must be starving! I will make chicken with mushrooms,” I must have paled. Lucia said, “Nelson, look, your friend is half dead already from hunger.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not. I’m fine, I’m not hungry at all.”
Inside the house we found Hecuba licking a stick of butter on the dining-room table. Lucia buried her face in the cat’s black fur and, with many tiny kisses, set it on the floor. She opened a bottle of wine and put two glasses on the kitchen table.
“From the state liquor store,” she said. “Imagine such a thing! I think it is so that they can keep track of how much and what we are drinking. Now you two sit down. In the kitchen, I am a wild woman. A maniac. Watch out.”
With that, she began to fly about, chopping, stirring, frying. “After dinner, we will phone Marianna,” she said. “When it is seven here, I think, is nine in India.”
Lucia reached up and took down one of several large apothecary jars full of what appeared to be dried lizards. “My mushrooms,” she said. “My beauties. I could kiss each one. This has been a fabulous year. Tonight with the chicken I will put in maybe eight kinds of mushrooms I find in the woods this spring.”
“Do you. know a lot about mushrooms?” I couldn’t hide the tremor in my voice.
Lucia laughed. “Nelson has eaten my mushrooms for years, and he is alive to tell the tale. Don’t worry, every mushroom I pick, I send a spore print to Washington for analysis. No one knows you can do this, but it is the only safe way. I have a good friend, he finds mushrooms all his life, last spring, he eats something he has been picking for years, he barely has time to call Poison Control before he loses all sensation in his—”
“I’ve got an idea,” said Nelson. “We feed Polly first and then watch her for twenty-four hours to see if she makes it.”
It was the sort of intimate teasing that married couples indulge in, and I might have been encouraged that Nelson was choosing to do it if I hadn’t suspected that they were capable of sitting at the table, discussing Nelson’s research, Lucia’s art, and occasionally checking to see if I had survived the dinner. It crossed my mind that if I did die from mushroom poisoning, I would be at least spared going into town and phoning Marianna.
It was reassuring that we all started to eat at once, food that was so delicious, who cared if it was lethal? Behind Nelson was a window and all through dinner I’d been distracted by dark shapes swooping near the glass.
“What kind of birds are those?” I finally asked.
“Bats, darling,” said Lucia. “But my bats are very strange bats. Most bats squeak, you know, like mice. But my bats cry like kitties. Isn’t that right, Hecuba, my love? Tell our friends what the little bats say.”
Lucia couldn’t remember if she had gas in her car, so we took Nelson’s VW, with our sleeping bags still in back. I offered Lucia the front seat. I was shocked when she accepted. Since then I have met others who take you up on what’s only politeness; it’s like some spiteful playground trick you fall for again and again. I scrunched up in the backseat: a relief, in a way.
Lucia slid in front and said, “I don’t believe in seat belts. To me, is a fascist plot.”
Then the whole grim scenario played out before my eyes. Nelson having an episode, Lucia not wearing her seat belt. Was it more or less scary that this was wishful thinking on my part? I felt like a child in the backseat, sullen and resentful. I thought mean thoughts about Lucia and Nelson, that they had more in common than just Marianna. By temperament, they were spoilers, they enjoyed ruining your pleasure, making you hate what you might otherwise love: Mozart, bachelor’s buttons, mushrooms, food. in Nelson’s case, my whole life.
For just the briefest moment, I was sorry for Marianna. And suddenly I felt frightened, alone, at Lucia and Nelson’s mercy, like a heroine in a thriller. Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, held prisoner in South America by Claude Rains and his evil mother. But Lucia and Nelson weren’t conspiring to kill me. It was fine with them, enough for them, to make me acutely unhappy. Though it wasn’t — ever — clear to me if they even knew, or cared.
It was a soft July evening. We drove along a river, past a waterfall. Light and water splashed on us, beading up on the car. A valley opened before us, rolling fields studded with barns, silos, farmhouses, kitchen gardens: quiet facades behind which families and household pets must have been eating dinner, inside, out of the golden light.
“Look!” I said unnecessarily. Nelson and Lucia were already staring at a blazing wedge of sun streaming down from one high cloud.
“People say I am imagining,” said Lucia. “But I know for a fact I am psychic. Yesterday morning I woke up and I knew I would hear from Marianna though it was, oh Jesus Christ, early spring since I hear from her last. That time she turned on the gas in your apartment, Nelson, I was at a party in Manhattan, and at the very moment my daughter was trying to kill herself, I suddenly faint and throw up all over the dinner table.”
There was a silence. Nelson said, “Two hundred years ago, my ancestors would have burned women like you and Marianna at the stake.”
Now I was glad that I was in the back, I could burrow down in the lumpy seat and try not to be hurt that Nelson’s forebears wouldn’t have wasted their time burning a woman like me.
“So would the people in this town,” Lucia said. “They would boil me in oil on Main Street if they knew anything about me.”
Only then did I realize that we were in town. On the way to Lucia’s, Nelson and I had passed many pretty country villages crowded with tourist couples shopping for maple products. But Lucia’s town wasn’t one of those. Two grim rows of water-stained Greek Revival houses led up to the business section, a dusty crossroads — gas station, post office, grocery, hardware — uninterested in a stranger’s patronage or in any hospitable cosseting frills, like, for example, a sidewalk. I tried to imagine a life for myself and Nelson in such a town, in one of the nicer houses, near somewhere he could teach. but it didn’t seem like a good idea, thinking too far into the future.
“If they knew…” Lucia said darkly. “About me and Hecuba. and my work. It is very anarchist, very un-Puritan and subversive. But to them I am just a crazy Italian, her house always needs fixing, her checks clear at the bank. Meanwhile, they tell me the gossip, the carpenters and electricians and plumbers. This town is a pit of snakes.”
What people was she talking about? There was no one in this town, no children wheeling on their bikes as their parents watered the shaggy lawns. It was as if a bomb had dropped while we were out at Lucia’s, and we hadn’t known about it, and we were the only ones left.
“Turn here,” Lucia instructed Nelson. Nelson pulled up to the grocery, a one-story brick-red-cinder-block structure streaked with patches of oily black. Against the wall was a phone booth and a rickety picnic bench with an uninterrupted view of the gas pump.
“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” cried Lucia.
“What is it?” Nelson said, and from the backseat I echoed lamely, “What’s wrong?”
“I forgot my money. We must go home. I will miss Marianna!”
“I have money,” said Nelson. “Can you get change in the store?”
“I can try.” Lucia rolled her head and flared her nostrils, breathing harshly. I felt as if I were in the car with a small pony starting to panic. “Two women work here, sisters, one nice, one bitch, you never know who you are getting…”
Nelson handed her a bill. “It’s a ten,” he said.
“I know that,” snapped Lucia, groping for the door handle.
Nelson leaned across her. Presumably he meant to open the door, but he was restraining her, too. He had to twist around slightly. I was shocked by the look on his face. I was afraid he was having an episode. Then something in his expression reminded me of my lab partner in the split second he had to decide whether to relinquish the frog or fetal pig I was grabbing out of his hands. Briefly I wondered if Nelson had been right about the Mormon boy’s secret passion for me. Because suddenly I recognized the expression of a man who has just realized that he will — that he is helpless not to — humiliate himself for love. And that was my psychic moment: I knew what was going to happen. I knew what Nelson was going to say long before he was able to make himself sound even slightly casual.
Nelson said, “Say hello to Marianna. Tell her I’m up here visiting with my new wife.”
“Yes, of course,” Lucia said and jumped out of the car.
The summer evening was warm and pretty, but Nelson and I stayed in the car. I didn’t move up front. We stared at the storefront, on which there was nothing to see, not even a beer or cigarette ad or a sign announcing a
