Ted said with scorn, “He’s enthusiastic about everything!” his voice cracked on the last word and he repeated it with dignity: “Everything. Besides, afterward they have beers and they bowl. Also it’s political. He’s getting to be such a big shot in this part of town, the next thing you know, he’ll he elected dogcatcher. Then he’ll be away from home every night, looking for old ladies’ lost poodles.” He yacked mightily at that sally.
His mother laughed a little too.
Charles picked up the evening paper and took his father’s chair under the green-shaded drop-lamp. He reflected somberly that it was odd how homesick one could get at an Air Force base in Texas and how soon the feeling evaporated when one actually got home.
Nostalgia for home had been changed by some unwanted trick to nostalgia for the past.
He was thinking about Lenore, in a wordless stream of pictures.
Lenore in the days when he’d been younger than Ted, when he’d been given his own first jalopy by his father and learned to take care of it; Lenore, fifteen, half-tomboy and half-woman, more fascinated by machinery than he, adept, helping him, summer afternoons, when they sprawled together in overalls in the drive, under the car with wrenches, tightening bolts and swapping kisses that tasted faintly of engine oil, Lenore, taking the high school chemistry prize in her junior year, the physics award the year after, a pretty kid with a man’s aptitude for the sciences, encouraged by the teachers, who said she’d “go a long way.”
The times, the times that went back as far as he could remember, when usually at her instigation, they “collected”—birds’ eggs, moths and butterflies, insects, stamps, coins, J and shells from the distant ocean that neither one had ever seen, then….
And—Lenore when she’d won the first beauty contest—slender but mature-bodied, proud but vaguely ashamed, walking a runway at the Swan Island Amusement Park Beach, head high, breasts high, her dark, almost black hair perfectly curled down her back between tan shoulder blades, her blue eyes straight ahead, her smile too fixed—winning the cup and beginning to move away from him, not meaning or wanting to….
Her college years. She knew a little about the trouble with herself, by then; nobody, no intent professor or research graduate, expected to look up from some glass maze and see a dream girl working at the bench opposite; nobody could quite believe glamour and brains could live together. And her family: a mother openly outraged that she’d birthed a brainy daughter, publicly maintaining that beauty, by which she meant a body, was a woman’s one useful asset and brains were the certain road to inconspicuous poverty; Beau, the indulgent father, scared of his wife, happily awed by his child-scared and awed first by his own mother—indulging Lenore when he could but never making any assertion of family values, never leading, always either following Netta or pursuing Lenore like a nervous secretary….
It was a dilemma all right, and Chuck was accustomed to it. He didn’t exactly blame Lenore for reaching no decision, for drifting along, a lovely college girl, “back at home,” awaiting events, like myriads of other girls. Maybe she was spoiled. Maybe she was really lacking in initiative like her dad. Maybe she shared, deep beneath the intelligent mind, the realism and pert but warm aliveness that appeared to be her whole self, some taint of her mother’s infinite cupidity; perhaps she had caught some contagion from her mother’s striving to escape an inferior background. Maybe Lenore wasn’t the woman the girl had been. But maybe she was.