Moses had listened, smiled, and then had asked, “Do you want happiness, Nancy, or pleasure? Or do you think they’re the same thing?”
It was that question, Nancy realized afterward, that had started her movement toward the decision that she wanted to make today, this afternoon, driving back home to Catamount in the rain. Moses had made her think about the Basics, she said to herself. A sudden blast from the horn of a huge, eighteen-wheel truck cut into her silent monologue, showed her that she was out in the left lane and that an enormous, roaring vehicle, switching its headlights from low beams to high, wanted to pass her. The truck, seen in her rearview mirror, seemed almost close enough to touch the flimsy rear bumper of her Datsun coupe, and terrified, she wrenched the steering wheel to the right. The rear wheels of the Datsun let go of the road and the car started sliding. It happened too fast for her to hit the breaks, which, according to Ronald later, probably saved her life, because, as the nose of the low, silver-gray Datsun swung slowly to the right, the rear end followed, bringing the car into the right lane altogether and facing the opposite direction, while the truck roared past in the outside lane, its horn blasting one long wailing note into the rain and the dark.
She sat in the car, her entire body shaking, and after a few seconds realized that she was facing oncoming traffic, should there be any, so she backed the car around, turned it toward the north again, then drew it off the road onto the shoulder and shut off the motor and lights. She lit a cigarette and watched the rain slop down the windshield in skeins.
I could have been killed, she said to herself. I very nearly was killed! She pictured Ronald’s round, reddish face, his small eyes, wet and blue behind horn-rimmed glasses, his calm, rational, nearly expressionless face that twenty-five years ago had seemed masculine and warmly protective to her — and suddenly she saw his face breaking into pieces, shattered by grief and loss, tears swarming over his cheeks. The children, too — she thought briefly of their faces, heard their groans, let their pain flicker past for a few seconds — but Ronald’s face wouldn’t go away. Her chest lifted and then settled beneath a great weight.
She rubbed out the cigarette butt, started the motor, switched on the lights and eased the car back onto the road. The rain was coming down more heavily now, and even had she wanted to, she could not drive over forty. She had to concentrate and squint to see farther than a hundred feet ahead, and she kept the car carefully in the right lane. Now and then a truck passed her on the left, splashing water and road-film over the tiny silver Datsun, shoving the car aside with its wake, so that she had to hold on to the steering wheel fiercely with both hands to keep the car from luffing off to the right.
Frequently, in her talks with Moses, she had described her life as a prisoner’s. The walls of her prison were constructed of obligations to others — to the children, to Ronald, of course, even to the damned dog, and because of those obligations she was further obliged to please whoever was important to the children, Ronald and the dog, which meant behaving in a way that was acceptable to the families of the other small businessmen in town. In recent years she had let her dissatisfaction with the life of a prisoner reveal itself — bumper stickers against nuclear power plants and for the burning of wood, involvement with a dozen young couples in the formation of a cooperative nursery school and day-care center (which was where she had met Dino and Bliss), demonstrating outside the capitol in Concord during the ERA and, later, abortion hearings. These gestures and expressions of her discontent, she knew, were pathetic and, in the end, harmless, for she still entertained Ronald’s local business associates in precisely the manner he had long ago grown accustomed to, she still cleaned up after and cooked for whichever members of her family slept and ate at home, she still kept her mouth shut and smiling in the face of conversations that she regarded as ignorant, narrow-minded, provincial, even cruel. And gradually, she had become a sullen, utterly self-centered, deeply pessimistic prisoner.
“Who’s the warden in your prison?” Moses had asked her. She had thought about that one for a week, and then, the following Thursday, had begun their session by announcing her discovery that she herself was the warden.
“Ah,” Moses said, clearly pleased. “Then you have the keys to unlock all the cells, don’t you?” That remark had led her directly to the understanding that all of them were prisoners, not just she, but Ronald too, and Noni. Even the dog. She could release them all, if she dared.
It would be a wonderful new life for them all. Ronald would be free to live and work just as he always had but without being obliged to deal with a surly, disapproving, somewhat embarrassing wife, and Noni would be free to choose which of her parents’ lives seemed more coherent and honorable to her, choosing in that way the shape and direction of her own life, which, at fifteen, she was certainly eager to do. And the dog, well, the dog would receive a kind word now and then when it got fed, for Ronald was damned well going to have to take care of his beloved Irish setter himself now. And Nancy herself? Nancy at last would be free to live and work, to think and speak, to hate and love in all the ways she had wanted for years now. She would rent an apartment in town, or better yet, a small house or cabin in the woods, where she could grow her own vegetables, organic vegetables, maybe raise a dozen chickens, for eggs, not for meat, because as soon as she got settled, she meant to become a vegetarian. She would work, at first on a volunteer basis, than as a paid organizer, for the Clamshell Alliance against the construction and any further development of nuclear energy. Or maybe she could work for one of the small organizations interested in researching and publicizing the virtues and values of solar energy. She would live modestly, simply, honestly — alone, she assumed, but in time she would have a lover, a man younger than she but who nonetheless would be able to explore with her the intricacies of her wonderful new life, for he would have to be someone who shared with her the beliefs, principles and positions of her politics.
A few miles north of Manchester, she left the Turnpike and continued on toward Catamount through Hooksett and Suncook on Route 28. The towns were smaller now, villages and old, decaying mill towns squatting alongside the rivers in the rain and cold darkness of October. North of Suncook, at the edge of a gray circle of fluorescent light cast by a filling station, she caught sight of a figure standing by the side of the road. It was a girl, she realized as she sped past, or a woman, and she was hitchhiking. On the ground next to her was a backpack, soaked through from the rain, and the girl was wearing an orange, stiff-looking, plastic poncho. Nancy slowed the car, feathering the brakes so as not to slide, and came almost to a stop several hundred yards beyond the girl. In the rearview mirror she saw the girl lift the backpack from the ground and start running in a clumsy, off-balance gait toward the car, which was still moving slowly ahead, a few miles an hour. The girl struggled along behind, splashing through deep puddles, until she had drawn to within a hundred yards of the car, and still Nancy kept the car moving forward. Finally, the girl stopped running. She dropped her pack onto the ground beside her and stood peering into the darkness at Nancy’s car. In the mirror, as the car moved back into the roadway and increased speed, Nancy saw the girl jab her hand at her in a gesture of disgust and contempt, and then the car went around a long, slow bend in the road, and the girl was gone.