Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle Page 3

  “Make sure about the school,” Rhoda said and made her exit. She went into the hall and found Jimmy waiting at the top of the stairs. She took his arm and started down. “Let’s go dig up the time capsule,” she said. “I might need that picture where I’m going.” She stamped down the wooden stairs, making as much noise as she could on every stair, stamp, stamp, stamp, back in control with Jimmy by her side. She lifted her head and began to sing. “I’m happy when I’m hiking. Off the beaten track. I’m happy when I’m hiking. Pack upon my back. With a right good friend, to the journey’s end. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty miles a day. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.”

  “The name of the pack is life or death,” Jimmy muttered. “Therefore, let’s keep moving.”

  Some Blue Hills at Sundown

  It was the last time Rhoda would ever see Bob Rosen in her life. Perhaps she knew that the whole time she was driving to meet him, the long drive through the November fields, down the long narrow state of Kentucky, driving due west, then across the Ohio River and up into the flat-topped hills of Southern Illinois.

  If it had been any other time in her life or any other boyfriend she would have been stopping every fifty miles to look at herself in the mirror or spray her wrists with perfume or smooth the wrinkles from her skirt. As it was she drove steadily up into the hills with the lengthening shadows all around her. She didn’t glance at her watch, didn’t worry about the time. He would be there when she got there, waiting at the old corrugated building where he worked on his car, the radio playing, his cat sitting on a shelf by the Tune Oil, watching. Nothing would have changed. Only she was two months older and he was two months older and there had been another operation. When he got home from the hospital he had called her and said, “Come on if you can. I’ll be here the rest of the semester. Come if you want to. Just let me know.” So she had told her mother and father that if they didn’t let her go she would kill herself and they believed her, so caught up in their terrible triangle and half-broken marriage and tears and lies and sadness that they couldn’t fight with her that year. Her mother tried to stop it.

  “Don’t give her a car to go up there and see that college boy,” her mother said. “Don’t you dare do that, Dudley. I will leave you if you do.”

  So her father had loaned her the new Cadillac, six thousand dollars’ worth of brand-new car, a fortune of a car in nineteen fifty-three, and she had driven up to Southern Illinois to see Bob Rosen and tell him that she loved him. No, just to see him and look at his face. No, to watch him work on his car. No, to smell the kind soft whiteness of his cheeks. To see him before he died. Untold madness of the dark hour. “Now by this moon, before this moon shall wane, I shall be dead or I shall be with you.”

  He was waiting for her. Not working on the car. Not even inside the building. Standing outside on the street, leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette and waiting. One foot on top of the other foot, his soft gray trousers loose around the ankles, his soft white skin, his tall lanky body fighting every minute for its life.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m glad to see you. Let me see this goddamn car. Where did you get this car? My God, that’s some car.”

  “He’s getting rich. Just like he said he would. Who cares. I hate it there. There isn’t anything to do. No one to talk to. I think about you all the time.” He slid into the driver’s seat and turned around and took her into his arms. It was the first time in two months that she had been happy. Now, suddenly, it seemed as if this moment would be enough to last forever, would make up for all the time that would follow.

  “I ought to just turn around and go home now,” she said. “I guess I just wanted to make sure you were real.”

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea to get in the habit of loving me. I shouldn’t have let you come up here.”

  “I asked to come.”

  “So you did. Well, look here. Let’s go to the sweetshop and get a sandwich and see who’s there. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten all day.”

  “I don’t want to eat anything.” She pulled away. “I want to do it. You said you’d do it to me. You promised me. You swore you would.”

  “When did I do that?”

  “You know.”

  “Rhoda, Rhoda, Rhoda. Jesus. Exactly where did you envision this deflowering taking place?”

  “In the car, I guess. Or anywhere. Where do people go?”

  “I don’t go anywhere with sixteen-year-old girls. I’d go to jail, that’s where I’d go. Come here.” He pulled her across his legs and kissed her again, then turned around toward the steering wheel and turned on the ignition. “Talk while I drive. I’ll take you out to the roadside park. It’s completely dark out there. You can see a thousand stars. Remember that night Doc Stanford was here from Louisville and we played music out there? You were having that goddamn slumber party and I had to take all your goddamn friends to get you out of the house. My friends still haven’t let me stop hearing about that. That cousin of yours from Mississippi was there. Do you remember that night?”

  “You won’t do it?”

  “Hell, no, I won’t do it. But I want to. If it gives you any satisfaction you’d better believe I want to.” They were cruising very slowly down a dark street that led upward through a field of poplars. There was one streetlight at the very top of the deserted street. “I drive by your house every now and then. It seems like the whole street died when your family left. Everyone misses you. So your father’s doing well?”

  “They’re getting a divorce. He’s having an affair and my mother acts like she’s crazy. That’s why I got to come. They’re too busy to care what I do. They sent Dudley off to a boys’ school and next year I’m going to Virginia. I’ll never get to come back here. If we don’t do it tonight, we never will. That’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

  “No, we are going to the sweetshop and get a malt and a ham sandwich and see who’s there. Then I’m going to take you over to the Buchanans’ house where you’re supposed to be before someone calls out the state cops. Did you call and tell them you’re in town?”

  “No, they don’t even know I’m coming. No one knows but Augusta. And Jane Anne. She had to tell Jane Anne.” He shook his head and pulled her very close to him. She was so close to him she could feel him breathe. I’m like a pet dog to him, she decided. I’m just some little kid he’s nice to. He doesn’t even listen to what I say. What does he want me here for? He doesn’t need me for a thing. It was dark all around them now, the strange quiet weekend dark of small midwestern towns in the innocent years of the nineteen fifties. Rhoda shuddered. It was so exciting. So terrible and sad and exciting, so stifled and sad and terrible and real. This is really happening, she was thinking. This feeling, this loving him more than anything in the world and in a second it will be over. It ends as it happens and it will never be again in any way, never happen again or stop happening. It is so thick, so tight around me. I think this is what those old fairy tales meant. This is how those old stories always made me feel.

  “I want you to know something,” he said. He had stopped the car. “I want you to know that I would have made love to you if I had been well. If you had been older and I had been well and things had been different. You are a wonderful girl, Rhoda. A blessing I got handed that I can’t ever figure out. DeLisle loves you. You know that? He asks me about you all the time. He says he can’t figure out what I did to deserve you writing me letters all the time.”

  “I don’t want to talk about DeLisle.”

  “I’m taking you to the sweetshop now.” He put the brake on the car and kissed her for a very long time underneath the streetlight. Their shadows were all around them and the wind moved the light and made the street alive with shadows and they held each other while the wind blew the light everywhere and her fingers found the scars on his neck and behind his ear and caressed them and there was nothing else to say or nothing else to do and they expanded and took in the sadness and shared it.

  After a while he started the car and they went to the sweetshop and ate ham sandwiches and talked to people and then drove over to the Buchanans’ house and he left her there and walked the six blocks home with his hands in his pockets. He was counting the months he might live. He thought it would be twenty-four but it turned out to be a lifetime after all.

  Nora Jane

  The Starlight Express

  Nora Jane was seven months pregnant when Sandy disappeared again. Dear Baby, the note said. I can’t take it. Here’s all the money that is left. Don’t get mad if you can help it. I love you, Sandy.

  She folded up the note and put it in a drawer. Then she made up the bed. Then she went outside and walked along the water’s edge. At least we are living on the water, she was thinking. I always get lucky about things like that. Well, I know one thing. I’m going to have these babies no matter what I have to do and I’m going to keep them alive. They won’t die on me or get drunk or take cocaine. Freddy was right. A decent home is the best thing.

  Nora Jane was on a beach fifty miles south of San Francisco, beside a little stucco house Sandy’s old employer had been renting them for next to nothing. Nora Jane had never liked living in that house. Still, it was on the ocean.

  The ocean spread out before her now, gray and dark, breaking against the boulders where it turned into a little cove. There were places where people had been making fires. Nora Jane began to pick up all the litter she could find and put it in a pile beside a firesite. She walked around for half an hour picking up cans and barrettes and half-burned pieces of cardboard and piled them up beside a boulder. Then she went back to the house and got some charcoal lighter and a match and lit the mess and watched it burn. It was the middle of October. December the fifteenth was only two months away. I could go to Freddy
, she was thinking. He will always love me and forgive me anything. But what will it do to him? Do I have a right to get around him so he’ll only love me more? This was a question Nora Jane was always asking herself about Freddy Harwood. Now she asked it once again.

  A cold wind was blowing off the ocean. She picked up a piece of driftwood and added it to the fire. She sank down upon the sand. She was carrying ten pounds of babies but she moved as gracefully as ever. She wiggled around until her back was against the boulder, sitting up very straight, not giving in to the cold or the wind. I’m one of those people that could go to the Himalayas, she decided. Because I never give in to cold. If you hunch over it will get you.

  Freddy Harwood stood on the porch of his half-finished house, deep in the woods outside of Willets, California, and thought about Nora Jane. He was thinking about her voice, trying to remember how it sounded when she said his name. If I could remember that sound, he decided. If I could remember what she said that first night it would be enough. If that’s all I get it will have to do.

  He looked deep into the woods, past the madrone tree, where once he had seen a bobcat come walking out and stop at the place where the trees ended and the grass began. A huge yellow cat with a muff around its neck and brilliant eyes. A poet had been visiting and they had made up a song about the afternoon called “The Great Bobcat Visit and Other Mysteries of Willets.” If she was here I could teach it to her, Freddy thought. So, there I go again. Everything either reminds me of her or it doesn’t remind me of her, so everything reminds me of her. What good does it do to have six million dollars and two houses and a bookstore if I’m in love with Nora Jane? Freddy left his bobcat lookout and walked around the side of the house toward the road. A man was hurrying up the path.

  It was his neighbor, Sam Lyons, who lived a few miles away up an impassable road. Freddy waved and went to meet him. He’s coming to tell me she’s dead, he decided. She died in childbirth in the hands of a midwife in Chinatown and I’m supposed to go on living after that. “What’s happening?” he called out. “What’s going on?”

  “You got a call,” Sam said. “Your girlfriend’s coming on the train. I’m getting tired of this, Harwood. You get yourself a phone. That’s twice this week. Two calls in one week!”

  In a small neat room near the Berkeley campus a young Chinese geneticist named Lin Tan Sing packed a change of clothes and his toilet articles, left a note for himself about some things to do when he returned, and walked out into the beautiful fall day. He had been saving his money for a vacation and today was the day it began. As soon as he finished work that afternoon he would ride the subway to the train station and get on board the Starlight Express and travel all the way up the California coast to Puget Sound. He would see the world. My eyes have gone too far inside, Lin Tan told himself. Now I will go outside and see what’s happening at other end. People will look at me and I will look at them. We will learn about each other. Perhaps the train will fall off cliff into the ocean. There will be stories in the newspapers. Young Chinese scientist saves many lives in daring rescues. President of United States invites young Chinese scientist to live in White House and tutor children of politicians. Young Chinese scientist adopted by wealthy man whose life he saves in train wreck. I am only a humble scientist trying to unravel genetic code, young Chinese scientist tells reporters. Did not mean to be hero. Do not know what came over me. I pushed on fallen car and great strength came to me when it was least expected.

  Lin Tan entered the Berkeley campus and strolled along a sidewalk leading to the student union. Students were all around. A man in black was playing a piano beneath a tree. The sky was clear with only a few clouds to the west. The Starlight Express, Lin Tan was thinking. All Plexiglas across the top. Stars rolling by while I am inside with something nice to drink. Who knows? Perhaps I will find a girl on the train who wishes to talk with me. I will tell her all things scientific and also of poetry. I will tell her the poetry of my country and also of England. Lin Tan folded his hands before him as he walked, already he was on the train, speeding up the California coast telling some dazzling blonde the story of his life and all about his work. Lin Tan worked at night in the lab of the Berkeley Women’s Clinic. He did chemical analyses on the fluid removed during amniocentesis. So far he had made only one mistake in his work. One time a test had to be repeated because he knocked a petri dish off the table with his sleeve. Except for that his results had proved correct in every single instance. No one else in the lab had such a record. Because of this Lin Tan always kept his head politely bowed in the halls and was extra-nice to the other technicians and generous with advice and help. He had a fellowship in the graduate program in biology and he had this easy part-time job and his sister, Jade Tan Sing, was coming in six months to join him. Only one thing was lacking in Lin Tan’s life and that was a girlfriend. He had what he considered a flaw in his character and wished to be in love with a Western girl with blond hair. It was only fate, the I Ching assured him. A fateful flaw that would cause disaster and ruin but not of his own doing and therefore nothing to worry about.

  On this train, he was thinking, I will sit up straight and hold my head high. If she asks where I come from I will say Shanghai or Hong Kong as it is difficult for them to picture village life in China without thinking of rice paddies. I am a businessman, I will say, and have only taken time off to learn science. No, I will say only the truth so she may gaze into my eyes and be at peace. I will buy you jewels and perfume, I will tell her. Robes with silken dragons eating the moon, many pearls. Shoes with flowers embroidered on them for every minute of the day. Look out the Plexiglas ceiling at the stars. They are whirling by and so are we even when we are off the train.

  Nora Jane bought her ticket and went outside to get some air while she waited for the train. She was wearing a long gray sweatshirt with a black leather belt riding on top of the twins. On her legs were bright yellow tights and yellow ballet shoes. A yellow and white scarf was tied around her black curls. She looked just about as wonderful as someone carrying ten pounds of babies could ever look in the world. She was deserted and unwed and on her way to find a man whose heart she had broken only four months before and she should have been in a terrible mood but she couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for despair. Whatever chemicals Tammili and Lydia were pumping into her bloodstream were working nicely to keep Nora Jane in a good mood. She stood outside the train station watching a line of cirrus clouds chugging along the horizon, thinking about the outfits she would buy for her babies as soon as they were born. Nora Jane loved clothes. She couldn’t wait until she had three people to dress instead of only one. All her life she had wanted to be able to wear all her favorite colors at one time. Now she would have her chance. She could just see herself walking into a drugstore holding her little girls by the hand. Tammili would be wearing blue. Lydia would be wearing red or pink. Nora Jane would have on peach or mauve or her old standby, yellow. Unless that was too many primaries on one day. I’ll start singing, she decided. That way I can work at night while they’re asleep. I have to have some money of my own. I don’t want anyone supporting us. When I go shopping and buy stuff I don’t want anybody saying why did you get this stuff and you didn’t need that shirt and so forth. As soon as they’re born I’ll be able to work and make some money. Nieman said I could sing anyplace in San Francisco. Nieman should know. After all, he writes for the newspaper. If they don’t like it then I’ll just get a job in a day-care center like I meant to last fall. I’ll do whatever I have to do.

  A whistle blew. Nora Jane walked back down the concrete stairs. “Starlight Express,” a black voice was calling out. “Get on board for the long haul to Washington State. Don’t go if you’re scared of stars. Stars all the way to Marin, San Rafael, Petaluma, and Sebastapol. Stars all the way to Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. Stars to Alaska and points north. Stars to the North Pole. Get on board this train. . . .”