He had Stitch with him. And all the magazines. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Talbot,” he said. “If you’d like, I’ll put them under the house and you can send Lynn for them one at a time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t feel like reading them anymore.”
Dad put the magazines on the couch and sat down at the card table. Mom dished him up a bowl of soup. “I got the seeds,” he said. “The tomato seeds had gotten water-soaked, but the corn and squash were okay.” He looked at me. “I had to board up the post office, Lynn,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you, that I can’t let you go there anymore? It’s just too dangerous.”
“I told you,” I said. “I found it. While I was looking for a magazine.”
“The fire’s going out,” he said.
After they shot Rusty I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere for a month for fear they’d shoot me when I came home, not even when I promised to take the long way around. But then Stitch showed up and nothing happened and they let me start going again. I went every day till the end of summer and after that whenever they’d let me. I must have looked through every pile of mail a hundred times before I found the letter from the Clearys. Mrs. Talbot was right about the post office. The letter was in somebody else’s box.
AND COME FROM MILES AROUND
Nobody knows what housewives do all day. Nobody cares either, and this places the housewife in the same position as Miss Marple, whom people are continually underestimating, and gives the housewife a certain freedom and power that make her the perfect heroine.
I’ve used the housewife heroine in several stories, and she appears in this one in her guise as Young Mother. The role of Young Mother is a little more constraining in that when something important happens, she is likely to miss it because she is wiping somebody’s runny nose or putting on somebody’s boots. On the other hand, while she is pushing somebody on a swing or waiting for somebody to finish their Coke, she has a lot of time to think. And sometimes, taking somebody to the bathroom, she sees something everyone else has missed.
Laynie had to go to the bathroom again. Meg guided her through the crowded cafe to the back. The bathroom was crowded, too. Meg waited in the hall with Laynie. On the wall above the telephone, someone had written in Magic Marker, “Eclipse or Bust,” and had drawn a crude sun, a circle with uneven lines radiating from it. Under that someone else had scrawled in pencil, “It better not be cloudy I came all the way from Houston.”
When Meg came back to the table carrying the little girl, Rich and Paulos had both disappeared. Meg ordered Laynie another Coke and stared out the window, wondering how long it would take a two-year-old to overdose on sugar. Emergency situations required emergency measures, and seven hundred miles in a car with Laynie was an emergency situation. With Rich’s colleague Paulos along, Laynie could hardly be allowed to indulge in her usual trip behavior, which was to hang over the backs of their seats, shouting “cow” at regular intervals and dropping her gum down their backs. This trip Meg had sat in the back seat with Laynie and a litter of sticker books and doll clothes, popping Lifesavers into her mouth every time she asked how much farther it was to Tana.
And now here they were in Montana, and the men had gone God knows where, probably back to the Chamber of Commerce to ask more obscure questions about f-stops and mylar filters. They had already been there once. Meg had stood in the slushy snow outside the crowded office while Laynie ran around and around the towns resident Air Force missile, screaming like a wild Indian. No one had paid any attention to her. People had clustered in little groups, reading over the free brochures and arguing about a line of minuscule clouds in the southwest.
They were clustered together on the streets, too. The locals were easy to spot. They were the only ones who weren’t anxiously watching the sky They were also the only ones not wearing T-shirts that said “Eclipse ’79” in psychedelic orange and yellow.
The four men walking down the other side of the street were definitely not locals. They were all talking at once and gesturing wildly at the sky Scientists, thought Meg. You can always tell scientists. Their pants are too short. These four all looked alike: short black pants, short-sleeved shirts with the pocket crammed with pencils and metal clips and a flat calculator. Short sandy hair and black-rimmed glasses. Heads of four science departments somewhere, Meg thought.
The men came back. Rich had bought a T-shirt for Laynie. She refused to put it on. “I think I’d better take her back to the motel so she can have some kind of nap,” Meg said. “She’s about done in.”
Rich nodded. “You didn’t bring any masking tape, did you? Some guys over at the Chamber of Commerce said an eye patch makes it easier to see the corona at totality.”
“Maybe one of the drugstores is open,” Paulos said. “The seminars start at two-thirty. Surely we can find a drugstore open.”
“What if we meet you at the seminar?” Rich said. He gave Meg the key to the motel room and took off again, remembering his coat this time. Meg struggled Laynie into her snowsuit, paid the bill, and carried her back to the motel.
Two redheaded teenage boys were setting up an expensive-looking telescope in the parking lot of the motel. The No Vacancy sign flashed on and off in the sunny afternoon. Laynie was already asleep against Meg’s shoulder. She stopped to admire the telescope. The boys were from Arizona. “Do you know how lucky we are?” one of them said. “I mean, how
“It does look like we’re going to have good weather,” Meg said, shielding her eyes against the sun to look at the clouds in the southwest. They seemed to be dwindling.
“I don’t mean the weather,” the boy said, with an air of contempt Meg was sure he didn’t feel, not when he’d come all the way from Arizona. “If we lived on Jupiter we wouldn’t have this at all.”
“No,” Meg said, smiling, “I suppose we wouldn’t.”
“See, the sun is exactly four hundred times bigger than the moon and exactly four hundred times farther away. So they just fit. It doesn’t happen like that anyplace else in the whole universe probably!”
He was talking very loudly. Laynie shifted uneasily against Meg’s shoulder. Her cheeks were flushed, a sure sign that she was worn out. Meg smiled at the boys and took Laynie into the room. She turned back the red chenille bedspread and laid Laynie on the blankets, then kicked off her shoes and lay down beside her.
The boys were still outside when she woke up, loudly telling the landlady how lucky she was not to be living on Venus. The landlady probably already knew how lucky she was. Meg was relatively sure she didn’t usually get to use her No Vacancy sign in February. She was positive she didn’t usually get thirty-five dollars a room.
Meg had a long chenille-nubbled crease down her cheek from where she’d slept on the folded bedspread. She combed her hair, pulled on a sweater, and sat down on the bed beside Laynie. It was only a little after two. The seminar was supposed to last two and a half hours, with a film at three O’clock. There was no way Laynie could last through the whole thing. She might as well let her sleep.
Laynie was staring at her wide-eyed from the bed. “Tana?” she asked sleepily
“Yes,” Meg said. “Go back to sleep.”
Laynie sat up. “Clips?” she said, and crawled off the bed.
“Not yet. Would you like to go swing? Let’s get your boots on.”
The redheaded boys were gone from the parking lot. They had probably gone to the seminar. The landlady directed Meg and Laynie to a park two blocks off the main street. Meg walked slowly, letting Laynie dawdle over a puddle and poke at the piles of dirty snow with a stick she found. On the way, Meg saw the four scientists again. She was relieved to see they were no longer running around without coats. They were all in parkas now and had an assortment of hats, among them an enormous Stetson and a red wool deerstalker with ear flaps. Protective
