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By Root 634 0

between the grass blades, as if she had no weight at all. “How much do you reckon it would cost to mail a sundial?” she asked. The saleslady said, “Oh, no, honey, you don’t want to mail them, it’d take a fortune.” Peter hated people who called their customers “honey.” But P.J. only shifted her smile to the saleslady’s face, and the two of them stood beaming at each other like very dear friends. Oh, it would take a lot to make P.J. start frowning. He thought of all this last week, all the times her parents must have whispered, “Paula Jean, what’s the matter with that boy?” all the children who, coming upon him unexpectedly, lost their bounce and seemed to sag under the weight of his gloom. Yet P.J. had continued smiling. She had led him by the hand through the barnyard, hoping that he would make friends with the animals. She had introduced a hundred topics of conversation that Peter and her family might seize on. “Petey’s just got out of the Army, Daddy, you and him ought to compare experiences. Petey, don’t you want to see Mama’s herb garden?” Peter had tried, but nothing came to his mind to say. He floated in a weariness that made him want to escape to some hotel and sleep for days. “Petey, darling,” P.J. said, “don’t you like them?” I do,” he said truthfully, “but I just can’t—” “Talk about the crops. Daddy likes that. Talk about baseball, or what’s on the television.” So then, back among the others, Peter said, “How’re the crops, Mr. Grindstaff?” “Just fine,” said Mr. Grindstaff, and Peter said, “Oh, good,” and subsided, unable to think of what came next.

“He’s just back from Vietnam,” P.J. would tell people. Everyone murmured, as if that explained things. But Peter had been gloomy long before the Army. War only added a touch of fear and the sense of being out of place, neither of which seemed to leave him when he came back. He was still afraid. He still felt out of place. He had a job now, teaching chemistry in a second-rate girls’ school, where the pupils whispered and giggled and knit argyle socks while he lectured. “All of you,” he would tell them, “missed the second equation on the last hour quiz. Now I would like to go over that with you.” The girls looked up at him, still moving their lips to count stitches, and Peter fell silent. Why would he like to go over it? What difference did it make? How had he come to be here?

P.J. settled on a gnome with a pointed red cap, cradled it in her arms all the way to the car and rolled it in a picnic blanket in the trunk. “I just know she’s going to love it,” she said. And then, when they had pulled out into traffic again, “I know things will work out all right. Won’t they? Everything will be just fine now.”

“Of course,” said Peter, but he had no idea what she was talking about. This trip? The two of them? He and her family? If he found out he might have to disagree. He kept quiet, and smiled steadily at the stream of oncoming cars while P.J. slid down and set both feet against the dashboard. Her hair blew out behind her, knotting itself and slipping out of the knots. She seemed to glint and shimmer. When Peter first met her, in the school cafeteria, she had stood out among the pasty dull students like a flash of silver. She had worn a white uniform and collected dirty dishes off the tables with pointed, darting hands. He took her for a student with a part-time job. When she turned out to be a real waitress he was relieved, since it was against school rules to date students. Then later, after they had begun to grow serious, he had some doubts. A waitress? What would his family say? He pushed the thought away, ashamed that it had come up. He started seeing her daily; he fit himself into her motionless, shadowless life: lying oiled and passive on a beach towel for hours at a stretch, watching television straight through till sign-off, sitting all afternoon in dusky taverns dreamily peeling the labels off beer bottles. She gave him the feeling that she could never be used up. Whenever he looked her way she smiled at him.

The rush hour was beginning. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper,