foot, in a black sock and a shiny black oxford, was dangling out the door. The chauffeur pulled his door shut. Then Atley closed his door too, and the limo drove away. Before we had turned to leave, though, the car stopped and backed up to us again. Atley rolled down his window. He stuck his head out. “ ‘Oh, Mr. Atley,’ ” he said in falsetto, “ ‘wherever are you going?’ ” He whistled a few notes. Then, in a booming, gruff voice, he said, “ ‘Why, Atley, back at work after your
Billy thought this was nice weather? It was March in New York, and there hadn’t been any sun for three days. The wind was blowing so hard that an end of my scarf flew up over my face. Billy put his arm around my waist and we watched the limousine make it through a yellow light and swerve to avoid a car that had suddenly stopped to back into a parking space.
“Billy,” I said, “why did you keep kissing me all through lunch?”
“We’ve known each other quite a while,” he said, “and I realized today that I’d fallen in love with you.”
This surprised me so much that as well as moving away from him I also went back in my mind to the safety and security of childhood. “You make a trade,” my mother had said to me once. “You give up to get. I want a TV? Why, then, I let him make me dance every time I come into the room. I’ll bet you think women are always fine dancers and men always try to avoid dancing? Your father would go out dancing every night of the week if he could.” As Billy and I walked down the street, I suddenly thought how strange it was that we’d never gone dancing.
My mother had said all that to me in the living room, when Ricky was at his wit’s end with Lucy on television and my father was at work. I sympathized with her at once. I liked being with my mother and thinking about something serious that I hadn’t thought about before. But when I was alone—or maybe this only happened as I got older—puzzling things out held no fascination for me. The rug in the room where my mother and I talked was patterned with pink cabbage-size roses. Years later, I’d have nightmares that a huge trellis had collapsed and disappeared and I’d suddenly found the roses, two-dimensional, on the ground.
Lofty
Kate could think of nothing but how she had cheated when she and Philip lived in this house. She had put little daubs of glue on the back of peeling wallpaper and pushed it back into place; she had stuffed the big aqua urns at the back door with rags—they were deep enough to hold twenty pounds of earth—and then poured a foot of soil on top. The pansies, pounded deep into the urns by summer rain, had shot up and cascaded over the rims anyway.
The house belonged to Philip’s Great-Aunt Beatrice, and she had come in person every month for the rent check, but all Kate’s worrying about their tenancy had been for nothing. The woman rarely looked closely at anything; in fact, in winter she often kept her car running in the driveway while she made the call, and wouldn’t even come inside for coffee. In the summer she stayed a few minutes to cut roses or peonies to take back to the city. She was a tall old lady, who wore flowered dresses, and by the time she headed for her ancient Cadillac she herself often looked like a gigantic flower in motion, refracted through a kaleidoscope.
In retrospect, Kate realized that the house must have looked perfectly presentable. When she and Philip first moved in and were in love with each other, they were in love with the place, and when they were no longer in love the house seemed to sink in sympathy. The sagging front step made her sad; a shutter fell from the second story one night, frightening them into each other’s arms.
When the two of them decided to part, they agreed that it was silly not to stay on until the lease was up at the end of summer. Philip’s young daughter was visiting just then, and she was having a wonderful time. The house was three stories high—there was certainly room enough to avoid each other. He was being transferred to Germany by his firm in September. Kate planned to move to New York, and this way she could take her time looking for a place. Wadding newspaper to stuff into the urns for another summer, she had been shocked at how tightly she crushed it—as if by directing her energy into her hands she could fight back tears.
Today, ten years later, Kate was back at the house. Philip’s daughter, Monica, was eighteen now, and a friend of Monica’s was renting the house. Today was Monica’s engagement party. Kate sat in a lawn chair. The lawn was nicely mowed. The ugly urns were gone, and a fuchsia plant hung from the lamppost beside the back door. A fuzz of green spread over a part of the lawn plot that had been newly plowed for a garden. The big maple tree that encroached on the kitchen had grown huge; she wondered if any light could penetrate that room now.
She knew that the spike in the maple tree would still be there. It had been there, mysteriously in place, when they first moved in. She walked up to the tree and put her hand on it. It was rusted, but still the height to allow a person to get a foot up, so that he could pull himself up into the nearest overhead branches.
Before the party, Philip had sent Monica a note that Monica showed to Kate with a sneer. He said that he was not going to attend the celebration of a mistake; she was too young to marry, and he would have nothing to do with the event. Kate thought that his not being there had less to do with his daughter and more to do with Kate and him. Either he still loved her or else he hated her. She closed her hand around the spike in the tree.
“Climb up so I can look up your skirt,” her husband said.
And then he was surprised when she did.
Ignoring the finger she’d scraped on the bark pulling herself up, she stood on the first high branch and reached behind to tug her skirt free, laughing and letting the skirt drift away from her body. She went one branch higher, carefully, and leaned out to look down. She turned and leaned against a higher branch, facing him, and raised her skirt.
“O.K.,” he said, laughing, too. “Be careful.”
She realized that she had never looked down on him before—not out of a window, not in any situation she could think of. She was twelve or fifteen feet off the ground. She went one branch higher. She looked down again and saw him move closer to the tree, as quickly as a magnet. He was smaller.
“Birds used to peck birdseed from a seeded bell that dangled from there,” she said, pointing to the branch her husband could almost touch. “This tree used to be filled with birds in the morning. They were so loud that you could hear them over the bacon sputtering.”
“Come down,” he said.
She felt a little frightened when she saw how small his raised hand was. Her body felt light, and she held on tighter.
“Sweetheart,” he said.
A young man in a white jacket was coming toward her husband, carrying two drinks. “Whoa, up there!” he called. She smiled down. In a second, a little girl began to run toward the man. She was about two years old, and
