A damaging consequence of this neurotic interlude was a rivalry between Shell and her sister. Their mother developed and encouraged it with that faultless instinct which people who live under one roof have for one another’s pain.
“I can’t remember which of you hurt most,” she reflected. “Good thing you weren’t twins.”
Shell’s father drove her to school every morning. It was his idea that the girls go to different schools. This was a wonderful part of the day for both of them.
She watched the forest go by. She knew how happy he was that she had inherited his love of trees. This was more important than her own delight, and it ushered her into a woman’s life.
He drove very carefully. He must have been unwilling to turn his head to look at her, he had such a precious cargo. He mustn’t have quite believed he had anything to do with her, she was so lovely, and he must have wondered why she believed the things he told her. When she was sixteen he gave her a car of her own, a second-hand Austin.
The school was a continuation of the house. There were many trees and trimmed bushes, many weathered buildings or buildings constructed to appear weathered. The enrolment represented an impressive concentration of old money, so no one could accuse the authorities of pretensions when they disguised the new junior residence with an Early American façade.
Its curriculum was not designed to produce artists, revolutionaries, or ceramicists. A Wall Street version of the little red school-house, it trained girls to ornament society rather than question or subvert it.
Shell was formal. She sat on the grass with a book in front of the library and arranged her dress over her knees.
Let us say the dress was white and the book one of the interminable dialogues of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and let us say that this time her hair was bound in braids
If she wished to think about something she laid the book down carefully and leaned on one arm; perhaps with one finger she absently turned a page.
She knew she represented something immortal, she was sure. She was the girl in front of the building. Her age in the foreground, her fifteen-year-old body, her hair in the intermittent wind, were instruments to praise the weather and the old stones. She knew this, so she composed her face.
She must be still so that the unknown elderly man crossing the other side of the quadrangle, if he happened to glance towards where she was sitting, would see the perfect thing, the quiet thing, the girl before the preserved doorway, the scene the heart demanded. It was her responsibility. Therefore she was serious, and the world was crumbling into plastic.
She loved the horizontal afternoon light. It seemed to come right out of the shrubbery, and, for precious minutes, right out of the ground itself.
She must find a way to sit in that light.
2
Breavman was furious. He didn’t want to move the bed. He wanted to climb into it, hold her, and go to sleep.
They had driven all day. He didn’t know where they were, probably Virginia, and he didn’t know the name of the tourist house.
The woodwork was brown and perhaps the loose circus wall -paper hid sinister bugs. He was too tired to care. The last hundred miles her head had slept on his shoulder and he vaguely resented her defection from the ordeal of the road.
“What does it matter where the damn bed is? We’ll be out of here by eight in the morning.”
“I’ll move it myself.”
“Don’t be silly, Shell.”
“We’ll be able to see the trees when we wake up.”
“I don’t want to see the trees when we wake up. I want to look at the dirty ceiling and get pieces of dirty plaster grape-vine in my eye.”
The ugly brass bed resisted her. For generations of sleepers it had not changed its position. He imagined a grey froth of dust on the underside. With a sigh he presented himself at the other end.
“I offered to drive,” she said to excuse her energy.
But he couldn’t bear to be conducted through the night, helpless by the side of the speeding driver. If he had to find himself hurtling down a highway, neon motels and hamburgers arresting him absurdly like those uncertain images that were always flashing in his mind, he himself wanted to be in charge of the chaos.
“Besides, there’s something irreverent about moving this stuff around.”
She pushed hard, knuckles white on the brass bars.
It struck Breavman that they were the hands of a nun, bleached, reddened by convent chores; he had always thought them so delicate. Her body was like that. At first she might be mistaken for a Vogue mannequin, tall, small-breasted, angular, and fragile. But then her full thighs and broad shoulders modified the impression and in love he learned that he rode on a great softness. The nostrils of her face over-widened just far enough to destroy the first impression of exquisite harmony and allow for lust.
Her remarkable grace was composed of something very durable, disciplined and athletic, which is often the case with women who do not believe they are beautiful.
Yes, Breavman thought, she would have moved it with or with -out me. She is the Carry Nation of Evil Chintzy Rooms and I am the greasy drunkard smirking over my stack of Niagara Falls souvenirs. She learned to wield her axe three hundred years ago, clearing a New England field for planting.
Now the bed was beneath the window. He sat down and called for her with two open hands. They held each other softly and with a kind of patience as if they were both waiting for the demons developed in the silence of the long trip to evaporate.
At last she stood up, a little too soon, he thought.
“I’ve got to make the bed.”
“Make the bed? The bed is perfectly well made.”
“I mean
