The Fury of Rachel Monette Read Free Page B

for the party last night, if that’s what it was.” He moved his chubby body a step farther into the room, and lifted his nose inquiringly toward the Ampex.
    â€œAdoption in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
    The nose turned up. It did a lot of his talking, like a dog’s tail. “Sounds dry. But I loved the one you did for NPR.”
    â€œWhich one? I’ve done two for NPR.”
    â€œYou know. The one on skin flicks, or whatever excuse you found to air all that titillation.”
    â€œIt wasn’t meant to be titillating—it was meant to be frightening. Now vamoose. I’ve got work to do.”
    The nose drooped and Andy backed out of the room, neglecting to close the door. Everyone remembered skin flicks, no one mentioned commodity futures, a much better piece. Sex sells, even in documentaries for nonprofit radio.
    Blues drifted in from the control room. For some reason WMS, the college radio station where she did her editing, liked to devote mornings to scratchy blues recordings. Bessie Smith was singing:
    I ain’t gonna play no second fiddle
    I’m used to playing lead
    in a threatening voice and young Louis Armstrong was blowing into his cornet as if he couldn’t agree more.
    Rachel threaded the tape through the timer. The standard length for a half-hour documentary was twenty-eight minutes and fifteen seconds. She had thirty-two fifty. It was too much work to do before lunch. She left the tape on the machine and went home, as she often did when Dan had no afternoon classes. They would eat in the study while Dan marked papers or read monographs for a while before she lured him into bed. “Just for a quick nap.” There were many of these quick naps during the winter, and often they lasted until Adam came home from school.
    The snow had stopped falling as Rachel drove home. It lay everywhere in puffy pure white carpets, as in the Christmas cards of yesteryear. It made the branches bend and the roofers rich. The whole town was very quiet, and she could hear the deep-tread tires gently compressing the snow beneath. Then the bell on the old white Congregational church rang one peal, signifying 12:15, and the streets filled with hungry students on the way to lunch, and then more classes, study, labs, writing letters home, sleeping, reading comic books, watching TV, drinking beer, smoking marijuana, having sexual encounters, stealing money from the lockers in the gym. The Ephs, they were called, after Colonel Ephraim Williams, a minor performer in the Revolutionary War and founder of the school. An Eph did not have the formidable sound of an Eli, to say nothing of a Sooner, a Razorback or a Fighting Irish; but many parents paid good money to make sure their child became one.
    She passed the airplane hangar that called itself a New England Inn and turned the corner that led by Adam’s school to the house. The new inn had replaced the bona fide one which had become a residence when the college finally began admitting women. In the dark paneled bar of the old inn, on a warm spring night with the birds singing and the waiter dispensing free drinks, Dan had asked her to marry him. She had said yes. The waiter was fired soon after.
    The plow had already been by to wall off the driveway. Rachel left the car by the side of the road, climbed over the snowbank, feeling the snow infiltrate her boots, and walked up the unshoveled path, taking advantage of the footprints that led to and from the house.
    Rachel turned the doorknob and pushed. The door didn’t open, which was strange because they never locked it, not in a small place like Williamstown. She remembered the front-door key she had on the ring that held the car keys. She tried it; the door wasn’t locked, only stuck. Rachel pushed again, harder. The door yielded an inch. She put her shoulder against it. It refused to open until she had strained with all the power in her strong legs. The difficulty was Mrs.