around and now to commit it to paper. Our sleeping selves should not be subjected to this sort of treatment, should they?)
I smoked the cigarette all the way down. I felt possessed by an excess of nervous energy, part of it no doubt a matter of having a hangover, but more to it, it seemed, than just that. I stubbed out my cigarette, got up, put clothes on. A pair of skintight dungarees, a sloppy flannel shirt.
I felt-it took me a moment to know how I felt, and then I realized that this house was imprisoning me just now, that I had to be out and away, free of it for long enough so that the feeling could go away. I tucked my feet into a pair of Priss’ loafers-our shoe size is the same, which annoyed me no end in college, as it would have been handy to be able to exchange other clothes occasionally, whereas who in hell wants to wear somebody else’s shoes?
I lit a second cigarette. Smoking is a great cure for depression, reassuring one that, however unpleasant life may be, one is doing something to shorten it. I took a few drags on the cigarette, then started to leave the bedroom.
“Rho?”
I turned.
“Where you goin’?”
“Nowhere. Go back to sleep.”
“Come back to bed.”
“Later.”
“Mmmnnn. Timezit?”
“Early. Go back to-”
“S’Harry?”
“Out Back.”
“Where you goin’?”
“For a walk.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Go back to sleep, Priss.”
She said something but it came out in a total mumble, and I waited until she had slipped off to sleep again. I went to the kitchen and hurried through breakfast, making do with instant coffee in spite of strong feelings against it, and then let myself out of the house and started for the woods in back.
Of course Harry had picked that moment to decide that he couldn’t stand looking at his sketch pad. He was having a cigarette break in the garden, pacing back and forth, smoking furiously, and examining flowers.
“Hello, there,” he said, too heartily. “You’re up early, aren’t you?”
He was as unfortunately wide awake as Priss was sleepy. This morning both of them seemed to me to be carrying things to extremes. The nervousness, which I now knew was more than a matter of a hangover, did not seem to be going away.
“Thought I’d go for a walk,” I said.
“Oh?”
“In the woods.”
The property backs up on some woods, which constitutes a barrier of no little size between our place (our place?) and the estate to our rear. (Estate is perfectly justified in this context. The owner made several million dollars in scrap metals during the Second World War, multiplied this a few times over in other fields, and then retired to a couple of hundred acres in the Berkshires, where he maintains racing horses and fattens Black Angus cattle.)
“You’re not supposed to walk in his woods,” Harry said.
“I’m not?”
“Well, not you personally. Nobody’s not. He has signs up. No hunting, trespassing, or spitting. Violators will be torn apart by mad Alsatians. Incidentally, what is an Alsatian?”
“A native of Alsace.”
“No, it’s some kind of a dog I always encounter in English novels. They’re always guarding property. Just the right sort of a dog for it, one gathers, but I’ve never heard of the breed outside of English novels.”
“They’re German shepherds.”
“They sound sort of similar, but they always-”
“Not similar. They are German shepherds.”
“Then why not call them that?”
“For a long time, if you called anything German in England, nobody bought it.”
“Oh. So they just-”
“Changed the name.”
“Fantastic,” he said. He flicked ashes at an azalea. “How come you know all these things?”
How come you don’t,, I very nearly said. Why, I wondered, am I so fucking hostile this morning?
Instead I said, “I think I’ll chance the slavering Alsatians. That’s probably just to keep hunters off his property, wouldn’t you think?”
“Probably.”
“And I feel in the mood for a walk in the woods.”
“Maybe I’ll lock up my pen and come along.”
“No, don’t do that,” I said. It was absolutely maddening-all I wanted to do was go for a walk and now everybody on earth wanted to keep me company. I felt like a character in a Gothic novel whom nobody wants to let out of the forbidding old manse.
“To protect you from the mad Alsatians.”
“Oh, I’ll manage,” I said. “I’ll insist I lost my way. That I am a stranger in these parts, kind sir-”
“Some kind sir. Bloody old robber baron.”
“A stranger in these parts, kind baron-”
“You want to go for a walk by yourself.”
“Yeah, kind of. A walk by myself, she explained, lowering her eyelashes bashfully at the handsome young cartoonist. Yeah, that’s it, I guess.”
“You vhant to be alone,” he said, not too much like Greta Garbo. And he looked at me oddly, but just for a moment, and then he laughed it all away.
“Take care, kitten,” he said. “I’ll get back to the serious business of mining salt. Watch out for bear traps.”
“Oh, I will, kind sir.”
“For that matter, watch out for bears.”
“They prevent forest fires.”
“They also eat Boy Scouts. Where else do you think they get those hats?”
“Well, fella, I ain’t no Boy Scout.”
“Don’t worry, honey. Somebody’ll eatcha.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“Well-”
I laughed and he laughed, and I was only laughing to get to the end of the scene, and so was he, and he went back to the shed while I walked on to the back line of the property and climbed over a couple strands of barbed wire that were strung from tree to tree at the property line.
I trespassed, but benignly. I didn’t pick any wildflowers or leave any litter behind. I just walked around in the silence, enjoying the loneliness, and wondering if I would ever stop being lonely, in or out of the woods. And wondered, for that matter, if I would ever really be out of the woods, so to speak.
Because it seemed to me, on that otherwise unimpeachable morning, that this was not my house, or my family, or indeed my life. That I had slipped it on as easily as I slipped on Prissy’s loafers, and that it was comfortable in about the same way, but that it was not mine and that sooner or later I would have to give it back. I had not been made for it, I did not own it, and it was not mine.
I sat down on a fallen tree and looked at mushrooms, wishing I knew how to tell the poisonous ones from the edible ones. It struck me as though it would be great fun to gather one’s own mushrooms and take them back and
