Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

On the way back to the cottage Jean and Snowberry held hands. Two children were trying to boot apples soccer-style into a pail. A young woman was peering keenly at the action of a hinge as she swung the door this way and that. It occurred to Bryant as he passed through the village that everyday life was the surprise, not the war: the surprise was in the revelation that all of this life would go on, unconcerned, as he and his friends did what they did every day.

He fancied Robin was thinking the same way. Her eyes were following a low stone wall, and she knitted her brows, as if displeased, the way his father did. Ahead of them Snowberry and Jean were evidently discussing Snowberry’s left hand.

“Why don’t I ever fall in love at first sight?” Robin asked. She looked at Bryant, who was unable to shrug or smile. The comment seemed thoughtless and deflating. “I suppose it has something to do with my father,” she added. “I never knew him very well. Mother used to say he treated us badly when he treated us at all.”

“I was never very close to my father, either,” Bryant said. But your father’s still alive, dope, he thought.

“He was killed in a shipping accident. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did.” He wondered what Snowberry and Jean were talking about. “Though that’s all you said.”

She said, “It all sounds so pathetic and commonplace I suppose I don’t often see the point of going into it.”

He groped for something that would help. He wanted to know more about her, but was retaining very little.

She smiled for his benefit. “It’s funny how everyone agrees on the awfulness of growing up, isn’t it?”

He thought he should say something. He remembered Snowberry. “Gordon doesn’t. He’s always telling me these great stories. I always feel like, God, did I miss the boat.”

She gazed ahead sympathetically at Snowberry’s back. “Perhaps he’s forgotten,” she said.

On a low knoll a terrier watched them with the paranoid expression peculiar to the breed. Another dog lay snoozing with its fur poking through the slats of a garden fence, and before arriving at the cottage, he caught a mysterious and fleeting glimpse down a side lane of a small boy in shorts riding a black dog along a winding path beneath silent and dark trees.

Elizabeth had retired, leaving a pot of tea in its quilted warmer and an overlong note on the dining room table. Bryant had the sudden intuition that she’d been given some sort of instructions prior to their visit. Jean and Gordon went out to the garden despite the dark, and Bryant and Robin tidied up at the strange stone sink. He put away in the cream-colored cupboards dishes or utensils that Robin would then quietly relocate. It began to rain, the sound light on the leaves outside the windows. They heard the heavier sound of running footsteps, and Jean swept back in, with Snowberry behind her. She shook out her hair and Snowberry rubbed his shoulders while Robin circled the room turning out the lamps. Robin kissed Bryant’s cheek and Jean kissed Snowberry on the lips and they said goodnight.

“Aw, Jeez,” Snowberry said, shivering a bit for effect.

“Let us know if you need anything,” Jean whispered.

“I need something,” Snowberry said.

“Goodnight,” she said again, and the two girls ascended the stairs. Bryant said goodnight and Robin turned on the landing and hesitated, silhouetted in a nimbus of light in the hallway.

Snowberry climbed the stairs himself soon afterwards, disappointed and tired. “I think we probably do worse with girls than anybody in the Army,” he said as he climbed. Bryant remained in the kitchen, sitting in the dark and listening to the loud ticking of a clock he hadn’t noticed. There was a faint biscuity smell. The rain had stopped and the cardboard blackout shutters rattled faintly against the window frames. In the bathroom he discovered behind the washstand an old corner of National bread, plush with mold. The loo was a separate room altogether, with a long chain hanging down from a flushing tank set up higher than eye level. Bryant assumed it had something to do with gravity. He dreamed that night about a Bing Crosby record with Jesus Christ accompanying on clarinet, and remembered wondering vaguely how sleeping people got their hands on such recordings.

In the morning when he woke no one was in the house, and in the garden Robin was standing quite still, with a hand cupped and raised over her forearm, her face as placid and beautiful in its absorption as the face of a woman in a painting. Only the tremor of background primroses compromised the stillness. The air above the trees rang with a mysterious bird. The short sleeves of her blouse trembled, and she slapped the insect, and broke the spell.

When he joined her, they sat in wicker garden chairs under the cherry tree she had written him about.

“They’ve gone for a walk,” Robin said.

Bryant rubbed his chin. “Were they trying to leave us alone, you think?”

She sniffed. “Jeannie adores the thought of mad, secret lives of endless trysts and intrigue. I suppose I’ve let her down a bit on that score. The silly thing is, Gordon seems to believe he’s initiating things.”

Bryant nodded foolishly, feeling acutely again that he and his friend were overmatched by these women.

An insect thin as a pencil point lighted on his lap. On its back were aqua and scarlet bands as brilliant as fresh paint. An immense white cat perched atop the stone man-hole in the corner of the garden, Cardinal Newman’s hideout. Robin made birdlike squeaks with her pursed lips. “That’s Puff,” she said. “Here, Puff.”

He asked if she’d been doing any more painting.

“Haven’t had much time,” she said. “I’d like to go to art college after the war, I think. I was told by a friend I’d be certain to be offered a place.” She opened her eyes and turned to face him. “Probably end up doing adverts.” Her complexion remained beautifully smooth in the direct sunlight. She seemed pleased by the colors on her arm. She smiled. “What about you, mysterious Bobby? What will you be doing after the war?”

Bryant shrugged. The war had imposed a way of thinking on him, an ability to conceive only in terms of the present. His past was receding, so that calling it forward required ever more effort, and his future was a white wall, bland and abstract enough to discourage speculation.

They had a late dinner, relaxing around a splintery wooden table in the garden with cold meat and pickles. The windows of the cottage filled with the orange and violet of the sunset.

“This is really a beautiful place,” Snowberry said.

“I’d like to have you for two weeks,” Robin murmured.

Jean gave her eye a delicate rub. “Six would do nicely,” she suggested. She crunched a pickle.

Bryant and Snowberry nodded politely.

“You don’t seem particularly enthused,” Robin noted.

They were awkward momentarily, uncertain what she wanted. “This is great, too,” Snowberry said.

“Aren’t you always wishing the war would go away?” Jean said.

They were silent. Snowberry looked to Bryant. “I can’t say that, exactly,” Snowberry said. “There’s a lot I hate about it, a lot that’s terrible. But in some ways I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

The girls looked at them.

“I guess it’s hard to talk about,” Snowberry further volunteered. Bryant felt angry and impatient with the question: they were outside looking in. How could they know?

“I know it sounds terrible,” Snowberry said. “I don’t mean it to.”

After a pause Robin shifted her gaze from Snowberry to Bryant. “And you?” she asked.

“It’s bad. It’s the worst thing in the world,” he said. He wanted to reassure her. He felt the way he had when his mother had discovered him doing something childish and destructive, like vandalizing street signs. He didn’t have the words. “But you know. I met you. I got to know good pals I can depend on. It teaches you stuff like that.”