not being accusatory or anything. I just said that I’d really missed seeing her—them.”
“Well, great.” Jonathan is thinking how he admires her; she is fundamentally honest, and brave. And so pretty tonight, her delicately pointed face, her lively brown hair.
“Hattie couldn’t have been nicer. She said they’d missed us, of course, but they just got so caught up in this wedding business. It’s next Saturday—I’d lost track. They truly haven’t had one minute, she told me, and I can believe her. Anyway, they’re coming for supper on Sunday night. She said a post-wedding collapse would be just the best thing they could possibly think of.”
“Well, great,” Jonathan repeats, although some dim, indefinable misgiving has edged into his mind. How can one evening of friends at dinner be as terrific as this one will have to be? That question, after moments, emerges, and with it a darker, more sinister one: suppose it isn’t terrific at all, as the last one was not?
By mid-August, in Hilton, it has been hot for so long that almost all the flowers have wilted, despite an occasional thundershower. Many people are away at that time, and in neglected gardens overblown roses shed fat satin petals onto drying, yellowing grass; in forgotten orchards sweet un-picked fruit falls and spatters, fermenting, slowly rotting, among tall summer weeds, in the simmering heat.
The Saturday of the McElroy son’s wedding, however, is surprisingly cool, with an almost New England briskness in the air. That familiar-feeling air gives Jonathan an irrational flutter of hope: maybe the next night, Sunday, will be a reasonable evening. With the sort of substantive conversation that he and Sarah are used to, instead of some nutty Southern doubletalk. With this hope, the thought comes to Jonathan that Hattie imitating Popsie Hooker is really Hattie speaking her own true language. Dare he voice this to Sarah, this interesting perception about the nature of mimicry? Probably not.
Sarah spends a lot of Saturday cooking, so that it can all be served cold on Sunday night; she makes several pretty vegetable aspics, and a cold marinated beef salad. Frozen lemon soufflé. By Saturday night she is tired, but she and Jonathan have a pleasant, quiet dinner together. He has helped her on and off during the day, cutting up various things, and it is he who makes their dinner: his one specialty, grilled chicken.
Their mood is more peaceful, more affectionate with each other than it has been for months, Jonathan observes (since before they came down here? quite possibly).
Outside, in the gathering, lowering dusk, the just perceptibly earlier twilight, fireflies glimmer dimly from the pinewoods. The breeze is just barely cooler than most of their evening breezes, reminding Jonathan of the approach of fall—in his view, always a season of hope, of bright leaves on college campuses, and new courses offered.
• • •
Having worked so much the day before, Sarah and Jonathan have a richly indolent morning; they laze about. Around noon the phone rings, and Sarah goes to answer it. Jonathan, nearby, hears her say, “Oh, Hattie. Hi.”
A very long pause, and then Sarah’s voice, now stiff, all tightened up: “Well, no, I don’t see that as a good idea. We really don’t know Popsie—”
Another long pause, as Sarah listens to whatever Hattie is saying, and then, “Of course I understand, I really do. But I just don’t think that Jonathan and I—”
A shorter pause, before Sarah says again, “Of course I understand. I do. Well, sure. Give us a call. Well, bye.”
As she comes out to where Jonathan stands, waiting for her, Sarah’s face is very white, except for her pink-tipped nose—too pink. She says, “One more thing that Hattie, quote, couldn’t get out of. A big post-wedding do at Popsie Hooker’s. She said of course she knew I’d been working my head off over dinner for them, so why didn’t we just put it all in a basket and bring it on over there. They’d come and help.” Unconsciously, perhaps, Sarah has perfectly imitated Hattie’s inflections—even a few prolonged vowels; the effect is of a devastating irony, at which Jonathan does not smile.
“Jesus” is all he says, staring at Sarah, at her glistening, darkening eyes, as he wonders what he can do.
Sarah rubs one hand across her face, very slowly. She says, “I’m so tired. I think I’ll take a nap.”
“Good idea. Uh, how about going out to dinner?”
“Well, why not?” Her voice is absolutely level, controlled.
“I’ll put some things away,” Jonathan offers.
“Oh, good.”
In the too small, crowded kitchen, Jonathan neatly packages the food they were to have eaten in freezer paper; he seals up and labels it all. He hesitates at marking the date, such an unhappy reminder, but then he simply writes down the neutral numbers: 8, 19. By the time they get around to these particular packages they will not attach any significance to that date, he thinks (he hopes).
He considers a nap for himself; he, too, is tired, suddenly, but he decides on a walk instead.
The still, hot, scrubby pinewoods beyond their house are now a familiar place to Jonathan; he walks through the plumy, triumphant weeds, the Queen Anne’s lace and luxuriant broomstraw, over crumbling, dry red clay. In the golden August sunlight, he considers what he has always recognized (or perhaps simply imagined that he saw) as a particular look of Sundays, in terms of weather. Even if somehow he did not know that it was Sunday, he believes, he could see that it was, in the motes of sunlight. Here, now, today, the light and the stillness have the same qualities of light and stillness as in long-past Sundays in the Boston suburb where he grew up.
Obviously, he next thinks, they will have to leave this place, he and Sarah; it is not working out for them here, nothing is. They will have to go back to New York, look around, resettle. And to his surprise he feels a sort of regret at the thought of leaving this land, all this red clay that he would have said he hated.
Immersed in these and further, more abstract considerations (old mathematical formulas for comfort, and less comforting thoughts about the future of the earth), Jonathan walks for considerably longer than he intended.
Hurrying, as he approaches the house (which already needs new paint, he distractedly notes), Jonathan does not at all know what to expect: Sarah still sleeping (or weeping) in bed? Sarah (unaccountably, horribly) gone?
What he does find, though, on opening the front door, is the living room visibly pulled together, all tidied up: a tray with a small bowl of ice, some salted almonds in another bowl, on the coffee table. And Sarah, prettily dressed, who smiles as she comes toward him. She is carrying a bottle of chilled white wine.
Jonathan first thinks, Oh, the McElroys must have changed their minds, they’re coming. But then he sees that next to the ice bowl are two, and only two, glasses.
In a friendly, familiar way he and Sarah kiss, and she asks, “How was your walk?”
“It was good. I liked it. A real Sunday walk.”
Later on, he will tell her what he thought about their moving away—and as Jonathan phrases that announcement he considers how odd it is for him to think of New York as “away.”
Over their first glass of wine they talk in a neutral but slightly stilted way, the way of people who are postponing an urgent subject; the absence of the McElroys, their broken plans, trivializes any other topic.
At some point, in part to gain time, Jonathan asks her, “Have I seen that dress before?” (He is aware of the “husbandliness” of the question; classically, they don’t notice.)
Sarah smiles. “Well, actually not. I bought it a couple of months ago. I just haven’t worn it.” And then, with a recognizable shift in tone, and a tightening of her voice, she plunges in. “Remember that night when you were talking about the McElroys? When you said we weren’t so high on their priority list?”
Well, Jesus, of course he remembers, in detail; but Jonathan only says, very flatly, “Yes.”
“Well, it’s interesting. Of course I’ve been thinking about them all day, off and on. And what you said. And oh dear, how right you were. I mean, I knew you were right—that was partly what I objected to.” Saying this, Sarah raises her face in a full look at him, acknowledging past pain.
What can he say? He is quiet, waiting, as she continues.
“But it’s interesting, how you put it,” she tells him. “How accurately. Prophetic, really. A lot of talk, and those letters! All about wonderful us, how great we are. But when you come right down to it—”
“The bottom line is old friends,” Jonathan contributes, tentatively.
Pleased with him, Sarah laughs, or nearly; the sound she makes is closer to a small cough. But “Exactly,” she says. “They poke a lot of fun at Popsie Hooker, but the reality is, that’s where they are.”
He tries again. “Friendships with outsiders don’t really count? Does that cut out all Yankees, really?” He is thinking, Maybe we don’t have to leave, after all? Maybe Sarah was just settling in? Eventually she will be all right here?
Grasping at only his stated question, about Yankees, Sarah gleefully answers, “Oh, very likely!” and she does laugh. “Because Yankees might do, oh, almost anything at all. You just can’t trust a one of them.”
As she laughs again, as she looks at Jonathan, he recognizes some obscure and nameless danger in the enthusiastic glitter of her eyes, and he has then the quite irrational thought that she is looking at him as though he were her new best friend.
However, he is able quickly to dismiss that flashed perception, in the happiness of having his old bright strong Sarah restored to him, their old mutually appreciative dialogue continuing.
He asks her, “Well, time to go out to dinner?”
“Oh yes! Let’s go,” she says, quickly getting to her feet.