She should turn around. But she can’t. It’s the pipe smoke, she tells herself, as she continues up the road in the dust the truck has left behind. She loves the smell with an almost scary intensity; she feels, when she smells it, as if she might fall down. Her father and grandfather were pipe smokers of the kind that set their pipes down only for photographs, though there is one black-and-white of senator and governor together—it hangs still in the yacht club’s billiard room—in which both men, son- and father-in-law, blow smoke at the camera. Vee’s father was smoking a pipe when he had the stroke that killed him—his coffin smelled of it, if you leaned close enough.
Vee did not adore her father or her grandfather. Neither man allowed that. Even in their slippers or swimming trunks they appeared monumental. They could not comfort Vee, like her mother or her grandmother, but neither did they become real to her in the way her mother and grandmother did. The women’s realness came with a cost; it made them impossible not to hate, in a way—their comforting and combing and correcting, their bodies and hands and hair always near. The men never got close enough to ruin the illusion of their omnipotence—they were immortal, somehow, even in death. So what the smell gives her now is a feeling of safety. If she falls down, the smell tells her, she will be picked up. It makes her feel warm, though the day is cold.
It is mid-December already. She has been at Rosemary’s more than a month, and though she still has no idea what she will do next, her initial panic has for the most part ebbed. She no longer fears at any given moment that Rosemary or Philip will kick her out, and the tabloids rarely mention her now. Also, she got her period. She was about to send off for a kit from a laboratory in North Carolina—she’d asked Rosemary to drop her off at the library, where they had a new book called Our Bodies, Ourselves that provided instructions and an address—but then she bled, and another layer of fear fell away. She almost shouted from the bathroom. She felt like celebrating. But what would Rosemary, at twelve weeks now, her waist thickened even to Vee’s eye, make of that? And Vee hadn’t even shared her fear that she might be pregnant. The lightness the friends established early in Vee’s “visit” has somehow persisted, so that Vee has still not asked Rosemary about the cross that was burned on her lawn, and Rosemary hasn’t pressed Vee for any details beyond the basics of what happened in her town house the night before she tripped up Rosemary’s steps with nothing but a bag and her hat. They talk about memories, and their parents, and what they will drink, and Rosemary’s pregnancy, and whether the laundry—still Vee’s job—needs doing. At Thanksgiving, they debated stuffing recipes, then cooked together, and Philip, though he still asks when Vee plans to leave, allowed Vee to be at the dinner since Vee had no family and Rosemary’s parents, who knew and loved Vee—though they rigorously avoided any discussion of what she was doing there, alone—were the only guests.
Beyond Rosemary, Vee has found a doctor willing to keep her name to himself and refill her prescription for the Pill, which seems to her now, though she is not currently having sex, as critical as food and water—like her own private armor. The library book agrees. The library book—which she couldn’t check out; it was reference, and besides, she wouldn’t dare be seen reading it; even in the library she had read it tucked inside a large dictionary—quotes a handbook that calls the Pill “the first drug to weaken male society’s control over women.”
Vee is confused about sex. She wakes sometimes from dreams pinned by an arousal so intense it’s more like pain, a certainty that a body has been on hers, a desperation to call it back. But it’s not sex, per se, that she misses—she doesn’t think so. She has enjoyed not putting on a girdle, not shaving her armpits every day. It’s not sex—she tells herself—but it is something. Rosemary hugs her. Rosemary is a generous hugger. But that’s not it, quite, either. Rosemary’s friendship, as much as Vee loves her, cannot be enough. A man is required—she knows this even as it shames her. She has not been unattached from a man since she and Rosemary, at thirteen, went on a double date with two boys named John and John.
The smoke is still in her nostrils when she reaches a driveway, at the end of which stands a small house of unfinished wood, newly built—she can smell that, too. Enough trees have been cleared around the house that she can see it, but not so many that she feels exposed as she stands looking at it. She wonders if anyone else knows that the house is here, if the man who drove by is a kind of hermit, or outlaw. She hears the clicking of his cooling truck. She sees a row of tools leaned against the house, shovels and hoes and axes and a machete. She wonders if he is planning to build a shed—if his wife, if there is a wife, will insist on a shed. She would, she thinks. But why? Her walk has left her confused. Would she want the shed to protect the tools, or to hide them for appearance’s sake, or to make him build it? Vee knows she often can’t tell the difference between what she wants and what she thinks she should want, but knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to tell the difference.
“You here to beat down my trees?”
Vee hadn’t noticed the man walking toward her, carrying a leash. She backs away.
The man stops. He surveys her. He wears
