Robert Wilson: A Hidden Place

After the movie they went for Cokes.

The Wilcox girl’s hair had strayed down in front of her eyes again. She probed at the ice with her straw and said, “You don’t go out much, do you?”

“Is it so obvious?”

“No, Travis. Nothing wrong. Just you seemed a bit uncomfortable is all.”

Travis was carefully silent.

She said, “I guess you were kind of a misfit back where you came from.”

“Your mother told you that?”

“Said as much, I guess, but that’s not what I mean. I mean the way you move, the way you talk. Very, I don’t know, wary. Like something’s going to jump out at you.”

“A misfit,” he said. “I guess that’s about it.”

“I’m a misfit. Did you know that?” She sipped her Coke again.

“Those books?”

“Partly. Nobody reads in this town. Miss Thayer who works at the library, she doesn’t even read. But that’s not all of it.” She said, as if offering a vital confidence, “I don’t get along with people.”

“I know what that’s like,” Travis said.

“Partly it’s my mother. She makes a profession out of being righteous. She believes the world is going straight to hell. So I guess the pressure’s on me to live up to all that. I’m supposed to be perfect—a saintly little female Imitation of Christ. I guess I just, ah, cracked.” She laughed. “She’s so afraid of everything, you know, Travis? Afraid and suspicious. And I’m the opposite.”

He smiled distantly. “Never afraid?”

“Not of what she’s afraid of.”

“What’s she afraid of?”

Nancy gazed out the big window of the diner. It was way past dark now. All the cars had their lights on. “Love. Sex. Politics. Dirty words.” She waved her hand. “All that.”

“Oh,” Travis said, taken aback.

“Are you afraid of those things?” She was staring at him now.

“Hell, no,” he said, hoping it was not a lie.

But she laughed and seemed to loosen up. “No,” she said, “no, I don’t guess you are.” And she drained her Coke. “Walk me home?”

At the corner of the street where she lived Nancy turned and touched his arm. “I don’t want my mother to see us. She’ll be on to us soon enough anyway. You can kiss me if you want, Travis.”

The offer surprised him. He was clumsy but earnest.

She nodded thoughtfully then, as if she had entered some particularly revealing notation in a private notebook. His hands lingered on her.

“One day,” she said, “you have to tell me the truth about it.”

“About what?”

“You know. Where you came from. What happened there.” She hesitated. “Your mother.” “She was a very fine woman,” Travis said. “ Is that the truth?” He stepped away from her. “Yes.”

Three Sundays after Travis arrived in Haute Montagne, Liza Burack made up her special mille-feuilles for the Baptist Women’s bake sale.

The day was dusty and hot, as all the days had been that parched summer, and the baked goods were set up on the lawn of the First Baptist, in the shadow of the high quatrefoil stained-glass windows which were the building’s only adornment. Reverend Shaffer had brought out the big sprucewood tables and Mrs. Clawson had provided drop cloths. The edibles were displayed thereon—quite artistically, Liza thought, the candies and pastries in attractive circles like tiny works of art. Shirley Croft’s almond cake had been given, as usual, pride of place. Shirley herself stood guard against the circling flies, flailing with an elder branch and wearing the sort of vigilant expression her late husband might have displayed to the Germans at the Battle of the Somme. Faye Wilcox was at one end of the table, Liza at the other, like the two polarities of an electrical cell.

I will just drift down, Liza thought. After all. Appearances. And what with the way things were going… well.

She moved lightly past the creamhoms and butter cookies.

She liked these times best, she thought, all the people around her, the aimless chatter. It was like being pulled in many directions at once. If she closed her eyes she could almost imagine herself floating, the baked goods like scattered islands in an ocean of afternoon, the heat on her like a benediction. Everything condensed in this minute point of experience.

But such ideas worried her (her thoughts strayed too easily these days) and she forced herself to stay on course: Faye Wilcox, she instructed herself, talk to Faye.

The Wilcox woman was heavy and hostile. Her arms were laced under her bosom. It looked for all the world as if her body were some unpleasant excresence that had leaked, unavoidably, into public sight. Well, Liza thought, it’s that outfit, hardly better than a sack. But who am I to talk? She glanced with momentary embarrassment at herself. Her cornflower dress was streaked with white from the morning’s baking. She had neglected to change. And had she combed her hair? Lord, Lord, where was her mind?

“Lovely afternoon, Liza.” It was Reverend Shaffer, cruising across the broad green church lawn. He was a young man and there was, Liza thought, something almost feminine about him, such a contrast with the Reverend Kinney who had died just two autumns ago. Reverend Shaffer used the pulpit to deliver obscure parables, to pose questions; Reverend Kinney had been more concerned with answers. It was, Liza thought, too symptomatic of the changes that had overtaken the nation, the town, her life. But she mustn’t dwell on that. “It is nice,” she said.

The flies were intense, the heat debilitating, there were no customers.

“Everybody loves your napoleons,” the Reverend said.

“Mille-feuilles,” Liza said automatically. “Pardon me?”

“Mother always called them mille-feuilles. Mary-Jane—that’s my sister—my, how she loved those pastries! She was always pestering Mother. ‘Make up your mill-fills, Mama, make up your mill-fills!’ She ate and ate and never got fat. Not like me____”

“And how is your sister?” the Reverend asked, puzzled.

“Dead,” Liza said. “Dead and, I presume, in hell.”

Reverend Shaffer frowned. “The judgment’s not ours to make, Mrs. Burack.”

“You didn’t know Mary-Jane, Reverend. Please—take a mille-feuille.”

But the Reverend only gazed at her coolly and drifted away.

How different it had been when she was a girl. In those days there had been virtue and vice, distilled and pure essences between which one might choose. Not this muddying, not this terrible confusion. Liza straightened her spine and gazed at the Wilcox woman—Nancy’s mother.

“Love your butter tarts,” she said.

Faye Wilcox looked at her as if from a great distance. “You haven’t even tried one, Liza dear.”

“Oh, I couldn’t. But they’re so beautiful. Just so perfect.”

“Thank you,” Faye said.

“Did you see my mille-feuilles?”

“Lovely as always.”

She is so hard, Liza thought sadly. Hard as granite. At one time, of course, they had been friends— allies, at least; wary, but with the same goals before them. In those days (it would have been three years ago: she remembered the annual picnic, “Summer 1929” printed on the invitation cards) Liza had been the leading light of the Baptist Women. It was Liza who had organized the letter campaign to the public school board concerning their thoughtless promotion of the Darwin Theory in the high-school textbooks; it was Liza who had chaired the Temperance Committee. Everyone agreed that without Liza Burack the Baptist Women would have been a vastly less effectual organization.

But then things had begun to happen. Things over which she had no control. That Blaise girl had moved in. Creath began to act strangely. Mary-Jane had come down sick off in Oklahoma, and there was no way Liza could visit, not merely on account of the distance but because of the sort of woman Mary-Jane had allowed herself to become.