Salem's Lot

‘He was really nice,’ Susan said. ‘Very natural.’

‘Hoo, my feet,’ Mrs Norton said. She set the iron on its fanny, making it hiss balefully, and eased into the Boston rocker by the picture window. She reached a, Parliament out of the pack on the coffee table and lit it. ‘Are you sure he’s all right, Susie?’

Susan smiled a little defensively. ‘Sure, I’m sure. He looks like… oh, I don’t know-a college instructor or something.’

‘They say the Mad Bomber looked like a gardener,’ Mrs Norton said reflectively.

‘Moose shit,’ Susan said cheerfully. It was an epithet that never failed to irritate her mother.

‘Let me see the book.’ She held a hand out for it,

Susan gave it to her, suddenly remembering the homosexual rape scene in the prison section.

‘Air Dance,’ Ann Norton said meditatively, and began to thumb pages at random. Susan waited, resigned. Her mother would bird-dog it. She always did.

The windows were up, and a lazy forenoon breeze ruffled the yellow curtains in the kitchen-which Mom insisted on calling the pantry, as if they lived in the lap of class. It was a nice house, solid brick, a little hard to heat in the winter but cool as a grotto in the summer. They were on a gentle rise of land on outer Brock Street, and from the picture window where Mrs Norton sat you could see all the way into town. The view was a pleasant one, and in the winter it could be spectacular with long, twinkling vistas of unbroken snow and distance-dwindled buildings casting yellow oblongs of light on the snow fields.

‘Seems I read a review of this in the Portland paper. It wasn’t very good.’

‘I like it,’ Susan said steadily. ‘And I like him.’

‘Perhaps Floyd would like him, too,’ Mrs Norton said idly. ‘You ought to introduce them.’

Susan felt a real stab of anger and was dismayed by it. She thought that she and her mother had weathered the last of the adolescent storms and even the aftersqualls, but here it all was. They took up the ancient arguments of her identity versus her mother’s experience and beliefs like an old piece of knitting.

‘We’ve talked about Floyd, Mom, You know there’s nothing firm there.’

‘The paper said there were some pretty lurid prison scenes, too. Boys getting together with boys.’

‘Oh, Mother, for Christ’s sake.’ She helped herself to one of her mother’s cigarettes.

‘No need to curse,’ Mrs Norton said, unperturbed. She handed the book back and tapped the long ash on her cigarette into a ceramic ash tray in the shape of a fish. It had been given to her by one of her Ladies’ Auxiliary friends, and it had always irritated Susan in a formless sort of way. There was something obscene about tapping your ashes into a perch’s mouth.

‘I’ll put the groceries away,’ Susan said, getting up.

Mrs Norton said quietly, ‘I only meant that if you and Floyd Tibbits are going to be married-’

The irritation boiled over into the old, goaded anger. ‘What in the name of God ever gave you that idea? Have I ever told you that?’

‘I assumed-’

‘You assumed wrong,’ she said hotly and not entirely truthfully. But she had been cooling toward Floyd by slow degrees over a period of weeks.

‘I assumed that when you date the same boy for a year and a half,’ her mother continued softly and implacably, ‘that it must mean things have gone beyond the handholding stage.’

‘Floyd and I are more than friends,’ Susan agreed evenly. Let her make something of that.

An unspoken conversation hung suspended between them.

Have you been sleeping with Floyd?

None of your business.

What does this Ben Mears mean to you?

None of your business.

A re you going to fall for him and do something foolish?

None of your business.

I love you, Susie. Your dad and I both love you.

And to that no answer. And no answer. And no answer. And that was why New York-or someplace-was imperative. In the end you always crashed against the unspoken barricades of their love, like the walls of a padded cell. The truth of their love rendered further meaningful discussion impossible and made what had gone before empty of meaning.

‘Well,’ Mrs Norton said softly. She stubbed her cigarette out on the perch’s lip and dropped it into his belly.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ Susan said.

‘Sure. Can I read the book when you’re finished?’

‘If you want to.’

‘I’d like to meet him,’ she said.

Susan spread her hands and shrugged.