“You do your writing in here?” Ingrid asked dubiously, eyeing the desk. The old manual typewriter Ray had used in college was parked there beside a box of battered paperback crime novels. The open door of the tiny closet revealed further disarray: more boxes of books, old coats on wooden hangers, manila folders spilling across the floor.
“My writing?”
“Yeah, your architecture book. Is this where you write it?”
“Oh.” He turned in the direction of the study and then stopped. “Actually, I’m sort of between desks,” he stammered. “We’re having some—some work done on the actual study, so in the meantime, I’m rather adrift.”
“That’s a cool typewriter,” Ingrid said, running one finger lightly over the space bar. She wasn’t really listening, he noted, relieved.
“Oh, I don’t actually type on that. I’ve got a new electric that takes a lighter touch.”
She nodded, laid her fingers on the keys without striking them.
“I learned on an old one like this in typing class,” she said. “I like the sound it makes when you’re typing much better than the sound of the electric ones.”
Ray looked at her in surprise. He also held this opinion but had never voiced it; at work his receptionist had the latest model IBM Selectric, a machine whose dull, industrial hum he found annoying. His own electric typewriter, the Smith Corona in the study, was quieter, but made a curiously flat and unsatisfying slap when the keys struck the paper. He had written all his college papers and a few detective stories on this manual Underwood, and he was still fond of it.
“Yes,” he said to Ingrid, “I know what you mean.”
Downstairs Evelyn arranged cups and saucers on a tray in the kitchen. Anger made her hands clumsy. What would Ingrid think when she saw the blood and glass all over the study? How could Ray be so dense? And why was she, Evelyn, such an idiot that she had not cleaned it up? She had wanted a tea party as perfect as the delicate teacups themselves, but Ingrid had come too early, the cake she had hastily thrown in the oven was nowhere near done, and the state of the study was inexcusable. She measured the loose tea Ray liked into the teapot, poured the water, and shook sugar cubes into the sugar bowl—the tea set, at least, looked elegant. When she first moved in she had found it in a box in the attic, the carefully wrapped china as thin as bird bones—Ray’s grandmother’s wedding pattern.
They were coming back downstairs. Evelyn pulled the oven door open a crack, as if after ten minutes the cake could possibly be done. Of course it wasn’t; a shiny skin had formed over the top, the wet batter beneath it having tentatively risen. Evelyn ripped open a box of Walker’s shortbread and arranged the buttery rectangles on the serving plate. That would have to do. She elbowed open the swinging door, trying not to slosh tea all over the tray.
They sat in the living room, Evelyn and Ray on the sofa, Ingrid in an armchair. Ray watched as Evelyn carefully picked up two sugar cubes with a pair of sugar tongs and dropped them into Ingrid’s tea. He wondered where his wife had unearthed sugar cubes and tongs. Evelyn must want Ingrid here very badly, he thought; she was doing her utmost to make a good impression, and as so often happened when she did this, because she was trying too hard the result was unintentionally comical. It was like electroplating, it was campy, almost. He glanced at Ingrid and caught a fleeting expression he couldn’t read—possibly amusement, possibly derision. It’s not Evelyn’s fault, he thought protectively. And to appease his own sense of guilt for thinking ‘electroplating,’ he moved closer to his wife and put his arm around her shoulders.
Evelyn stiffened a little. The room was damp, and Ray’s body seemed to be radiating heat—she felt perspiration dampen the back of her shoulder where his arm rested. She tried to shift so that he would move his arm away again, but he seemed to interpret the movement as snuggling closer, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.
“So how long have you guys lived in this place?” Ingrid asked.
And Ray was off and running, eager as always to talk about the house, what a find it was, the challenges of remodeling—Evelyn had heard it all before. She recalled a time when she had found this discussion interesting—she had been fascinated by Ray’s ability to change a physical structure from one shape to another. It was almost, she’d felt, as if he could do magic. But now, sitting in the middle of the finished magic trick, in this particular moment she felt claustrophobic. Ray’s arm on her shoulder seemed to be cutting off her circulation; the side of her neck was numb.
“The previous owners had done nothing since 1960,” Ray was saying, “when the extent of their remodeling was to put in a dropped ceiling in the kitchen—they covered the pressed tin with acoustical tiles—can you imagine?—and then digging a fallout shelter in the basement.”
“A fallout shelter?” Ingrid sat up very straight on the couch.
Ray laughed. “There aren’t any tins of chipped beef or propaganda manuals lying around. They never finished it, so I turned it into a wine cellar.”
Evelyn felt as if she were watching foreign film without her contact lenses in—she couldn’t read the subtitles, had lost the thread of what was being discussed. She had no idea why Ray was saying “Eleven gauge—not galvanized, mind you, but stainless steel” or why Ingrid, sitting there in her ratty black clothes, responded with, “Awesome, that is so awesome.” There was something odd about her sneakers: like her hair, they seemed to have been dyed black with dye that had not quite taken. The roots of Ingrid’s hair had a slightly greenish cast—not enough ammonia, Evelyn thought—and the black canvas of her shoes was a streaky gray in places.
And then there was the safety pin in her ear—was that supposed to be daring? Ingrid should see the Human Pincushion in the Jones and Wallace sideshow. And yet it was daring, because how dare she, this Ingrid? She was in Randall, she was a student at Newell Academy, the least she could do was dress correctly, but she didn’t seem to care at all, she seemed perfectly happy to sit there in their nice living room wearing whatever she wanted. Evelyn looked from Ingrid to Ray. They seemed to have forgotten she was there.
So say something intelligent. Something perceptive and cool.
“Did you color your sneakers black with magic marker?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Faux pas number two, as Ray would say. Ingrid looked down at her shoes.
“Um, yeah, I did, actually. In English class. I was bored one day.”
“It must be a relief not to have a dress code,” said Ray, smoothing over the awkward pause that followed. “Walking around your campus last fall, I remember thinking how pleasant it was to see kids wearing what they wanted. When I was at Andover, we all had to wear ties.”
Ingrid nodded. “I interviewed at two other schools that wouldn’t take me because of my hair—I had a Mohawk then. Like the point of going to school is a hairstyle or something. It was ridiculous. I mean we’re supposed to be learning how to think, right?”
Evelyn took a sip of tea and burned her mouth.
“So Ingrid,” she tried again, “you need a place to live for the summer.”
For the first time since sitting down, Ingrid looked right at her. “Yeah,” she said. “I really really do.”
Evelyn saw the hope in her eyes and felt a surge of triumph at having finally gotten the upper hand in the conversation. Ingrid wanted something that she had. She glanced at Ray, and he made an almost imperceptible Sure, why not expression.
“Well, we do have plenty of room here,” Evelyn said. “This is a very large house.”
“It’s a great house. I really like it.”
“You don’t think you’d be bored,” Ray asked, “spending your summer out here in the provinces?”
Ingrid