“You look good.” Everett touched the scratch.
“I feel good.”
“You have the prettiest legs,” Everett said slowly, “of any small girl I ever saw.”
“I guess you like tall girls better.” There: she was still doing it.
Everett looked at her, not smiling, and she was struck by anxiety: in her ignorance of how the game was played she had said the wrong thing, broken some rule.
“I like you all right,” he said after a while, still looking at her. “I never thought about it until last night.”
“Never thought about what?”
Everett said nothing, and she wondered if she had angered or disappointed him, wondered if it was possible that she could lose Everett McClellan, in the sense that you could lose people who were not your father or your brother.
“I wish you would kiss me,” she whispered, feeling again that Everett was suddenly not Everett but a stranger, someone to be won.
He kissed her, and she clung to him a long time, watching the oak leaves swimming against the sun and feeling the ends of her hair floating just on the surface of the water and after a while opening her mouth and pulling down the straps of Martha’s bathing suit, before his hand tightened over the scratch on her left thigh. All right, she whispered over and over, and after a while she began to think it could never happen because it hurt so much. When Everett finally said, again and again in a kind of triumph, you feel it? baby feel it, she assumed that it had happened. Later the scratch on her thigh became infected from the river water and left a drawn white scar noticeable whenever her legs got brown, but she did not think of it at the time.
6
Lily, he whispered every time as he lay spent in the rising morning heat, but she hesitated, equivocated, wondered if she was really obliged to marry him simply because he had wanted and taken her.
That was in June. In July, when she figured that she had been screwed (the word, which she had heard Everett use in reference to someone else, pleased her with its crisp efficiency, its lack of ambiguity) a total of twenty-seven times, they once had an entire morning to spend: coming back from the narrow strip of beach they waded in the irrigation ditches, knee-deep in the soft ditch grass and slow muddy water, the sun hot on their heads. All around them were her father’s orchards: the pears hanging warm and heavy, dropping to rot on the ground beneath the trees, going brown and bruised and drawing flies, going to waste in that endless summer as she, thank God and Everett, was not. She let her dress trail in the water and ran splashing through the ditch with her eyes closed against the sun. Catching her, Everett rubbed her face and bare sunburned arms with the cloudy river water that bubbled from a supply pipe; they laughed (Everett you fool my sunglasses I like you for being so brown Everett baby so hard I love you) and fell down again together, for the pickers were working the far orchards that week, and when she screamed beneath him, remembering that snakes infested the ditches, he neither told her that there was no snake nor told her that the snake (if there was one) was harmless, but picked her up and held her until she was quiet and until the snake (if there was a snake at all) had gone away. Shortly before noon she told Everett that she would marry him, and then she ran up to the house to change her dress for lunch. It seemed as inescapable as the ripening of the pears, as fated as the exile from Eden.
She mentioned it, however, to no one; scarcely thought of it away from Everett. Through day after summer day she moved as if sunstruck, dimly aware that any announcement would disturb the delicately achieved decision which had been, really, no decision at alclass="underline" only an acquiescence. Was it, after all, so inevitable? The word why, once spoken out loud, could bring the pears all tumbling down. She would have to say that she loved him: it was the only incantation which would satisfy them, even as it would dispel her own illusions. Unspoken, it might still be true.
Everett remained the flaw in the grain. His constant and incontrovertible presence intruded upon her, prevented her from contemplating the idea of him, from polishing that idea into some acceptable fact. Sometimes when she came downstairs in the morning Everett would be sitting there, reading the Chronicle; he would call her several times during the day, and a suggestion, from Edith Knight, that she and Lily might go to San Francisco for the day could throw him into such despair that he would call every half-hour, all evening, to see when they were going, what they would do, when they would be home. Every scene Lily saw seemed to include Everett; all she heard was Everett’s voice, asking when they would be married.
“I don’t know,” she said finally one morning on the river. “I mean I don’t want to think about it right now.”
“When do you want to think about it? Next year? The year after?”
“Everett. Stop talking that way. I’m nervous. All brides are nervous.” She had read in a magazine that all brides were nervous, and had wondered whether that might not be her only problem: an apprehension which would turn out to be not unique but common to all women.
“If you could just leave me alone a little,” she added, hopeful that she might be right.
“Leave you alone,” Everett repeated. “I want to marry you. I don’t know how many times I have to say it.”
“Wait until the hops are down,” she said finally. “You’re too busy now, you know that.”
“I’m not too busy to tell people. Don’t you want to tell people?”
“No,” she said faintly. “I don’t.”
“You have to. You have to do it now.”
“I told them I’m not going back down to Berkeley. So they might have guessed.” She had told her parents that she wanted to take a semester off; as far as their guessing the other went, she had invested her faith in the extreme improbability of their guessing anything at all. Putting asunder the delicate balance of dependency among them seemed every day more unthinkable.
“You have to tell them. Your father likes me all right. Although nobody’d know you did, the way you act when they’re around.”
“I’m not demonstrative.” She picked up a white pebble and skimmed it across the surface of the water, angling it downstream to catch the drift. “I don’t guess you learned to skip stones like that at Stanford.”
“Lily,” he pleaded, sitting up and grasping her shoulders. “Listen to me.”
She traced an L and a K and half of McC on his chest with her fingernail, not looking at his face.
“There’s no use talking to Daddy until he gets the fruit out of the way,” she said at last.
But when all the pears had been shipped to the canneries and the hops on the McClellan place had been down six weeks, she still had told no one.
“I don’t think you want to,” Everett said finally. “I don’t believe you want to marry me.”
“Ah, sweet.” She kissed the back of his neck, ran a finger down his backbone. “It’s not you.”
“What is it?”
“It’s anyone. Sometimes I don’t want to marry anyone. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.”