She had made it home just before dark, stoked the woodstove, and slept a dozen hours getting to school a little late. The principal asked after her sick aunt in Denver and Sarah for want of an answer said, “She died,” and walked off down the hall. She had had a thin slice of a nightmare about Karl but the leaden aftereffects weren’t there when she awoke. Lolly had left a piece of fine lasagna in her refrigerator which she’d shared with Rover for breakfast after which she’d sung the dog part of the Hank Williams song about KawLiga, the wooden Indian. When she sang to Rover the dog squirmed with pleasure.
She began a letter to Alfredo in geometry class which was childish compared to what her father had taught her years before, and continued in chemistry class (her father had hung up a poster of the periodic table when she was ten). At the school lunch of fetid Spanish rice she sat as usual with Terry and Marcia. They wondered where she had been the two previous days and she would only say “camping out up the canyon.”
After school it was the first day of outdoor track practice though the weather was cloudy and in the midthirties. She was delighted to put on her sweat suit and after a few laps on the cinder track she and Marcia vaulted one fence and then another and ran down a long pasture with two little bull calves running along beside them for no apparent reason with their quite exhausted mothers following up in the rear.
When she got home she begged off having dinner with Frank and Lolly saying she wasn’t feeling well. She picked up a letter from Peppy and Lolly gave her a container of veal stew in case she got hungry which she already was. The letter from Peppy was typically inane but she cautioned herself remembering that Frank had said that Peppy had done well in academic subjects but the nature of her family had closed all of the windows to the world.
Sarah spent a long evening intermittently working on her letter to Alfredo and reading in the three botanical texts he had given her. She liked best The Biology of Horticulture but Introductory Plant Biology was also fascinating. It all seemed quite exotic compared to her life above the forty-fifth parallel where bird and flora species are slim indeed compared to farther south.
The letter was hard going. By late evening she had five pages which she thought was too long and edited it down to three by midnight. She was amused by the irony of saying, “Not much is happening around here except for the long wait for true spring.” Not much, that is, if you exclude shooting a carton of cartridges at a rapist.
Some of what she wrote intrigued her in the act of writing what she actually thought. “I so wish that I were on the piano seat with you feeling the notes of Schubert in my body.” Or, “Staying with Rebecca was to enter an entirely new world which makes me wonder how many hundreds of worlds there are to which I have only gained entry by reading?” Or, “Whatever happens I feel much better about life having met you.”
After she turned off the lights and put her hand on Rover’s chest to get the calming sense of a heartbeat she worried that she might be delusional like her mother Peppy. Peppy had said in her note that she had called Giselle who told her that Frank had found “another.” She was grieved because she thought that one day she might return to her loving family. This had momentarily stunned Sarah and so did the statement “Older men aren’t very affectionate.”
Her hand actually trembled when she dropped the letter in the mail slot the next day. It was nine days before she got an answer which was like nine days in a dentist’s chair but then she had had so little experience writing and receiving letters she didn’t know what to expect. Meanwhile she and Marcia were running five miles every late afternoon and in the evening she was playing the piano for so long that Rover would beg to go outside.
When Alfredo’s letter finally came she drove up to the canyon to read it. He was profuse in his apologies. His daughter had been kicked out of private school in Los Angeles for smoking pot and her mother was in Italy. It had taken him nearly a week to find another school that would accept her. He asked Sarah’s forgiveness for sharing such “grim” news. After that he was quite romantic saying how much he missed her and that it seemed impossible to fall in love in two days but it had happened. Did she think that it was mostly the piano? A thought that had actually occurred to her but then time would certainly tell. His father was a “large-scale” farmer and neither rich nor poor. His family had sacrificed with no complaint to put him through Juilliard and then Cornell but he had graduated summa cum laude and graduate school had been on ample fellowships. He finished by saying that he wished that they were in each other’s arms which made Sarah feel faint. On a silly impulse she smelled the letter and then looked down at her feet where the first shoots of green grass were emerging on the south-facing side of the canyon.