Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

A warm day came, taking everyone by surprise. Through the open windows we could hear the engine of a crane as it lifted steel beams at the back of the school. Later that day the weather grew cold, but we knew the turn had come. Icicles on eaves glistened and dripped. The last snow began to melt in the shadows of garages and under bushes hung with brown leaves. Willows, still yellow, glowed in the sun. The white glove, resting in a bar of sun on a desk beside a window, was so fiercely white that it hurt my eyes. Within the whiteness I could see the creases plainly, the faint discolorations, a small darkish stain beside one button. Somewhere a dog barked. And a restlessness came over me, the restlessness before spring, when the world, in that in-between season, is waiting for something to happen.

One night I woke in my warm room. I could hear the heat blowing through the vent at the base of the wall. It seemed to remind me of something, and all at once I saw the blue-and-white-striped pajamas, the tiny dolls on their wooden benches, the glowing snow stretching away. Emily lay in her room, fast asleep. Or was she also awake? Perhaps she had taken off her glove, which rested on the covers, the five fingers slightly curved. At the thought of the glove I felt a pressure in my head, like a thumb pushing against my temple, and when I swung out of bed and thrust aside the white blinds, which rattled like coat hangers, I saw that the sky was a deep and glowing blue, the blue of warm spring evenings.

I opened the front door and stepped outside. The chill startled me — it was a blue brisk night, with a big white rippled-looking moon that made me think of refrigerator frost. I turned up my shirt collar and walked quickly under that moon, a heavy cold stone that at any moment was going to rip out of the sky with loud tearing sounds. In the distance I could hear the trucks on the thruway like low rumbles of thunder.

It was a long walk, and for a while I forgot everything but the clear black lines of television antennas against the blue night sky and the curved shadows of telephone wires like strips of black typewriter ribbon stretching across one side of the road. After a while I came to a familiar neighborhood. Porch screens, catching the moonlight, became for an instant opaque aluminum walls, which suddenly vanished to reveal shadowy wicker chairs and leaning bicycles. The windows of Emily’s house were dark. I walked along the strip of grass between the side of the house and the driveway of cracked tar. In the backyard I opened a sloping door and descended six steps. At the cellar door I reached up for the hidden key.

I made my way slowly through the dark cellar, lit here and there by long rectangles of moon-glow, and climbed the wooden stairs to the upper door. It opened onto a small space off the kitchen. A single plate leaned in the dish rack. I passed into the living room and turned onto the carpeted stairs. Halfway up I stopped, with one hand on the banister. Until that moment it hadn’t struck me how easy my break-in actually was. The sheer ease of it exasperated me. Shouldn’t the house have protected itself against intruders? The house trusted the world — it believed that it was safe from harm, that darkness was the beginning of rest. But things were no longer that way. Harm walked in the night. The glove was up there, in her room. It was always with her, always touching her — the white companion.

I continued up the stairs to the almost black landing, where I thought I recalled a painting of a red barn, and climbed the final three stairs. Then I seemed to remember that the painting showed not a barn but a barnyard, where a woman was flinging feed from her apron at white chickens. In the darkness of the upstairs hall I passed the Hohns’ bedroom and felt along the wall for Emily’s door. The familiar doorknob turned with ridiculous ease, and the door opened without a sound.

The shades on the double window were drawn, but a blurry bar of light lay at an angle on one wall. Emily was asleep on her back, her head turned to one side. On the bedspread her right arm was flung across her stomach. Her left hand, still bound in the white glove, lay beside her on the pillow. The palm was up, the fingers slightly curved. Quietly I closed the door behind me.

I came up to the bed and bent slowly over Emily. As I did so, I had the sense that I was introducing myself with a formal bow. The glove lay motionless. It seemed to be holding its breath. In the darkness made less dark by the blurry bar of light, I could see the two buttons at the wrist. I realized there were three of us in the room: the glove, Emily, and me. If I undid the buttons and pulled at the white fingertips, only the glove and I would know. “Emily,” I whispered, “are you awake?” But Emily was far away.

The glove lay very still on the pillow. It seemed to be expecting me, seemed almost to mock me a little: Here we are, you and I, what are you going to do about it? I reached out and touched the lower button with the tip of my forefinger. It felt like an ordinary button, with a slightly raised rim and a depression in the center. I could see the four holes and the tight lines of white thread crossing. The buttonhole was nearly concealed by the button. I would have to press the button through the taut slit, while at the same time I was careful not to push down on her wrist. If, with fanatical patience, I succeeded in forcing the button through without waking Emily, I would have to repeat the operation with the second button. But the glove, which fit tightly, would still be on her hand. I would have to remove it with extreme care, holding her bare wrist with one hand while I pulled at the cloth fingers with the other. At any moment her eyes might begin to open. She would see a dark figure bending over her, she’d feel a hand on her skin. The glove sat there, exposing its two buttons. They were looking at me. They were daring me, with little white smiles, to get on with it. And an anger came over me — at the grinning white buttons, and the smug white glove, and the fat white moon, and the careless house, which entrusted itself to the night, and at innocent Emily, lying there too peacefully, though with a slight look of strain between her eyebrows, and at the sky, and the stars, and the rushing-apart universe, and the vain fool who stood in the dark bedroom like a killer with an upraised knife — like a strangler with a cord in his hands — like a boy lost in a forest. “Emily,” I whispered, “I wasn’t here,” and fled into the night.

Spring came. Under budding branches I walked with Emily along squares of sidewalk that sometimes showed the imprint of numbers or the swirl of a trowel. The sides of roads were dusted by maple flowers, dark red and yellow-green. On some afternoons it was warm enough to sit out on the front porch, which Mrs. Hohn had swept clean of brown, crackly maple wings left over from the fall. Emily and I never spoke of the white glove. One day she was absent; after school I didn’t call. The next day she appeared with a new glove, white and clean, exactly the same as the first, its two buttons faintly iridescent in the sun. She held her arm very carefully and lowered it slowly to the desk. As we walked home in hot sunlight, I watched the glove pass through new leaf-shadows and patches of sun. On the porch Mrs. Hohn served us rhubarb pie and a fruit-juice punch. She set down the plates and glasses on the green wicker table. “Not yet,” she said, holding up a handful of mail like a fan of cards. Emily and I were still waiting to hear from colleges. The idea of college seemed so remote that it was like a game I had played in childhood, in which you pretended to be a famous person, like George Washington or Babe Ruth.

I remained watchful — it was all I could do. I saw the glove resting motionless on the desk, in a band of sun. The fingers, slightly curved, lay in shade; suddenly the glove darkened; beyond the window, a shadow spread across the grass; a moment later the glove glowed brilliant white. Or it lay on its side across Emily’s lap, as she sat in the glider with her legs tucked under and sunlight on her knees.