When she wrote out the check to Schwarz her hand trembled so hard that she had to void the first check, and smoke a cigarette before she could write another.
"Get it right, Maria," the voice on the telephone said. "You got a pencil there? You writing this down?"
"Yes," Maria said.
"Ventura Freeway north, you got that all right? You know what exit?"
"I wrote it down."
"All set, then. I'll meet you in the parking lot of the Thriftimart."
"What Thriftimart," Maria whispered.
"Maria, I told you, you can't miss it. Under the big red T."
In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows
of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. Taco Bells jumped out at her. Oil rockers creaked ominously. For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky.
24
“YOU DRIVE," the man had said. "We'll pick up my car after."
He was wearing white duck pants and a white sport shirt and he had a moon f ace and a eunuch's soft body. The hand resting on his knee was pale and freckled and boneless and ever since he got in the car he had been humming I Get a Kick Out of You.
'You familiar with this area, Maria?"
The question seemed obscurely freighted. "No," Maria said finally.
"Nice homes here. Nice for kids." The voice was bland, ingratiating, the voice on the telephone. "Let me ask you one question, all right?"
Maria nodded, and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.
"Get pretty good mileage on this? Or no?"
"Pretty good," she heard herself saying after only the slightest pause. "Not too bad."
"You may have noticed, I drive a Cadillac. Eldorado. Eats gas but I like it, like the feel of it."
Maria said nothing. That, then, had actually been the question.
She had not misunderstood.
"If I decided to get rid of the Cad," he said, "I might pick myself up a little Camaro. Maybe that sounds like a step down, a Cad to a Camaro, but I've got my eye on this par tic ular Camaro, exact model of the pace car in the Indianapolis 500."
"You think you'll buy a Camaro," Maria said in the neutral tone of a therapist.
"Get the right price, I just might. I got a friend, he can write me a sweet deal if it's on the floor much longer. They almost had a buyer last week but lucky for me — here, Maria, right here, pull into this driveway."
Maria turned off the ignition and looked at the man in the white duck pants with an intense and grateful interest. In the past few minutes he had significantly altered her perception of reality: she saw now that she was not a woman on her way to have an abortion.
She was a woman parking a Corvette outside a tract house while a man in white pants talked about buying a Camaro. There was no more to it than that. "Lucky for you what?"
"Lucky for me, the guy's credit didn't hold up."
25
THE FLOOR OF THE BEDROOM where it happened was covered with newspapers. She remembered reading somewhere that newspapers were antiseptic, it had to do with the chemicals in the ink, to deliver a baby in a farmhouse you covered the floor with newspapers. There was something else to be done with newspapers, something unexpected, some emergency trick: quilts could be made with newspapers. In time of disaster you could baste newspapers to both sides of a cotton blanket and end up with a warm quilt. She knew a lot of things about disaster. She could manage. Carter could never manage but she could. She could not think where she had learned all these tricks. Probably in her mother's American Red Cross Handbook, gray with a red cross on the cover. There, that was a good thing to think about, at any rate not a bad thing if she kept her father out of it. If she could concentrate for even one minute on a picture of herself as a ten-year-old sitting on the front steps of the house in Silver Wells reading the gray book with the red cross on the cover (splints, shock, rattlesnake bite, rattlesnake bite was why her mother made her read it) with the heat shimmering off the corrugated tin roof of the shed across the road (her father was not in this picture, keep him out of it, say he had gone into Vegas with Benny Austin), if she could concentrate for one more minute on that shed, on whether this minute twenty years later the heat still shimmered off its roof, those were two minutes during which she was not entirely party to what was happening in this bedroom in Encino.
Two minutes in Silver Wells, two minutes here, two minutes there, it was going to be over in this bedroom in Encino, it could not last forever. The walls of the bedroom were cream-colored, yellow, a wallpaper with a modest pattern. Whoever had chosen that wallpaper would have liked maple furniture, a maple bedroom set, a white chenille bedspread and a white Princess telephone, all gone now but she could see it as it must have been, could see even the woman who had picked the wallpaper, she would be a purchaser of Audubon prints and scented douches, a hoarder of secret sexual grievances, a wife. Two minutes in Silver Wells, two minutes on the wallpaper, it could not last forever. The table was a doctor's table but not fitted with stirrups:
instead there were two hardbacked
chairs with pillows tied over the backs. "Tell me if it's too cold," the doctor said. The doctor was tall and haggard and wore a rubber apron. "Tell me now because I won't be able to touch the air conditioner once I start."
She said that it was not too cold.
"No, it's too cold. You don't weigh enough, it's too cold."
He adjusted the dial but the sound remained level. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the sound. Carter did not like air conditioners but there had been one somewhere. She had slept in a room with an air conditioner, the question was where, never mind the question, that question led nowhere. "This is just induced menstruation," she could hear the doctor saying. "Nothing to have any emotional difficulties about, better not to think about it at all, quite of ten the pain is worse when we think about it, don't like anesthetics, anesthetics are where we run into trouble, just a little local on the cervix, there, relax, Maria, I said relax."
No moment more or less important than any other moment, all the same: the pain as the doctor scraped signified nothing beyond itself, no more constituted the pattern of her life than did the movie on television in the living room of this house in Encino. The man in the white duck pants was sitting out there watching the movie and she was lying in here not watching the movie, and that was all there was to that. Why the volume on the set was turned up so high seemed another question better left unasked. "Hear that scraping, Maria?"
the doctor said. "That should be the sound of music to you. . don't scream, Maria, there are people next door, almost done, almost over, better to get it all now than do it again a month from now. . I said don't make any noise, Maria, now I'll tell you what's going to happen, you'll bleed a day or so, not heavily, just spotting, and then a month, six weeks from now you'll have a, normal period, not this month, this month you just had it, it's in that pail."