You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [75]
“Want a glass of wine?” she asks when they get into the kitchen.
“Yeah,” he says, “that would be cool.”
The high-ceilinged room is an odd combination of expensive chrome appliances and peeling wood furniture that looks like it was bought at a yard sale.
As Lauren hands Ted his glass, she leans forward to kiss him gently on the lips, a touch he receives, as always, weak kneed and nervous. He puts his free arm around her. He tries not to think about this evening in his own house, his brother out with friends, his father reading the paper in the living room, alone, his mother upstairs in bed, alone, their empty kitchen smelling slightly of the cleaning spray his father will have used on the counters after making dinner and washing the dishes.
“What’s up with the table?” he says.
“Having decrepit old shit you pay through the nose for is the latest thing. They can’t get enough of it. Perverse, isn’t it?”
Ted supposes that it is. She leans her head into the hollow of his shoulder and puts her hand in his back pocket, palming the cheek of his ass. He thinks they better hurry. Be kind to her, Mrs. Maynard said. He imagines he’s the only kid at his school who gets his romantic advice from a schizophrenic.
Taking his hand, Lauren leads him through rooms of fine rugs and distressed furniture, chandeliers and gilt-framed paintings, up a staircase wide enough to sleep on.
TIRES OF PASSING cars send arcs of snow into the air, dotting the skirt of her coat. She pauses now and then to wipe the fur clean with her gloved hands. Several inches have already accumulated on the road’s shoulder, but she manages all right in her boots, huffing a bit as she goes, unused to the exertion of a walk longer than the circumference of the grounds. In the hubbub of the New Year’s party, no one noticed her leaving.
Headlights flash up into her eyes, pass, and vanish. Wind drives snow down out of the sky. She reaches an intersection and sees it’s the old Plymouth Road, gas stations on three corners now. She turns north, ears full of the storm and Hester’s voice.
You should have heard the animals dying that winter in the cold, how the horse groaned in the frost, sheep starving in their pens, snow past the windows. And you know my eldest died of her cough in my arms when the ground was covered and too hard to bury her, so she lay under a sheet in the woodshed, where for a month I saw her every time I went to gather fuel for our fire. And we weren’t the worst off, sick at least with diseases we knew.
“I don’t care,” Elizabeth says, though it isn’t true and she can’t help seeing Hester in the woodshed. Her responses go unheeded now in any case. She starts up a rise she can remember being driven along by her grandfather in his Packard.
Eighty years the owners of a sawmill and merchants through the Revolution, and of course, you know the cellar was fitted with a second cellar covered with a boulder lowered from an oak beam by rope, where our family hid during raids by the British, relying on the appointed neighbor—should he survive—to come and lift the stone when the soldiers had quit their burning. And merchants still in the early days of the Republic, selectmen at town hall, teachers, a judge, a colonel, a daughter ended in the river, never mentioned, a graveyard full of us.
On the sidewalk, she shakes her head back and forth, back and forth. “I know this. What does it matter?”
Witnesses by news and action to the slaughters here and abroad; money in the banks that made the wars; snobbery; polite unspoken belief in the city on the hill and our place at its center; disdain; a preference for distant justice; lives of comfort made from