She looked over at him.
“You’ve set a thing in motion, you see.”
“It’s like being pregnant,” said Justine. Of course she couldn’t really have said that. His ears were bad. His mind was bad. He was going to have to get a hold of himself. He straightened his back and looked out the window, a respectable elderly gentleman admiring the view as they rattled homeward.
Meg Peck and the Reverend Arthur Milsom were sitting in the living room waiting for Meg’s parents. Or Arthur was sitting; Meg kept moving around. First she chose the armchair because she wanted to look proper and adult. Then she thought it was more natural to sit next to Arthur on the couch. They were about to ask permission to get married; what would they be doing across the room from each other?
Arthur had on his clerical collar, which wasn’t absolutely required but it looked very nice. He was a young, pale, tense man, small but wiry. When he was nervous he cracked his knuckles and his brown eyes grew so dark and sober that he seemed to be glaring. “Don’t be nervous,” Meg told him sitting back down on the couch. She reached over and took his damp hand.
This visit had been planned for weeks. The first Monday after she turned eighteen, he said, he would come talk to her parents. (Monday was a slow day at the church.) They had worked it out by letter. It was Arthur’s feeling that Duncan was the important one, but as Meg pointed out they needed Justine there to smooth things over. For certainly Duncan would be at his sharpest. He didn’t like Arthur. (How could anyone not like Arthur?) What they hadn’t counted on was Justine’s vanishing, taking Grandfather on one of his trips. Now there was no telling when she would be back, and meanwhile Duncan was coming home from work at any minute. They would have to handle him alone after all.
Meg always thought of her parents as Duncan and Justine, although she didn’t call them that. It might have been due to the way they acted. They were not very parent-like. She loved them both, but she had developed a permanent inner cringe from wondering how they would embarrass her next. They were so—extreme. So irresponsible! They led such angular, slap-dash lives, always going off on some tangent, calling over their shoulders for her to come too. And for as long as Meg could remember she had been stumbling after, picking up the trail of cast-off belongings and abandoned projects. All she really wanted was to live like other people. She tried to keep the house neat, like her friends’ houses, and to put flowers in the vases and to hide, somehow, whatever tangle of tubes and electrical wires Duncan was working on at the moment. But then it seemed so hopeless when she knew how soon they would be moving on. “We’re nomads,” Justine told her, “think of it that way”—as if making it sound romantic would help. But there was nothing romantic about this tedious round of utility deposits, rental contracts, high school transcripts and interrupted magazine subscriptions. “He’s ruining our lives!” she told Justine. Justine looked astonished. “But Meggie darling, we can’t be the ones to say—” Then Meg’s anger would extend to her mother, too, who was so gullible and so quick to give in, and she closed herself up in her room (if they were in a house where she had a room) and said no more.
She kept herself occupied with sewing, or pasting pictures in her scrapbook full of model homes — French windows and carpeted kitchens and white velvet couches. She straightened up her closet with all her shoes set side by side and pointing in the same direction. She ironed her own dresses, as she had since she was nine. (Justine thought there was no point to ironing, as long as things were clean.) At the age of ten she had baked her first cake, which everyone admired but no one ate because they were too busy rushing off somewhere; they seemed to live on potato chips from vending machines. Nothing ever worked on a schedule. She was encouraged to bring her friends home at any hour of the day or night. “This family is not a closed unit,” Duncan told her — apparently his only rule, if you could call it that. But how could she bring friends when her parents were so certain to make fools of themselves? “Oh, I just love your folks,” girls were always saying, little dreaming what agony it would be to have them for their own. For Justine might be found barefoot and waving her dirty playing cards, or sitting at the kitchen table with three or four unsuitable friends, or racing about looking for her broken straw carry-all in order to go to the diner whose food she preferred to her own. She had a high-handed, boisterous way of acting sometimes and she was likely to refer to Duncan publicly as “Meg’s second cousin,” her idea of a joke. And Duncan! Spouting irrelevant, useless facts, thinking out loud in startling ways, leaving her friends stunned and stupid-looking. His idea of a joke was to hang idiotic newspaper and ladies’ magazine pages all over the house, bearing what he thought were appropriate messages. On Justine’s birthday he pasted up a bank ad saying WE’RE INCREASING OUR INTEREST, and after Meg spent too much money on a dress (only because she wanted to look like the other girls for a change, not all homemade and tacked together) she found a page Scotch-taped to her closet door:
HAVE YOU EVER HAD
A BAD TIME IN LEVI’S?
Then she had snatched up the page and stalked in to where Duncan sat inventing a new keyboard arrangement for the typewriter. “Act your age!” she told him. But when he looked up his face was so surprised and unguarded, and she saw that he really was aging, there were dry lines around his eyes and two tiny crescents left by his wide, dippy smile. So she laid the paper down gently, after all, and went away defeated.
Now she sighed, remembering, and Arthur squeezed her fingers. “In an hour this will all be over,” he told her.
“It will never be over.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re going to be demolished,” she said. “I feel it.”
But now she had insulted him. He straightened up, which made him look smaller. He said, “Don’t you think I can have a reasonable discussion with my own girl’s parents?”
“Yes but—”
“You forget, I’m a minister. I’ve convinced families who swore they’d cut off their daughters without a penny. I’ve convinced fathers who claimed that—”
“But it wasn’t you their daughters were marrying.”
“Now don’t worry. If worst comes to worst we’ll just go away quietly and have the ceremony in my own church.”
But neither of them wanted that. They wanted everything perfect. Arthur wanted her to be happy, and Meg would only be happy with a white dress that dipped to a point at the waist, Sarah Cantleigh’s veil, and a bouquet of baby’s breath. She wanted to walk down the aisle of the family’s church in Baltimore where her mother had been married; she would like to be guarded by rows and rows of aunts and uncles and second cousins, grave Peck eyes approving her choice. Bridal showers, long-grained rice, Great-Grandma’s sixpence in her shoe. Arthur waiting beside the minister, turning his pale, shiny face to watch her procession. Whenever he looked at her, she felt queenly. All right, so he was not a handsome man, but would a handsome man treat her as adoringly as Arthur Milsom did? When they went to lectures she looked at the lecturer and Arthur looked at her. She felt the thin moon of his face turned upon her. He assisted her in and out of cars, through doorways, up the shallowest steps, his hands just barely brushing her. (The aunts would love his manners.) He devoted his entire attention to her, so much so that sometimes, he said, he worried about his jealous God. Nobody had ever, in all her life, felt that way about her before.