them.
But then she took the shine off. “My fifth Seagull,” she told him.
“I’ve only seen it twice.”
She began to name the productions she’d seen, the famous Russian one, the new translation with a hot British director, the slipshod amateurs in a summer theatre on the Cape. Meanwhile he guided her, palm under her elbow, across the street and through the crowd.
It was what she expected. He was fairly sure of that.
They waited in line at the will-call box until a man in carefully rolled-up sleeves and a vest handed them their reserved tickets. She seemed surprised that they would be sitting side by side.
“How did you manage that? I thought it was sold out,” she murmured.
“I have my ways.” There were some advantages to his part-time job.
He saw she was wondering if they were comps. “You paid and I paid,” he reassured her. That was not the sort of doubt he wanted to raise.
They swam through the crowd, as used to it as sea creatures to drifting weed. The waters parted before them, he found their seats without assistance. He took the aisle. They were good seats, more than he would have been willing to pay if the ticket hadn’t provided him with this opportunity.
The girl in black was on the stage. He hadn’t had time to look at the program and so didn’t know her name, but there was the famous line, “I’m in mourning for my life.”
He glanced at Helen. Of course she was wearing black, too. In this city it meant nothing.
He wondered suddenly if she wanted sympathy. That had never occurred to him before, especially after he’d seen her broad back, her shoulders like shelves, jutting. But now he heard her sigh, lingeringly, drawing it out, and although it might only mean she was relaxing—and she was settling into her seat—it proved his intuition correct. He remembered, suddenly, a summer when he’d been sent to visit an uncle in Jackson: the long bus ride, the slow lowering of the land that seemed to him—a small boy—to be running downhill to an invisible sea, the crowd of black people, as thick as in Harlem, at the bus station where he’d seen his uncle standing without expectation or surprise as though he stood there all his life. And then the long days. He’d felt sorry even for the dogs, lounging under the porch, scratching fleas.
There was no comparison, of course. Yet he felt the same inexplicable temptation to step back to avoid crushing something soft.
The play progressed. He’d had a long day. Before the end of the first act, he put his head back against the seat and dozed.
He jerked up at intermission as people began to climb over his knees. She was looking at him with her jagged smile. “So you don’t care much for the play? Or is it the production?”
“I was remembering,” he said, unshelled by his sudden waking. “I was feeling sorry.”
“For what? Or for whom?”
“For you,” he said, shaking himself awake. “It doesn’t make sense.”
She didn’t answer, looking across the crowded theatre as though she recognized someone. Then he saw she was studying the gilded mermaids that decorated the long-unused balcony where the black casings of the lighting system protruded like snouts.
“Never mind,” she said, which didn’t seem a response to what he had said.
They fell into silence. It was not uncomfortable. She continued to scan the theatre, taking in its recently re-gilded ceiling where amorphous gods and goddesses reared and plunged. He felt relieved of the responsibility of talking to her. It was almost like being at home. His roommate expected nothing in the way of words, which was a relief for a man working in the theatre.
The sharp edge of his wish, of what he’d been determined to get from her, dulled, as though rubbed against a stone, and he felt sleepy, again, and wondered how he was going to stay awake during the long second act.
The audience was crowding back in. He stood up to let several large people pass. It struck him that he was small compared to most of these people. It was an odd thought.
Then it was necessary to look, at least briefly, at that seagull, stuffed and mounted in a glass case on the stage, surely the most ridiculous representation of a symbol he’d ever seen, and to hear the girl on the stage lamenting.
They were all lamenting for their lives, but how hideous it was to have that stuffed, yellow-legged bird in its glass coffin held up to represent them.
“At least grant us the privacy of our disappointments,” she said, as though trespassing on his thoughts.
But it didn’t feel like trespassing. It felt like something soft.
Then it was over, and they were shuffling into their coats. “Walk me to the subway,” she said as they poured out with the crowd.
This time he didn’t put his palm under her elbow. “I’m sorry I asked you for money,” he said as they followed the swarm down the sidewalk.
She looked at him, surprised. “But I’m giving it to you,” she said. “Why should you be sorry?”
He was silent. People jammed past them. At the entrance to the subway, she turned and gave him her hand. “Goodbye,” she said. “I’ll put the check in the mail tomorrow.” Then she went, swooping down the long dirty steps.
SELLING THE FARM
IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. IT WAS ALSO, STILL, enormous, Shirley thought, sitting behind the wheel, her older sister Miriam beside her, neatly buckled in. Shirley had parked her hybrid by the old farm gate that still scraped the ground as it had every time their father jumped out of the car to open it, years and years ago, with the two sisters in the back seat and their mother cow-patient in front, waiting for him to jump back in and drive them through. After church, it would have been, Shirley thought, after a visit to the aunts in town, after a rare excursion to a state park to mark a holiday. The gate had scraped whenever she opened it to drive in with an armload of groceries, a stiff supermarket bouquet to cheer their mother. All that had stopped with her death; Shirley had not opened the gate since the funeral.
It was locked now with a big new padlock.
“I had no idea,” she said, looking helplessly at Miriam.
Miriam shuffled through her big black bag, coming up with a bit of paper. She handed it to Shirley, who took it, climbed out of the car and began to wrestle with the combination.
After a minute Miriam rolled down her window. “You need help?”
“No!” The lock gave finally. Shirley dragged back the gate, then climbed in again behind the wheel.
“At least we don’t need to lock it till we leave—nothing to keep in, or out, now,” she said.
Miriam didn’t answer.
On the other side of the gate, the long rolling cornfield that had bristled with dry stalks at this time of year had been leveled. The bulldozers, having finished their work for the day, were drawn up in a row, bright yellow and massive along the side of the old tenant’s cottage. It was falling down. The roof had caved in, and the modest white posts on the porch were sagging.
“Those posts were still straight last time I saw them,” Shirley said into the silence that had opened between them as soon as she’d turned off the highway onto the old two-lane road, recently widened.
“Where?” Miriam craned her neck, surfacing momentarily from what their mother had called a brown study. She had been on the edge of it and sliding when Shirley picked her up at the hotel.
Shirley pointed. “We used to sit on that porch swing when we went to play with Johnny’s kids. Once I swung so high I touched the ceiling with my toes.”
“Wretched