“That’s not the only way to describe what happened,” Polly said. She folded her napkin, in preparation to leave, and stood up from the table.
Rosie stood, too. “Polly, please, don’t go—I’m so happy to have you.”
Polly pushed past her and walked to the door. On her way out, her gaze went to the Civil War sword that hung above the mantel. What a waste, she thought. Nothing to be proud of, these stupid wars.
“Polly, Polly,” called a chorus behind her, until Gaga—Polly recognized the voice—said, “Oh, let her go.”
At home, Robert noticed her agitation, but she was too embarrassed to tell him what happened. She’d looked forward to spending the afternoon with him, but he went into town for supplies. She picked up her needlepoint and immediately stabbed herself. She sopped up her blood with the skeins of wool in her lap. Each color had to be set in a strainer and run over by boiling water from a kettle in hopes of restoration, and all the while she was flooded by wave after wave of shame and anger. She didn’t think she’d ever before been the subject of gossip. She felt alone in a new way, not merely personally—a feeling she assumed was familiar to every human being—but as though she were tethered to nothing.
Stop it, she told herself. Buck up. Buck up. Things were going well. Very well. What did it matter what people thought? Robert was starting to relax. Those old women—who cared? They were as irrelevant as Polly herself was, and she was shown and told about her diminished status at every juncture.
She liked having Robert on the Point. They hadn’t eaten together very often after the first day, when he was getting settled. Usually they met out back and chatted, or had coffee after he fixed something in the house. Occasionally when she saw him puttering around at dawn she asked him inside for breakfast, but there was a tacit agreement between them that they observe the dinner hour separately. She gave him the second set of keys to the car so he could go to town on his own and buy his food, and often she’d leave him a list of what to get for her, too. His crew still had his truck, and he was taking things slowly about asking for it back. He seemed to need time alone.
As easily as she and Robert got along, they couldn’t speak as they’d written. Their letters were done, that mode past. Polly had never spoken such naked feelings aloud, and she supposed he hadn’t either. She’d traded their intimate written exchange for his presence, and joked more than emoted. They could look at the same thing—for example, a pancake that came out looking like Richard Nixon—and both get the giggles. The days beaded a smooth chain of fine feeling. Polly was aware of a loosening in her shoulders. Her parents’ old prohibition against reading in bed in the morning lifted, and sometimes she made coffee and then went back up. Some days she and Robert didn’t even see each other except to wave from a distance. Others, they worked closely during most of the hours of light. Their conversations mainly involved the steps in each fix-it job. “I woke up thinking of the lip of the patio,” he might say, “and I pictured a low wall.”
She would see the picture, too. “Low wall,” she repeated. “Sounds like poetry.”
“I see it as smooth and carefully joined,” he said.
“And the stones are local and hand-cut.”
“Granite.”
“A few of the pink set oddly—in no pattern.” She was sure they were picturing the exact same thing, and building it together in words, first.
“Not spotty, though.”
“No.”
They walked to the proposed place for the wall and each held their hands parallel to the ground at the height they thought it should be. They differed by about six inches; another discussion then. The project started and they commented on every stone laid. Robert was like a child wanting his drawings praised, and she was a person who’d never gotten to have much of a say.
“You don’t mind, do you, Dick?” she asked when she was alone.
She waited for a sign. Silence had always signified disapproval to her, so she waited until she heard a creak, or a car going past, or a birdcall. The sign always came. All the changes Dick had put off, he didn’t mind now. Death had mellowed him.
One day she saw Lydia in the field by the new wall and automatically Polly went toward her. The toe of her shoe caught on the bottom step. She lurched forward and loped for a few steps with most of her body nearly parallel to the ground. The width of her steps increased so as not to fall, and her arms stretched forward automatically, in case she did. The speed of the fall was maddeningly slow, affording her time to think of the inconvenience of another broken wrist. The heavy clomping of her footfalls maddened her as well; so graceless and crude. Stand up, she commanded herself. Then she’d landed. Her face hit her arm.
She lay in the limbo and shock of an accident having happened, the odd restfulness of knowing there was nothing more she could do now. She settled into the grass and ran her mind over her body, concluding nothing had broken. Lydia, did you see that? Are you laughing? Well, it was funny.
A face appeared. She heard her name. She was lifted up, whirled around. She saw her blue river. She turned to the face. She looked at the mouth. What do you do with a mouth but kiss it?
“Polly, you hit your head.”
She heard a voice in the distance, then close again. Dick hadn’t picked her up in years. “I’m taking you to the hospital. You might have a concussion.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t want to go to the hospital. Let’s just sit a while.”
Robert took her to the hospital anyway. Polly had a mild concussion and was not to drive for a month. On their way back down Point Path they saw Agnes and Maisie heading for the graveyard.
“She looks so normal,” Polly said. How could that be, when they were estranged?
“A new look?” Robert teased, making Polly laugh and get a headache.
They decided on another wall farther down the meadow, parallel to the horizon, that would add a subtle note to the view. Robert came and went into and out of the house without knocking, and now they ate together at night without her inviting him. They spoke more freely, too, and once begun, the conversation was as deep and open as when they’d been safely invisible and had pen and paper as their go-between. Every day they revealed themselves more and shifted their habits to accommodate each other. Shirley got the meal ready and then went home. Robert showered and changed before he came over. Sometimes after dinner they took a walk down the road to the Sank. Every time they stood at the tip of the Point, one or the other said it was the most beautiful spot on earth, and it was always the right thing to say.
On some days he rearranged his schedule so he could take her to town.
One Monday they arrived at the time of morning when the windows along Main Street were black daubs one minute and in the next, flashes going off at the passing cars, as if each might contain a movie star. They parked, and Polly saw the two of them reflected, a Mutt and Jeff. People stopped to say hello, and some of them looked sideways at Robert. She wanted to smack them. He noticed, of course, but said nothing.
A couple of kids came muscling down the street, heedless as all boys.
“Natives,” Robert said.