Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [86]
Yet I don’t necessarily believe it, either. In all this truth-and-freedom-seeking I doubt that Shelly was very far behind her mate. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that while he was making out with somebody, she was around the corner not doing too badly herself. She has, on considered acquaintance, a bold eye and an uninhibited tongue and a body that flops and lounges. If she didn’t wear pants most of the time at work, even great stone Homer might nod and kink his neck. I cannot see her as an innocent victim of a nasty and dissolute hippie. When I was young there was a joke about the difference between dignified acquiescence and enthusiastic cooperation. I think I know where Shelly would belong. I feel sorry for Ada and Ed, who are small-town middle-class people, and not equipped to absorb these changes. Maybe Shelly rebelled against the life her husband was leading her into, maybe on the other hand, she simply got tired of supporting him.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon about four I was over by the window looking through a biography of Thomas Hudson by his daughter, checking out the references to Grandmother. Shelly was pulling out of the files all the Santa Cruz papers I was going to need for today: the letters, the illustrated article called “A Seaport on the Pacific,” some maps, some local histories. The sprinkler was going down on the lawn where Ed had set it when he came back from his tire shop–one of those golf-course sprinklers with a kicker bar and a pulse like the panting of a hard-run dog, a comfortable afternoon sound. Coolness drifted in the window, and a fragrance of wet grass. Every three or four minutes the jet of water, having marched clear to the edge of the pines, would start marching back. I heard it getting closer with each pst pst pst of the sprinkler until a volley of drops stormed the wistaria. Then away again, pst pst pst.
Downstairs the door opened and closed. Ada, earlier than usual. But instead of going to the kitchen she came up the stairs. I knew she was in a hurry not only by the sound of her feet but by the fact that she didn’t take the lift, which saves her legs but is pretty slow. Before she reached the top I turned my chair toward the door. At the file, Shelly turned too. We were both looking toward the door when Ada arrived there and stood, one hand spread on her bosom, getting her breath.
“He’s here,” she said.
For a second Shelly looked at her almost musingly, through her hair; then she put up a hand and lifted the hair over her shoulder. “Where?”
“Down at the house. Talkin’to your dad.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
“He pretended he did. We swore you wasn’t.”
“But he didn’t go away.”
“Not him. He says, Where is she, then? I’ve checked out Berkeley and the City, nobody’s seen her.’ ” Ada kept her hand spread on her chest and breathed carefully with her mouth open. She is overweight, and smokes a lot of cigarettes, and she hasn’t got a lot of wind. She looked upset, angry, accusing, and her hair was half down with hurrying. “So then Dad says, ‘Wherever she is, it’s no business of yours unless she wants it to be. She’s had about all of you she needs.’ ”
“Yeah,” Shelly said, standing by the file. The study was quiet, like a classroom after a hard question. Outside, the sprinkler walked toward the house, pst pst pst, and drops hit the wistaria with a gravelly