Driving Blind Read online

  Only last week they turned forty, the old and the young Wycherly. There must have been something about that day which broke a harp-thread so quick and so loud you could hear the clear sound of it across town.

  On that morning, Julia Wycherly awoke and did not comb her hair. At breakfast the oldest one looked in her faithful mirror and said, “What’s the matter with your comb?”

  “Comb?”

  “Your hair, your hair, it’s a bird’s nest.” The older put her delicate porcelain hands to her own coiffure which was like gold spun and molded to her regal head, not a plait ajar, not a strand afloat, not so much as a fleck of lint or a fragment of microscopic flesh in sight. She was so clean she smelled of alcohol burning in a brass bowl. “Here, let me fix it.” But Julia rose and left the room.

  That afternoon another thread broke.

  Julia went downtown alone.

  People on the street did not recognize her. After all, you do not recognize one of a pair when for forty years you’ve seen only the two, like a couple of dainty shoes promenading in the downtown store-window reflections. People everywhere gave that little move of the head which meant they expected to shift their gaze from one image to its painstaking duplicate.

  “Who’s there?” asked the druggist, as if he’d been wakened at midnight and was peering out the door. “I mean, is that you, Coral, or Julia? Is Julia or Coral sick, Julia? I mean—damn it!” He talked in a loud voice as if a phone connection was giving him trouble. “Well?”

  “This is—” The younger twin had to stop and feel herself, and see herself in the gleaming side of the apothecary vat which held green mint-colored juice in it. “This is Julia,” she said, as if returning the call. “And I want, I want—”

  “Is Coral dead, my God, how horrible, how terrible!” cried the druggist. “You poor child!”

  “Oh, no, she’s home. I want, I want—” She moistened her lips and put out a hand like vapor on the air. “I want some red tint for my hair, the color of carrots or tomatoes, I guess, the color of wine, yes, wine; I think I’d like that better. Wine.”

  “Two packages, of course.”

  “What, what?”

  “Two packages of tint. One for each of you?”

  Julia looked as if she might fly off, so much milkweed, and then she said, “No. Only one package. It’s for me. It’s for Julia. It’s for Julia all by herself.”

  “Julia!” screamed Coral at the front door as Julia came up the walk. “Where’ve you been? Running off, I thought you’d been killed by a car, or kidnapped or some horrible thing! Good God!” The older sister stopped and fell back against the side of the porch rail. “Your hair, your lovely golden hair, thirty-nine inches it was, one for every year almost, one for every year.” She stared at the woman who waltzed and curtsied and turned on the front lawn sidewalk, her eyes closed. “Julia, Julia, Julia!” she shrieked.

  “It’s the color of wine,” said Julia. “And oh my it has gone to my head!”

  “Julia, the sun, you went without your hat, and no lunch, you ate no lunch, it stands to reason. Here, let me help you in. We’ll go to the bathroom and wash out that terrible color. A clown for the circus, that’s what you are!”

  “I’m Julia,” said the younger sister. “I’m Julia, and look—” She snatched open a parcel she carried beneath her arm. She held up a dress as bright as the grass of summer, green to complement her hair, green like the trees and green like the eyes of every cat on back to the pharaohs.

  “You know I can’t wear green,” said Coral. “Wasting our heritage money, buying dresses like that.”

  “One dress.”

  “One dress?”

  “One, one, one,” said Julia quietly, smiling. “One.” She went in to put it on, standing in the hall. “And one pair of new shoes.”

  “With open toes! How ridiculous!”

  “You can buy a pair just like them if you want.”

  “I will not!”

  “And a dress like this.”

  “Ha!”

  “And now,” said Julia, “it’s time for tea, we’re due at the Applemans’, remember? Come along.”

  “You’re not serious!”

  “Tea is so nice, and it’s a lovely day.”

  “Not until you rinse your hair!”

  “No, no, and I might even let it grow out, in the next six months, all gray.”

  “Shh, the neighbors,” cried Coral, then, lower: “Your hair’s not gray.”

  “Yes, gray as a mouse, and I’ll let it grow out, we’ve been coloring it for years.”

  “Only to bring out the natural highlights, the highlights!”

  They went off to tea together.

  Things went quickly after that: after one explosion, another, another, another, a string, a bunch of ladyfinger firecracker explosions. Julia bought floppy flowered hats, Julia wore perfume, Julia got fat, Julia turned gray, Julia went out alone nights, pulling on her gloves like a workman approaching a fascinating job at the foundry.

  And Coral?

  “I’m nervous,” said Coral. “Nervous, nervous, nervous. Look at her stockings, all runs. Look at her smeared lipstick, and us always neat as pins, look at her cheeks, no powder over the freckles, and her hair all dirty snow; nervous, nervous, nervous, oh, I’m nervous.

  “Julia,” she said at last, “the time’s come. I won’t be seen with you anymore.

  “Julia,” she said, a month later, “I’ve got my bags packed. I’ve taken room and board at Mrs. Appleman’s, where you can call me if you need me. Oh, you’ll call, you’ll come sniveling, alone, and it’ll be a long night of talking to get me home.”

  And Coral sailed away like a great white skiff across the sea of summer afternoon.

  There was a thundershower next week. The largest single bolt of green-bolt lightning jumped around in the sky, picked its spot, and rammed itself feet-first into the center of the town, shaking birds from their nests in insane confettis, launching three children into the world two weeks ahead of time, and short-circuiting a hundred conversations by women in storm-darkened homes in mid-gallop on their way through sin and torment and domestic melodrama. This thunderbolt which jumped back up at the sky in a billion fragments was nothing to the following morning’s item in the paper which said that Henry Crummitt (the man with his arm around the shoulder of the cigar-store wooden Indian) was marrying one Julia Wycherly on that self-same day.

  “Someone marry Julia!”

  And Coral sat down to gasp and laugh and then gasp again at the incredible lie.

  “What? With her ragged seams and her dirty linens, and her awful white hair and her unplucked brows and her shoes run over? Julia? Someone take Julia to the license bureau? Oh, oh!”

  But just to satisfy her humor which veered wildly between comedy and sheer slapstick which was not funny at all, she went round to the little church that afternoon and was startled to see the rice in the air and the handful of people all shouting and laughing, and there, coming out of the church, was Henry Crummitt and linked to his arm …

  A woman with a trim figure, a woman dressed in taste, with golden hair beautifully combed, not a fleck of lint or a scrap of dandruff visible, a woman with neat stocking seams and well-delineated lipstick and powder on her cheeks like the first cool fall of snow at the beginning of a lovely winter.

  And as they passed, the younger sister glanced over and saw her older sister there. She stopped. Everyone stopped. Everyone waited. Everyone held their breaths.

  The younger sister took one step, took two steps forward and peered into the face of this other woman in the crowd. Then, as if she were making up in a mirror, she adjusted her veil, smoothed her lipstick, and refurbished her powder, delicately, carefully, and with no trace of hurry. Then, to this mirror she said, or it was reliably passed on she said:

  “I’m Julia; who are you?”

  And after that there was so much rice nobody saw anything until the cars had driven off.

  End of Summer

/>   One. Two. Hattie’s lips counted the long, slow strokes of the high town clock as she lay quietly on her bed. The streets were asleep under the courthouse clock, which seemed like a white moon rising, round and full, the light from it freezing all of the town in late summer time. Her heart raced.

  She rose swiftly to look down on the empty avenues, the dark and silent lawns. Below, the porch swing creaked ever so little in the wind.

  She saw the long, dark rush of her hair in the mirror as she unknotted the tight schoolteacher’s bun and let it fall loose to her shoulders. Wouldn’t her pupils be surprised, she thought; so long, so black, so glossy. Not too bad for a woman of thirty-five. From the closet, her hands trembling, she dug out hidden parcels. Lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil, nail polish. A pale blue negligee, like a breath of vapor. Pulling off her cotton nightgown, she stepped on in, hard, even while she drew the negligee over her head.

  She touched her ears with perfume, used the lipstick on her nervous mouth, penciled her eyebrows, and hurriedly painted her nails.

  She was ready.

  She let herself out into the hall of the sleeping house. She glanced fearfully at three white doors. If they sprang open now, then what? She balanced between the walls, waiting.

  The door stayed shut.

  She stuck her tongue out at one door, then at the other two.

  She drifted down the noiseless stairs onto the moonlit porch and then into the quiet street.

  The smell of a September night was everywhere. Underfoot, the concrete breathed warmth up along her thin white legs.

  “I’ve always wanted to do this.” She plucked a blood rose for her black hair and stood a moment smiling at the shaded windows of her house. “You don’t know what I’m doing,” she whispered. She swirled her negligee.

  Down the aisle of trees, past glowing street lamps, her bare feet were soundless. She saw every bush and fence and wondered, “Why didn’t I think of this a long time ago?” She paused in the wet grass just to feel how it was, cool and prickly.

  The patrolman, Mr. Waltzer, was wandering down Glen Bay Street, singing in a low, sad tenor. As he passed, Hattie circled a tree and stood staring at his broad back as he walked on, still singing.

  When she reached the courthouse, the only noise was the sound of her bare toes on the rusty fire escape. At the top of the flight, on a ledge under the shining silver clock face, she held out her hands.

  There lay the sleeping town!

  A thousand roofs glittered with snow that had fallen from the moon.

  She shook her fists and made faces at the town. She flicked her negligee skirt contemptuously at the far houses. She danced and laughed silently, then stopped to snap her fingers in all four directions.

  A minute later, eyes bright, she was racing on the soft lawns of the town.

  She came to the house of whispers.

  She paused by a certain window and heard a man’s voice and a woman’s voice in the secret room.

  Hattie leaned against the house and listened to whispering, whispering. It was like hearing two tiny moths fluttering gently inside on the window screen. There was a soft, remote laughter.

  Hattie put her hand to the screen above, her face the face of one at a shrine. Perspiration shone on her lips.

  “What was that?” cried a voice inside.

  Like mist, Hattie whirled and vanished.

  When she stopped running she was by another house window.

  A man stood in the brightly lighted bathroom, perhaps the only lighted room in the town, shaving carefully around his yawning mouth. He had black hair and blue eyes and was twenty-seven years old and every morning carried to his job in the railyards a lunch bucket packed with ham sandwiches. He wiped his face with a towel and the light went out.

  Hattie waited behind the great oak in the yard, all film, all spiderweb. She heard the front door click, his footsteps down the walk, the clank of his lunch pail. From the odors of tobacco and fresh soap, she knew, without looking, that he was passing.

  Whistling between his teeth, he walked down the street toward the ravine. She followed from tree to tree, a white veil behind an elm, a moon shadow behind an oak. Once, he whirled about. Just in time she hid from sight. She waited, heart pounding. Silence. Then, his footsteps walking on.

  He was whistling the song “June Night.”

  The high arc light on the edge of the ravine cast his shadow directly beneath him. She was not two yards away, behind an ancient chestnut tree.

  He stopped but did not turn. He sniffed the air.

  the night wind blew her perfume over the ravine, as she had planned it.

  She did not move. It was not her turn to act now. She simply stood pressing against the tree, exhausted with the shaking of her heart.

  It seemed an hour before he moved. She could hear the dew breaking gently under the pressure of his shoes. The warm odor of tobacco and fresh soap came nearer.

  He touched one of her wrists. She did not open her eyes. He did not speak.

  Somewhere, the courthouse clock sounded the time as three in the morning.

  His mouth fitted over hers very gently and easily.

  Then his mouth was at her ear and she was held to the tree by him. He whispered. So she was the one who’d looked in his windows the last three nights! He kissed her neck. She, she had followed him, unseen, last night! He stared at her. The shadows of the trees fell soft and numerous all about, on her lips, on her cheeks, on her brow, and only her eyes were visible, gleaming and alive. She was lovely, did she know that? He had thought he was being haunted. His laughter was no more than a faint whisper in his mouth. He looked at her and made a move of his hand to his pocket. He drew forth a match, to strike, to hold by her face, to see, but she took his hand and held it and the unlit match. After a moment, he let the matchstick drop into the wet grass. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  She did not look up at him. Silently he took her arm and began to walk.

  Looking at her pale feet, she went with him to the edge of the cool ravine and down to the silent flow of the stream, to the moss banks and the willows.

  He hesitated. She almost looked up to see if he was still there. They had come into the light, and she kept her head turned away so that he saw only the blowing darkness of her hair and the whiteness of her arms.

  He said, “You don’t have to come any further, you know. Which house did you come from? You can run back to wherever it is. But if you run, don’t ever come back; I won’t want to see you again. I couldn’t take any more of this, night after night. Now’s your chance. Run, if you want!”

  Summer night breathed off her, warm and quiet.

  Her answer was to lift her hand to him.

  Next morning, as Hattie walked downstairs, she found Grandma, Aunt Maude, and Cousin Jacob with cold cereal in their tight mouths, not liking it when Hattie pulled up her chair. Hattie wore a grim, high-necked dress, with a long skirt. Her hair was a knotted, hard bun behind her ears, her face was scrubbed pale, clean of color in the cheeks and lips. Her painted eyebrows and eyelashes were gone. Her fingernails were plain.

  “You’re late, Hattie,” they all said, as if an agreement had been made to say it when she sat down.

  “I know.” She did not move in her chair.

  “Better not eat much,” said Aunt Maude. “It’s eight-thirty. You should’ve been at school. What’ll the superintendent say? Fine example for a teacher to set her pupils.”

  The three stared at her.

  Hattie was smiling.

  “You haven’t been late in twelve years, Hattie,” said Aunt Maude.

  Hattie did not move, but continued smiling.

  “You’d better go,” they said.

  Hattie walked to the hall to take down her green umbrella and pinned on her ribboned flat straw hat. They watched her. She opened the front door and looked back at them for a long moment, as if about to speak, her cheeks flushed. They leaned toward her. She smiled and ran out, slamming the door.
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br />   Thunder in the Morning

  At first it was like a storm, far away, a touch of thunder, a kind of wind and a stirring. The streets had been emptied by the courthouse clock. People had looked at the great white clock face hours ago, folded their newspapers, got up from the porch swings, hooked themselves into their summer night houses, put out the lights, and settled into cool beds. All this the clock had done, just standing above the courthouse green. Now there was not a thing on the street. Overhead street lights, casting down illumination, made shines upon the asphalt. On occasion a leaf would break loose from a tree and clatter down. The night was so dark you could not see the stars. Why this was so there was no way of telling. Except that everyone’s eyes were closed and that way no stars were seen, that’s how dark the night was. Oh, here and there, behind a window screen, if one peered into a dark room, one might see a red point of light, nothing else; some man sitting up to feed his insomnia with nicotine, rocking in a slow rocker in the dark room. You might hear a small cough or someone turn under the sheets. But on the street there was not even a policeman swinging along with his club pointed to the earth in one hand.

  From far away the small thunder began. First it was far across town. You could hear it across the ravine, going along the street over there, three blocks away across the deep blackness. It took a direction, it made square cuts, this sound of thunder, then it crossed over the ravine on the Washington Street bridge, under the owl light, and turned a corner and—there it was, at the head of the street!

  And with a whiskering, brushing, sucking noise down the street between the houses and trees came the thundering metal cleaning machine of Mr. Britt. It was a tornado, funneling, driving, whispering, murmuring, feeling of the street ahead of it with big whirl-around brushes like sewer lids with rotary brushes under them, spinning, with a big rolling-pin brush turning under all the scattered trivia of the world’s men, the ticket stubs from that show at the Elite tonight, and the wrapper from a chewing gum stick that now rested on top of a bureau in one of the houses, a small chewed cannonball of tasteless elasticity, and the candy wrapper from a bar now hidden and folded into the small accordion innards of a boy high in a cupola house in a magic room. All these things, streetcar trransfers to Chessman Park, to Live Oak Mortuary, to North Chicago, to Zion City, giveaway handbills on hairdos at that new chromium shop on Central. All these were whiskered up by the immense moving mustache of the machine, and on top of the machine, like a great god, in his leather-metal saddle, sat Mr. Roland Britt, age thirty-seven, the strange age between yesterday and tomorrow, and he, in his way, was a duplicate of the machine upon which he rode, with his proud hands on the steering wheel. He had a little curly mustache over his mouth, and little curly hairs that seemed to rotate upon his scalp under the passing lamps, and a little sucking nose that was continually astonished with the world, sucking it all in and blowing it out the astonished mouth. And he had hands that were always taking things and never giving at all. He and the machine, very much the same. They hadn’t begun that way. Britt had never started to be like the machine. But after you rode it awhile it got up through your rump and spread through your system until your digestion roiled and your heart spun like a small pink top in you. But, on the other hand, neither had the machine intended being like Britt. Machines change also, and become like their masters, in imperceptible ways.