Naturally, Trixie happened by just then. She was wearing a tired-looking, sacklike blue day dress that must have emerged from the tiny valise that was her only luggage. She caught sight of Marian and stopped, her smile wincing and curdled. Her hair, free of its bandanna and damp from her bath, was bobbed in a style that was fashionable but did not suit her long face. She wore dark red lipstick, almost purple, and had lined her eyes and penciled her eyebrows. None of it suited her. She was spoiled by being taken out of her mechanic’s garb.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were snooping,” Trixie said.
“I wasn’t sure if anyone was in there.”
The eyebrows lifted; the purple mouth contracted. “Curiosity killed the cat.”
Neither could have explained the hostility between them. Marian endured its prickly onslaught without flinching, standing with her back against the bathroom door （a faint splash, a low cough） until Trixie flicked her bob and went on her way.
* * *
—
Except for Jamie, who ate a baked potato, they had Berit’s venison stew for dinner.
“You don’t like stew?” Trixie asked Jamie.
“He doesn’t eat meat,” said Marian.
“He don’t have teeth, neither,” said Caleb, who’d shown up unannounced and uninvited, as he often did. “There’s just gums in there. It’s why he only eats potatoes. He gums them up.” Caleb’s mother often spent all her money on drink, and when he wasn’t in the mood to fend for himself, he appeared at the Graves table. Berit clucked over him, fed him sugar cubes, peeled fruit, spoonfuls of jam. She stroked his long hair when she thought no one was looking, its obsidian gloss calling to something unexpected in her orderly Scandinavian soul.
“Doesn’t have teeth,” Wallace corrected. His one unexpected strictness was about correct language.
“He doesn’t?” Trixie asked.
“Jamie has perfectly good teeth,” Wallace said. “Caleb has an odd sense of humor.”
Trixie cast a dirty look at Caleb and turned back to Jamie. “No meat? Why not?”
Jamie said, “It doesn’t agree with me.”
“He means it doesn’t agree with him spiritually,” Wallace said. “Killing animals for food.”
“Why does everyone speak for the dear boy? He seems to have a tongue, as well as teeth.” To Jamie, she said, “What a dear you are. What a gentle lamb.”
Jamie, mortified, kept his eyes on his potato. Caleb laughed.
Wallace said he’d heard on the radio that the young pilot Charles Lindbergh had left New York in the morning and had been spotted passing over Newfoundland in the afternoon, attempting to be the first to fly the Atlantic. “He’s over the ocean somewhere now, they say.”
“Over it if he’s lucky,” said Trixie. “In it if he’s not.” She smirked as though she’d made a witticism.
“If he were older,” Felix said, “I’d say he was suicidal, but he’s a kid, so he’s just damn foolish. I’d put his odds at a thousand to one.”
Marian tried and failed to imagine the sea. She thought of the blue in the atlas, the stories in her father’s books, but its immensity eluded her.
The dining room had flocked wallpaper and an oblong table with mismatched chairs. A glass-front cabinet of the kind that would usually display silver or crystal instead held overflow from Marian and Jamie’s collections of rocks and bones. From a plain pint bottle, Wallace poured out something amber for Felix and Trixie （moonshine tinted with brown sugar, though if they wanted to think it was whiskey, they were free to）。
“How’d you learn to fly?” Marian asked Felix, whose hair was still damp from his bath. He was wearing too-big clothes that belonged to Wallace because his had been washed by Berit and hung out on the line along with Trixie’s.
“In France,” he said. “In the war. I wanted to fly, and the French were willing to take American volunteers and train them.”
“I’d want to see a war,” Caleb said.
Felix looked at Caleb, and a distance passed through him, as though he were sliding back away from the table, receding to somewhere else.
“Felix doesn’t like to talk about the war,” Trixie said.
Felix seemed to snap back into focus. “I’ll decide what I talk about, thanks.” He’d been trained in the south, he said, near the city of Pau. When he was ready, he was sent to join a squadron of other Americans at Luxeuil, where they were put up in a villa near a spa. When the weather was bad they soaked in the hot baths or played cards and drank. When the skies were clear, they went buzzing off to do reconnaissance or go after observation balloons, great gray hydrogen behemoths bobbing over the front. “The best way to bust them was to fly up close and shoot an incendiary round from your pistol,” he said, “but they were likely to take you with them when they blew up.”