Either Side of Winter Read Free Page B

her own wispy scalp after a shower. She should have moved back home after graduation, for a year at least; only, for whatever reason, and the fact surprised her as much as her parents, she hadn’t. When she told her father she was moving to New York, he said, ‘That’s the right kind of thing for you to do. Though I can’t say I didn’t hope you’d come back home. But you always used to take things on head on.’ She puzzled over that ‘used’. Maybe he thought he didn’t know her so well after four years at college. Maybe something else. She got the sense he was sending out a delegate to live the rest of his life – the life he should have lived in New York, when he ran around with a ‘pretty fast crowd’ and didn’t have kids. (That hokum ‘pretty’ gave the game away when he said it.)
    Amy knew herself well enough to realize this account of events was only partly right. She needed to think of her life asimportant. It didn’t seem so any more. Charles, she already suspected, practised some editing of his own. ‘I guess I better push off,’ he said after breakfast, hopeful of contradiction perhaps; though when she asked him what he had planned for the day, he adopted a brisk tone. ‘Buddy of mine’s trying to set up a company,’ he began, and swallowed the last of her drink. ‘I won’t bore you with the details, but I’m lending him a hand.’ And then added, after signalling for the bill: ‘Financial and otherwise.’ As he had guessed, perhaps, that stopped Amy’s curiosity short. All she said was, ‘Do you get summers off?’
    ‘That’s not how I work,’ he said.
    She watched him from her window after he saw her to the lobby. Kneeling on the futon and straining out, she admired the way he seemed to have somewhere to go but no hurry. His dinner jacket trailing off a thumb over his shoulder; the pleasant downhill swagger of a light hangover the morning after, his feet loose in his shoes. But the road dropped sharply and he disappeared behind a bend in it on the way back to the school where his car was parked. She didn’t get a look at his car. She thought, I hope I get a chance to before it ends.
    Now that he was gone she didn’t seem to have so much to do, and her apartment didn’t have any answers. Not since high school had she fallen in love, and wasn’t sure how to go about it any more. It used to be easier – this wasn’t hard work, but she felt she could go either way and didn’t want to have to choose. Already the thought presented itself to her: I suppose it depends on how lonely I get teaching, what I decide to make of this whole thing. And then she wondered what about Charles Conway gave her such grounds for confidence the choice was hers; that’s when the first shadow of doubt fell across her, and an ache ran along a vein in her temple. Just like in college, she told herself: by the time you decide you are where you are where you are, it’s too late. And: I hope he calls; I’m not sure I have the guts to any more.

    *
    She hardly thought about him Wednesday, that’s how she put it to herself at night, aside from a single embarrassment. There seemed so much for her to worry about, running hot and cold all day. By the afternoon the combination of her intermittent sweat and the air-conditioning had taken its toll: she stank slightly, and wished she’d worn a cardigan over her T-shirt to hide the patches under her arms. The problem she thought would be to keep the children quiet. In fact, she couldn’t get them to talk: row upon row of fourteen-year-olds, asleep or terrified or sullenly resentful, appeared before her; and she guessed in retrospect that she should have waited them out. But at the time – how could it be otherwise, given the restless, eager, dissatisfied current to her nature – she buzzed and flitted around them, playing the fool or the prim miss as the occasion demanded, confusing them and herself, desiring alternately and with an instant passion that