“Of what?”
“Well, you’re in a wedding dress, right? You could be weighing the possibilities.”
“What will I do?” she says.
He laughs. “I’m no seer. Let’s look it up in your horoscope. What are you?”
“Virgo.”
“Virgo,” he says. “That would figure. Virgos are meticulous. They’d be susceptible to a dream like the one you were talking about.”
Peter reads from the book: “Be generous to friends, but don’t be taken advantage of. Unexpected windfall may prove less than you expected. Loved one causes problems. Take your time.”
He shrugs. He passes her the flask.
It’s too vague. She can’t really understand it. She sees Lincoln shaking the beads, but it’s not her fault this time — it’s the horoscope’s fault. It doesn’t say enough.
“That man I’m with wants to marry me,” she confides to Peter. “What should I do?”
He shakes his head and looks out the window. “Don’t ask me,” he says, a little nervously.
“Do you have any more books?”
“No,” he says. “All out.”
They ride in silence.
“You could go to a palmist,” he says after a while. “They’ll tell you what’s up.”
“A palmist? Really?”
“Well, I don’t know. If you believe half they say …”
“You don’t believe them?”
“Well, I fool around with stuff like this, but I sort of pay attention to what I like and forget what I don’t like. The horoscope told me to delay travel yesterday, and I did.”
“Why don’t you believe them?” Cynthia asks.
“Oh, I think most of them don’t know any more than you or me.”
“Then let’s do it as a game,” she says. “I’ll ask questions, and you give the answer.”
Peter laughs. “O.K.,” he says. He lifts her hand from her lap and stares hard at it. He turns it over and examines the other side, frowning.
“Should I marry Charlie?” she whispers.
“I see …” he begins. “I see a man. I see a man … in the drinking car.”
“But what am I going to do?” she whispers. “Should I marry him?”
Peter gazes intently at her palm, then smooths his fingers down hers. “Maybe,” he says gravely when he reaches her fingertips.
Delighted with his performance, he cracks up. A woman in the seat in front of them peers over the back of her chair to see what the noise is about. She sees a hippie holding a fat woman’s hand and drinking from a flask.
“Coleridge,” Peter is saying. “You know — Coleridge, the poet? Well, he says that we don’t, for instance, dream about a wolf and then get scared. He says it’s that we’re scared to begin with, see, and therefore we dream about a wolf.”
Cynthia begins to understand, but then she loses it. It is the fault of the sleeping pill and many drinks. In fact, when Charlie comes back, Cynthia is asleep on Peter’s shoulder. There is a scene — or as much of a scene as a quiet man like Charlie can make. Charlie is also drunk, which makes him mellow instead of really angry. Eventually, brooding, he sits down across the aisle. Late that night, when the train slows down for the Georgia station, he gazes out the window as if he noticed nothing. Peter helps Cynthia get her bag down. The train has stopped at the station, and Charlie is still sitting, staring out the window at a few lights that shine along the tracks. Without looking at him, without knowing what will happen, Cynthia walks down the aisle. She is the last one off. She is the last one off before the train pulls out, with Charlie still on it.
Her parents watch the train go down the track, looking as if they are visitors from an earlier century, amazed by such a machine. They had expected Charlie, of course, but now they have Cynthia. They were not prepared to be pleasant, and there is a strained silence as the three watch the train disappear.
That night, lying in the bed she slept in as a child, Cynthia can’t sleep. She gets up, finally, and sits in the kitchen at the table. What am I trying to think about, she wonders, closing her hands over her face for deeper concentration. It is cold in the kitchen, and she is not so much hungry as empty. Not in the head, she feels like shouting to Lincoln, but in the stomach — somewhere inside. She clasps her hands in front of her, over her stomach. Her eyes are closed. A picture comes to her — a high, white mountain. She isn’t on it, or in the picture at all. When she opens her eyes she is looking at the shiny surface of the table. She closes her eyes and sees the snow-covered mountain again — high and white, no trees, just mountain — and she shivers with the coldness of it.
Wanda’s
When May’s mother went to find her father, May was left with her Aunt Wanda. She wasn’t really an aunt; she was a friend of her mother’s who ran a boardinghouse. Wanda called it a boardinghouse, but she rarely accepted boarders. There was only one boarder, who had been there six years. May had stayed there twice before. The first time was when she was nine, and her mother left to find her father, Ray, who had gone to the West Coast and had vacationed too long in Laguna Beach. The second time was when her mother was hung over and had to have “a little rest,” and she left May there for two days. The first time, she left her for almost two weeks, and May was so happy when her mother came back that she cried. “Where did you think Laguna Beach was?” her mother said. “A hop, skip, and a jump? Honey, Laguna Beach is practically across the world.”
The only thing interesting about Wanda’s is her boarder, Mrs. Wong. Mrs. Wong once gave May a little octagonal box full of pastel paper circles that spread out into flowers when they were dropped in water. Mrs. Wong let her drop them in her fishbowl. The only fish in the fishbowl is made of bright-orange plastic and is suspended in the middle of the bowl by a sinker. There are many brightly colored things in Mrs. Wong’s room, and May is allowed to touch all of them. On her door Mrs. Wong has a little heart-shaped piece of paper with “Ms. Wong” printed on it.
Wanda is in the kitchen, talking to May. “Eggs don’t have many calories, but if you eat eggs the cholesterol kills you,” Wanda says. “If you eat sauerkraut there’s not many calories, but there’s a lot of sodium, and that’s bad for the heart. Tuna fish is full of mercury — what’s that going to do to a person? Who can live on chicken? You know enough, there’s nothing for you to eat.”
Wanda takes a hair clip out of her pants pocket and clips back her bangs. She puts May’s lunch in front of her — a bowl of tomato soup and a slice of lemon meringue pie. She puts a glass of milk next to the soup bowl.
“They say that after a certain age milk is no good for you — you might as well drink poison,” she says. “Then you read somewhere else that Americans don’t have enough milk in their diet. I don’t know. You decide what you want to do about your milk, May.”
Wanda sits down, lights a cigarette, and drops the match on the floor.
“Your dad really picks swell times to disappear. The hot months come, and men go mad. What do you think your dad’s doing in Denver, honey?”
May shrugs, blows on her soup.
“How do you know, huh?” Wanda says. “I ask dumb questions. I’m not used to having kids around.” She bends to pick up the match. The tops of her arms are very fat. There are little bumps all over them.
“I got married when I was fifteen,” Wanda says. “Your mother got married when she was eighteen — she had three years on me — and what’s she do but drive all around the country rounding up your dad? I was twenty-one the second time I got married, and that would have worked out fine if he hadn’t died.”