she was relaxing—and she was settling into her seat—it proved his intuition correct. He remembered, suddenly, a summer when he’d been sent to visit an uncle in Jackson: the long bus ride, the slow lowering of the land that seemed to him—a small boy—to be running downhill to an invisible sea, the crowd of black people, as thick as in Harlem, at the bus station where he’d seen his uncle standing without expectation or surprise as though he stood there all his life. And then the long days. He’d felt sorry even for the dogs, lounging under the porch, scratching fleas.
There was no comparison, of course. Yet he felt the same inexplicable temptation to step back to avoid crushing something soft.
The play progressed. He’d had a long day. Before the end of the first act, he put his head back against the seat and dozed.
He jerked up at intermission as people began to climb over his knees. She was looking at him with her jagged smile. “So you don’t care much for the play? Or is it the production?”
“I was remembering,” he said, unshelled by his sudden waking. “I was feeling sorry.”
“For what? Or for whom?”
“For you,” he said, shaking himself awake. “It doesn’t make sense.”
She didn’t answer, looking across the crowded theatre as though she recognized someone. Then he saw she was studying the gilded mermaids that decorated the long-unused balcony where the black casings of the lighting system protruded like snouts.
“Never mind,” she said, which didn’t seem a response to what he had said.
They fell into silence. It was not uncomfortable. She continued to scan the theatre, taking in its recently re-gilded ceiling where amorphous gods and goddesses reared and plunged. He felt relieved of the responsibility of talking to her. It was almost like being at home. His roommate expected nothing in the way of words, which was a relief for a man working in the theatre.
The sharp edge of his wish, of what he’d been determined to get from her, dulled, as though rubbed against a stone, and he felt sleepy, again, and wondered how he was going to stay awake during the long second act.
The audience was crowding back in. He stood up to let several large people pass. It struck him that he was small compared to most of these people. It was an odd thought.
Then it was necessary to look, at least briefly, at that seagull, stuffed and mounted in a glass case on the stage, surely the most ridiculous representation of a symbol he’d ever seen, and to hear the girl on the stage lamenting.
They were all lamenting for their lives, but how hideous it was to have that stuffed, yellow-legged bird in its glass coffin held up to represent them.
“At least grant us the privacy of our disappointments,” she said, as though trespassing on his thoughts.
But it didn’t feel like trespassing. It felt like something soft.
Then it was over, and they were shuffling into their coats. “Walk me to the subway,” she said as they poured out with the crowd.
This time he didn’t put his palm under her elbow. “I’m sorry I asked you for money,” he said as they followed the swarm down the sidewalk.
She looked at him, surprised. “But I’m giving it to you,” she said. “Why should you be sorry?”
He was silent. People jammed past them. At the entrance to the subway, she turned and gave him her hand. “Goodbye,” she said. “I’ll put the check in the mail tomorrow.” Then she went, swooping down the long dirty steps.
SELLING THE FARM
IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. IT WAS ALSO, STILL, enormous, Shirley thought, sitting behind the wheel, her older sister Miriam beside her, neatly buckled in. Shirley had parked her hybrid by the old farm gate that still scraped the ground as it had every time their father jumped out of the car to open it, years and years ago, with the two sisters in the back seat and their mother cow-patient in front, waiting for him to jump back in and drive them through. After church, it would have been, Shirley thought, after a visit to the aunts in town, after a rare excursion to a state park to mark a holiday. The gate had scraped whenever she opened it to drive in with an armload of groceries, a stiff supermarket bouquet to cheer their mother. All that had stopped with her death; Shirley had not opened the gate since the funeral.
It was locked now with a big new padlock.
“I had no idea,” she said, looking helplessly at Miriam.
Miriam shuffled through her big black bag, coming up with a bit of paper. She handed it to Shirley, who took it, climbed out of the car and began to wrestle with the combination.
After a minute Miriam rolled down her window. “You need help?”
“No!” The lock gave finally. Shirley dragged back the gate, then climbed in again behind the wheel.
“At least we don’t need to lock it till we leave—nothing to keep in, or out, now,” she said.
Miriam didn’t answer.
On the other side of the gate, the long rolling cornfield that had bristled with dry stalks at this time of year had been leveled. The bulldozers, having finished their work for the day, were drawn up in a row, bright yellow and massive along the side of the old tenant’s cottage. It was falling down. The roof had caved in, and the modest white posts on the porch were sagging.
“Those posts were still straight last time I saw them,” Shirley said into the silence that had opened between them as soon as she’d turned off the highway onto the old two-lane road, recently widened.
“Where?” Miriam craned her neck, surfacing momentarily from what their mother had called a brown study. She had been on the edge of it and sliding when Shirley picked her up at the hotel.
Shirley pointed. “We used to sit on that porch swing when we went to play with Johnny’s kids. Once I swung so high I touched the ceiling with my toes.”
“Wretched old place. It always smelled like mice droppings. Johnny’s wife—what was her name?”
“Susie,” Shirley said. “Susie Taylor. She said she was related to that Civil War general.”
“Unlikely. Anyway, she was no kind of housekeeper. I always thought she drank, hid the bottles behind the stove. I peered when she wasn’t looking.”
“My, you were suspicious.”
“Realistic,” Miriam said, her voice crisp as her profile. Hawk nosed, like their father, the effect was softened by her small pointed chin, as though, Shirley thought, the upper half of her face had been designed for something grand, the prow of a boat, perhaps, but then the maker had thought better of it and given her a girlish chin. Not that the effect had really been diluted, at least in terms of the way Miriam led her life—as far as she knew, Shirley added to herself, in the interest of fairness. She saw her sister once or twice a year, and their rare communications were courteous and vague.
“When did they bring in the last crop?” Miriam asked.
“A month ago, after you sold the
