“Shouldn’t we call Lainey?” Willa’s father asked her mother, but her mother gave a grimace and said, “Lots of luck with that.” She told Derek, “Willa’s sister wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with her family these days,” and Derek chuckled.
Willa didn’t know why her mother was putting on such a show. It must be because Willa had finally, finally found herself a boyfriend. (Had her parents been worried about that?) It was true she had not been popular in high school. The only boys who ever asked her out had been geeky, bespectacled misfits whom she had turned down without a thought, preferring instead the back-of-the-room boys—juvenile-delinquent types in leather jackets, lounging almost horizontal at their desks and yawning at the ceiling during class, roaring out of the parking lot in their souped-up trucks as soon as the last bell rang. But none of those boys had ever given her a glance.
Maybe her parents had been asking each other, year after year, “Is she all right? Is something wrong with her? Do you suppose she’ll end up an old maid?”
Derek was telling her mother that he had once been like Elaine himself; used to avoid his parents like the plague (“I find that hard to believe,” her mother murmured), but now look: he couldn’t think of any two people he’d rather spend an evening with.
Willa took another sip of sherry. It coated her throat like cough syrup.
* * *
—
The experience with the man on the plane lurked behind everything, casting a shadow, causing the back of her neck to tingle, surfacing now and then during the most unrelated conversations, but neither Derek nor her parents referred to it again. It seemed her parents had decided to go along with Derek’s interpretation of it.
When she was showering that night she examined her right side for a bruise, but there wasn’t one. When she went to bed she made a conscious effort to focus on other subjects so that she wouldn’t have bad dreams—think of how to entertain Derek tomorrow; think of whether he’d made a good impression on her parents—and it worked, more or less, but then in the middle of a deep sleep she felt a steady, blunt nudge in her ribs, and she woke with her heart pounding so violently that she fancied she could see her top sheet trembling over her breasts in the dark. She searched with her fingers for the spot where she’d felt the nudge and it seemed to her that it was, in fact, slightly sore, but maybe that was just from her own prodding earlier. After that she lay awake a long time, staring up at the ceiling and listening to her sister’s snuffly breaths across the room.
Okay, then: think of Derek’s proposal.
He had no idea how much he’d asked of her, suggesting she give up her work with Dr. Brogan. The discovery of language had been her great epiphany in college. Not just Spanish and French and such, which she already knew from high school, but the origins of language in general, and what the various languages revealed about the various cultures that spoke them, and—most interesting of all—how many things the different languages had in common. Wasn’t it amazing that most people the world over agreed upon the need to distinguish between “he did” and “he was doing”? And idioms: funny how often the same illogical and unlikely idiom had been arrived at independently by widely separate nationalities. She could listen to Dr. Brogan discuss such issues all day.
Still, it was tempting, just for a moment, to consider the adventurousness of throwing everything over to marry Derek. Ditching all that was familiar, tying herself almost arbitrarily to this whole new person entirely unrelated to her. The suddenness, the extremeness.
Finally she slid back into sleep, and as far as she knew she had no dreams at all, good or bad, either one.
After breakfast the next morning she took Derek on a walk through town, keeping up a stream of chatter. “There’s where the Pearsons live,” she said. The Pearsons were the people she worked for during the summers, tending their two children while the parents took city folk whitewater-rafting. “And here’s Miss Carroll’s house who taught me clarinet, except one day I rang the doorbell and got no answer and it turned out she’d run off with Mr. Surrey from the auto-parts store who was married and had five children.”
Derek said, “I didn’t know you played the clarinet.”
She drew in a breath to speak but then just stared at him, because what? Oh, boys were such foreigners. (Not for the first time, she wished she’d had a brother or two.) A girl would have begged for every detail about Miss Carroll’s running off. “Well, not anymore,” she said finally. “I wasn’t very musical.”
For their lunch she packed sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade and they went for a hike up Bert Kane Ridge. They ate on the wrinkled mound of granite at the top—Elephant Rock, it was called—which was covered with names and hearts and initials dating all the way back to the 1920s. From time to time other hikers passed, so it wasn’t as private as she had hoped, but she and Derek sat close together and exchanged a few discreet kisses. Willa pointed out the distant road where her parents lived, and the steeple of their church just below them. “Looks like a nice place for a wedding,” Derek said, even though he could not have known that from where he sat.
Willa was worried he might start talking again about marrying this summer, so she said, “Oh, look, jack-in-the-pulpits! I haven’t seen jack-in-the-pulpits for ages,” and the subject of the church was dropped.
For supper that night her parents took them to the area’s best restaurant, the Nu-Deal Inn out on the East-West Parkway. Willa had been hoping that Elaine would come along to dilute the conversation (was how she thought of it), but Elaine wasn’t even around to turn them down, so they went without her. The Nu-Deal was family-style, with long, linen-draped tables where the diners all sat together and helped themselves from giant platters of fried chicken and barbecued ribs and sliced ham and turnip greens cooked with fatback. Willa’s mother got involved in a conversation with a woman who was a huge fan, she said; she’d seen Willa’s mother play Amanda in a production of The Glass Menagerie at the Garrettville Little Theatre. Willa’s mother said, “Oh, aren’t you nice to remember! Goodness, that was so long ago.” So then of course Willa’s father had to explain to Derek about his wife’s acting hobby. “I think she really could have made something of herself if we’d lived in a big city,” he said. “She’s got this flair; I mean, when she is on the stage the audience looks only at her. Take that Glass Menagerie, for instance: why, she was not the star, this young crippled girl was, but Alice swoops in and she’s so full of verve and just…uninhibited, you know, and enthusiastic—”
“Oh, Melvin, stop,” Willa’s mother said with a laugh, and she gave him an affectionate swat on the arm.
He beamed at her, his eyes twinkling behind his tiny, very clean lenses. “Well, anyhow,” he told Derek, “maybe someday you’ll get to see her in something and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.”