Return Trips Read Free Page A

means you spared. You like to live fifty, sixty years more.”
    Eagerly Gloria bursts out, “Exactly! That’s just the way I figured it, right away.” She pauses, smiling widely, showing her little white teeth. “And then, that very same afternoon of the day we saw the paper,” she goes on, “I was changing my clothes and I felt the calf of my leg where there’d been this lump that I was sort of worried about—and the lump was gone. I couldn’t believe it. So I guess it was just a muscle, not anything bad.”
    “Them leg muscles can knot up that way, could of told you that myself,” Mrs. Lawson mutters. “Heavy housework can do that to a person.” But Gloria looks so happy, so bright-faced and shiny-eyed, that Mrs. Lawson does not want to bring her down, in any way, and so she adds, “But you sure are right about that bus accident. It’s a sure sign you been spared.”
    “Oh, that’s what I think too! And later we saw these really neat big dogs, in Fairbanks. I’m really thinking about getting a dog. This man I know really likes dogs too, last night we were talking.” Her voice trails off in a happy reminiscence.
    Later in the day, though, thinking about Gloria and her story, what she and Gloria said to each other, Mrs. Lawson is not really convinced about anything. The truth is, Gloria could perfectly well get killed by a bus in San Francisco, this very afternoon, or shot by some sniper; it’s been saying in the paper about snipers, all over town, shooting folks. Or Gloria could find another lump, some place else, somewhere dangerous. Missing one bus accident is no sure sign that a person’s life will always come up rosy, because nobody’s does, not for long. Even Miss Goldstein, in China, could fall off of some Chinese mountain.
    In a weary, discouraged way Mrs. Lawson moved through the rest of her day. It is true; she is too old and tired for thework she does. Through the big street-floor windows she watches the cold June fog rolling in from the bay, and she thinks how the weather in California has never seemed right to her. She thinks about Charles, and it comes to her that one Charles could change into the other, the same way that first Charles in such a sudden way turned violent, and wild.
    That thought is enough to make her dread the end of her work, and the day, when although it is summer she will walk out into streets that are as dark and cold as streets are in Alaska.

You Are What You Own:
    A Notebook
    I can’t leave because of all the priceless and cumbersome antique furniture that my manic mother had flown out from St. Louis—at what cost! My inheritance: it weighs me down as heavily as my feet, a part of me. Like my husband, who is also heavy, to whom I am connected, whom I cannot leave. Where do I end? And he begin? In this crazy, hot California weather we both are sticky. We are stuck.
    Our house is perfectly box-shaped, the way a child would draw a house. “A real
house
house,” we said, laughing at our first sight of it. We were trying to convince ourselves that we took it because it is so amusing, not because it is the only one near the university, Stanford, that we can afford. An expensive box, it costs exactly half of Carl’s instructor’s salary. Half the floor is living room, one-fourth kitchen, one-eighth each bathroom and bedroom. It makes a certain sense, if you think about it.
    It is hard to walk through the living room, though, without bumping into something: small French tables, English desk, baroque Spanish sofa. My legs are bruised regularly. I think my mother would be surprised to see where the preciousfurniture has landed, crowded into a redwood box. But now she is depressed (Lithium does not work, with her), and she is not shipping any more furniture, or travelling. She does not believe in sending money.
    An interesting thing about the walnut desk and the rosewood table is that they both have broken left feet. I should have called Air Express, or someone, but