He nods slowly. “There’s plenty happening we’re not going to be able to do anything about,” he says.
He holds up a little book he has been looking through. It is called
“Ever read these things?” he asks.
“No. Is it good?”
“You know what it is—right? A book that interprets dreams.”
“I have a dream,” she says, “about being at an altar in a wedding dress, only instead of standing on the floor I’m on a scale.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “There’s no weird stuff in here. It’s all the usual Freudian stuff.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Oh—you dream about your teeth crumbling; it means castration. That sort of stuff.”
“But what do you think my dream means?” she asks.
“I don’t even know if I half believe what I read in the book,” he says, tapping it on his knee. He knows he hasn’t answered her question. “Maybe the scale means you’re weighing the possibilities.”
“Of what?”
“Well, you’re in a wedding dress, right? You could be weighing the possibilities.”
“What will I do?” she says.
He laughs. “I’m no seer. Let’s look it up in your horoscope. What are you?”
“Virgo.”
“Virgo,” he says. “That would figure. Virgos are meticulous. They’d be susceptible to a dream like the one you were talking about.”
Peter reads from the book: “Be generous to friends, but don’t be taken advantage of. Unexpected windfall may prove less than you expected. Loved one causes problems. Take your time.”
He shrugs. He passes her the flask.
It’s too vague. She can’t really understand it. She sees Lincoln shaking the beads, but it’s not her fault this time—it’s the horoscope’s fault. It doesn’t say enough.
“That man I’m with wants to marry me,” she confides to Peter. “What should I do?”
He shakes his head and looks out the window. “Don’t ask me,” he says, a little nervously.
“Do you have any more books?”
“No,” he says. “All out.”
They ride in silence.
“You could go to a palmist,” he says after a while. “They’ll tell you what’s up.”
“A palmist? Really?”
“Well, I don’t know. If you believe half they say . . .”
“You don’t believe them?”
“Well, I fool around with stuff like this, but I sort of pay attention to what I like and forget what I don’t like. The horoscope told me to delay travel yesterday, and I did.”
“Why don’t you believe them?” Cynthia asks.
“Oh, I think most of them don’t know any more than you or me.”
“Then let’s do it as a game,” she says. “I’ll ask questions, and you give the answer.”
Peter laughs. “O.K.,” he says. He lifts her hand from her lap and stares hard at it. He turns it over and examines the other side, frowning.
“Should I marry Charlie?” she whispers.
“I see . . .” he begins. “I see a man. I see a man . . . in the drinking car.”
“But what am I going to do?” she whispers. “Should I marry him?”
Peter gazes intently at her palm, then smooths his fingers down hers. “Maybe,” he says gravely when he reaches her fingertips.
Delighted with his performance, he cracks up. A woman in the seat in front of them peers over the back of her chair to see what the noise is about. She sees a hippie holding a fat woman’s hand and drinking from a flask.
“Coleridge,” Peter is saying. “You know—Coleridge, the poet? Well, he says that we don’t, for instance, dream about a wolf and then get scared. He says it’s that we’re scared to begin with, see, and therefore we dream about a wolf.”
Cynthia begins to understand, but then she loses it. It is the fault of the sleeping pill and many drinks. In fact, when Charlie comes back, Cynthia is asleep on Peter’s shoulder. There is a scene—or as much of a scene as a quiet man like Charlie can make. Charlie is also drunk, which makes him mellow instead of really angry. Eventually, brooding, he sits down across the aisle. Late that night, when the train slows down for the Georgia station, he gazes out the window as if he noticed nothing. Peter helps Cynthia get her bag down. The train has stopped at the station, and Charlie is still sitting, staring out the window at a few lights that shine along the tracks. Without looking at him, without knowing what will happen, Cynthia walks down the aisle. She is the last one off.
