“Chamber of Horrors?”
“That’s what my family calls my bedroom.”
“Oh. Ha.”
“Wall-to-wall Eagles posters. Sandwich crusts under my bed from 1998.”
“But…not to stay there, though, right?” she asked him.
“Stay?”
“I mean…not to sleep in the Chamber of Horrors overnight.”
“Hey. I was kidding,” he said. “Well, at least about the sandwich crusts. I believe my mom did come through with the vacuum cleaner once I’d moved out.”
“But I would be in the guest room,” she said, meaning it as a question.
“You want to be in the guest room?”
“Well, yes.”
“You don’t want to stay with me in my room?”
“Not in front of your parents,” she said.
“In front of my—” He stopped. “Look,” he said. “I guarantee they assume we’re sleeping together. You think they’d make a fuss about that?”
“I don’t care if they assume it or not. I just don’t like to be so public about it when I’m first being introduced to them.”
James had studied her a moment.
“They do have a guest room, right?” Serena asked.
“Well, yes.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“It just seems kind of…artificial, saying good night in the upstairs hall and going our separate ways,” he said.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Serena said stiffly.
“Plus, I’ll miss you! And Mom and Dad are going to be baffled. ‘Good grief,’ they’ll say, ‘do these kids not know about sex?’？”
“Ssh!” Serena had said, because they’d been sitting in the library where anyone might be listening. She glanced around the room and then leaned across the table toward him. “We’ll just go on a Sunday, then,” she said in a lower voice.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“We’ll say we’re tied up on Saturdays and so we’re coming in on a Sunday, and since I have a class Monday mornings we’ll have to make it a day trip.”
“Geez, Serena. You’re saying we’d travel all that distance just for a few hours? Just to pretend we’re not really so much of a couple after all?”
But that was what they’d ended up doing. Serena had gotten her way.
She knew she had disappointed him. He probably thought she was a hypocrite. But still, she felt she’d made the right decision.
They were nearing Wilmington now. Scattered, abandoned-looking houses were gradually giving way to clean white office buildings. The conductor passed down the aisle collecting ticket stubs from the slots above certain seats.
“Take that thing your mother said about my brother-in-law,” James said suddenly.
“What? What thing are you talking about?”
“Back when I first came to dinner, remember? I told your mother that one of my brothers-in-law came from Baltimore, and she said, ‘Oh, what’s his name?’ and I said, ‘Jacob Rosenbaum, but everyone calls him Jay.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Rosenbaum: he’s probably from Pikesville. That’s where most of the Jewish people live.’？”
“Well, Mom’s a little behind the times,” Serena said.
James gave her a look.
“What?” she asked him. “Are you calling her anti-Semitic?”
“I’m just saying Baltimore can be kind of us-and-them, is all.”
“You’re still going on about Baltimore?”
“Just tossing it out there,” he told her.
“Your brother-in-law’s folks might certainly live in Pikesville,” Serena said. “But they might also live in Cedarcroft, right next door to my parents. It’s not as if our neighborhoods are restricted or anything.”
“Oh, sure, I know that,” James said hastily. “All I meant was, seems to me that Baltimoreans like to…categorize.”
“Human beings like to categorize,” Serena told him.
“Well, okay…”
She said, “How about what your mom said, when we were leaving?”
“Huh?”
“？‘Next time you should come for a weekend,’ she said. ‘Come for Easter weekend! All of us get together then, and you can see what a big family feels like.’？”
Without intending to, Serena adopted a perky, chatty-housewife tone, although in fact that wasn’t at all what Dora had sounded like. And James caught it; he sent her a quick, sharp glance. “What’s wrong with that?” he asked her.