Just past Washington, he pulled into a service station and woke her up. “Would you like a Coke?” he asked her. P.J. lived on Cokes. And she was a great believer in breaking up trips — for sandwiches, restrooms, Stuckey’s pecan logs, white elephant sales, caged bears and boa constrictors — but now she only looked at him dimly. “A what?” she said.
“A Coke.”
“Oh. Well, I guess so.”
She yawned and reached for the door handle. While the attendant scraped bugs off the windshield Peter watched her cross the concrete apron — a thin, tanned, rubber-boned girl with red plastic rings like chicken-bands dangling from her ears. She swung her purse by its strap and tugged at her shorts, which were brief enough to show where her tan left off. The attendant stopped work for a moment to watch her go.
From the glove compartment Peter took stacks of maps — Georgia, New England, even eastern Canada, and finally Baltimore. He had promised P.J. they would stop over to see his family. It was three years since he had last been there. When he opened the map to check the best route the half-forgotten names of streets — St. Paul and North Charles, criss-crossed now with grimy folds that were beginning to tear — gave him the sudden, depressing feeling that he was a teenager again. He remembered hitchhiking on North Charles, sweating in the damp heavy heat, fully aware that his mother would go to pieces if she ever saw him doing this. He pictured Baltimore in an eternal summer, its trademark the white china cats, looking fearfully over their shoulders, which poor people riveted to their shutters and porch roofs. And then his mother’s house — closed, dim rooms. Gleaming tabletops. What was the point of going back?
P.J. came in sight, picking her way across the cement on narrow bare feet. When she caught the attendant watching she grinned and raised her Coke bottle in a toast. Then she leaned in the window and said, “Come on, Petey, get out and stretch your legs.”
“I’m comfortable here.”
“Out back they have garden statues, and birdbaths and flowerpots. Want to take a look?”
“I’d rather get going,” Peter said.
She climbed into the car, wincing when the backs of her thighs hit the hot vinyl. Down her cheek were the stripes of Peter’s corduroy slacks. Her eyes were still sleepy and rumpled-looking. “They have the cutest little plaster gnomes,” she said. “On spikes. You just stick them into the grass. I bet Mama would love one of those.”
“I bet she would,” said Peter.
She looked at him sideways, and then took a sip of her Coke. “Shall I get her one?” she asked.
“Why not?”
“As a sort of making-up present?”
Peter handed a credit card to the attendant. “You don’t have to make up,” he said.
“I was thinking of sending it in your name.”
“Well, don’t.”
She drank off the last of the Coke, wiped the rim of the bottle, and set off toward the case of empties beside the vending machine. The minute she was gone Peter felt sorry. “P.J.!” he called.
She turned, still cheerful. He slid out of his seat and ran to catch up with her. “Of course we can buy one,” he said. “Put my name all over it, if you like.”
“Oh, good,” P.J. said. “I’ll do the wrapping and mailing and all, you won’t have to lift a finger, Petey.”
She led him around the back of the filling station. toward a field of plaster flamingos and sundials and birdbaths. The gnomes stood in a huddle, their paint already flaking, grinning at a cluster of little black boys who held out hitching-rings. The saleslady wore a straw hat and a huge flowered smock that blazed in the sunlight. “Aren’t they darling?” P.J. said. “Or would she rather have an eentsy wheelbarrow to plant her flowers in. Which do you think?”
“You know her best,” Peter said.
“Or then these deer. They’re nice.” She wandered through the field, unable to make up her mind, patting the heads of little painted animals and returning the smile of any statue that smiled at her. Her bare feet stepped delicately between the grass blades, as if she had no weight at all. “How much do you reckon it would cost to mail a sundial?” she asked. The saleslady said, “Oh, no, honey, you don’t want to mail them, it’d take a fortune.” Peter hated people who called their customers “honey.” But P.J. only shifted her smile to the saleslady’s face, and the two of them stood beaming at each other like very dear friends. Oh, it would take a lot to make P.J. start frowning. He thought of all this last week, all the times her parents must have whispered, “Paula Jean, what’s the matter with that boy?” all the children who, coming upon him unexpectedly, lost their bounce and seemed to sag under the weight of his gloom. Yet P.J. had continued smiling. She had led him by the hand through the barnyard, hoping that he would make friends with the animals. She had introduced a hundred topics of conversation that Peter and her family might seize on. “Petey’s just got out of the Army, Daddy, you and him ought to compare experiences. Petey, don’t you want to see Mama’s herb garden?” Peter had tried, but nothing came to his mind to say. He floated in a weariness that made him want to escape to some hotel and sleep for days. “Petey, darling,” P.J. said, “don’t you like them?” I do,” he said truthfully, “but I just can’t—” “Talk about the crops. Daddy likes that. Talk about baseball, or what’s on the television.” So then, back among the others, Peter said, “How’re the crops, Mr. Grindstaff?” “Just fine,” said Mr. Grindstaff, and Peter said, “Oh, good,” and subsided, unable to think of what came next.
“He’s just back from Vietnam,” P.J. would tell people. Everyone murmured, as if that explained things. But Peter had been gloomy long before the Army. War only added a touch of fear and the sense of being out of place, neither of which seemed to leave him when he came back. He was still afraid. He still felt out of place. He had a job now, teaching chemistry in a second-rate girls’ school, where the pupils whispered and giggled and knit argyle socks while he lectured. “All of you,” he would tell them, “missed the second equation on the last hour quiz. Now I would like to go over that with you.” The girls looked up at him, still moving their lips to count stitches, and Peter fell silent. Why would he like to go over it? What difference did it make? How had he come to be here?
P.J. settled on a gnome with a pointed red cap, cradled it in her arms all the way to the car and rolled it in a picnic blanket in the trunk. “I just know she’s going to love it,” she said. And then, when they had pulled out into traffic again, “I know things will work out all right. Won’t they? Everything will be just fine now.”
“Of course,” said Peter, but he had no idea what she was talking about. This trip? The two of them? He and her family? If he found out he might have to disagree. He kept quiet, and smiled steadily at the stream of oncoming cars while P.J. slid down and set both feet against the dashboard. Her hair blew out behind her, knotting itself and slipping out of the knots. She seemed to glint and shimmer. When Peter first met her, in the school cafeteria, she had stood out among the pasty dull students like a flash of silver. She had worn a white uniform and collected dirty dishes off the tables with pointed, darting hands. He took her for a student with a part-time job. When she turned out to be a real waitress he was relieved, since it was against school rules to date students. Then later, after they had begun to grow serious, he had some doubts. A waitress? What would his family say? He pushed the thought away, ashamed that it had come up. He started seeing her daily; he fit himself into her motionless, shadowless life: lying oiled and passive on a beach towel for hours at a stretch, watching television straight through till sign-off, sitting all afternoon in dusky taverns dreamily peeling the labels off beer bottles. She gave him the feeling that she could never be used up. Whenever he looked her way she smiled at him.