Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [28]
Yes, Miss Morrow. Same old hairdo: classic knot and bangs. Anything good was worth sticking with. Susan disliked what she called “too much forehead.” She liked two hair styles-the one that she had determined suited her own face, and the low, sweeping curve, with a deep wave, that Augusta wore. I can’t even imagine what she would say at the sight of this girl’s steep skull with hair piled on top of it like a packrat’s nest on a cliff.
Good-bye, Miss Morrow, and thanks for your help, which I suppose I will recover from. Tomorrow I must make an effort to get started right with Ada’s daughter Shelly, for if she turns out wrong I can hardly let her go. I’ll be stuck with her until she settles her problem with the husband who doesn’t want to be unwanted. If her hair weren’t all loose down her back in the current fashion I would like her better, but having no machinery it might get caught in, I can hardly make her put it up. Also she has some of Ada in her, she might be all right.
It was an odd interview we had yesterday afternoon. I was taking my airing in the garden, the first time I’ve been able to go out since the rain. The apple trees are in blossom, and I thought for a while I was hearing the traffic from the freeway that has split and ruined this town, but when I listened carefully it was the sound of thousands of bees up to their thighs in pollen.
I was on my crutches, doing my eight laps up and down the path where the pines wall the garden in. It is level there, and I have had it paved. But eight laps are rough. Four are all I ever want, six I can barely manage, the last two I do with sweating hands. Every swing and peg hurts from my heel to my shoulders. When I finally crawl into the chair again it is as if all the blood in my body, at a temperature of 400° Fahrenheit, were concentrated in my miserable stump. It takes me half an hour to recover from what I am determined is going to do me good.
So I was not displeased, in the middle of the fifth lap, to see this young woman come through the gate where the path from the Hawkes cottage enters the bottom of the yard. I knew who she was, and got to my chair and watched her as she came.
She isn’t big like Ada—a sort of medium person, medium good figure, and that female way of pushing backward with her open hands as she walks. Hair down her back, and the habit of throwing it with a jerk of the head. Male or female, that gesture always irritated me when I lived down where one saw a lot of longhairs. If long hair is that much of a distraction, why not cut it off, or put it up in a classic knot and bangs? But when she stopped short just at the lower line of the apple trees, and stood for a moment with her face lifted, I chalked one up in her favor. I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wistaria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don’t, I prefer those who do.
When she got within a hundred feet I could see that she has Ada’s gray eyes in Ed’s square face. Not pretty, not homely. A medium sort of girl, the sort who, compact in white nylon and white nurses’ shoes, might take your order in a busy lunchroom in Des Moines. Why Des Moines? I don’t know. She just looks that way. Not Bay Area, anyway. Not that knowing, in spite of the hair.
Her voice surprised me, though—bass-baritone. “Hello. I’m Shelly Rasmussen.”
“I know. Your mother told me you were home.”
I could see her wondering how much else her mother had told me. I could also see that she found holding my gorgon