Early Warning

The rooms at the hotel Rosa found in Carmel were small, fake adobe. Without commenting or seeming to notice that this was unusual, Rosa put on her pajamas and got into bed with Henry. She was so businesslike and quick that he hardly got a look at her breasts, her thighs, her derriere, but he tried to think that this was his dream come true. She pressed herself into his arms and fell asleep. But it was like nothing — worse than that, uncomfortable. Even though he felt the breeze from the open window on his forehead, he couldn’t disentangle himself from Rosa to get up and close it. It was strange to feel her breath on his neck, strange to sense the weight of her head pressing his arm into the unforgiving mattress, strange to feel her knee push between his legs, strange to take in her scent (she hadn’t bathed before getting into bed), a combination of salt and sweat and the detergent her pajamas had been laundered in. She slept like a rock — an unconscious weight tilting the bed, so that finally he had to ease backward, toward the wall, and contain and balance himself there all night, until Rosa woke up, sat up, and said that she had just been dreaming of waffles. After breakfast, Rosa said that she thought they should drive down the coast, but Henry said that he had an exam the next day and absolutely had to get back to school, to the library, and to something (he kept this part to himself) that he understood.

He did not look at her on the drive home, only out the window, and he decided that maybe California was as interesting in its way as everyone said it was.

—

LATELY, Joe Langdon kept wishing that he had a photograph of his father when Walter was thirty-three, the age Joe was now. What he would look at was not the hairline or the wrinkles, but the belly. When had Joe’s come on? He could not remember. His mother said he was getting to look more like Walter every year, but she was talking about worry lines between his eyebrows. She said, “Well, you had to be a farmer, didn’t you?” And he always said, “You could have married more commercial bloodlines,” and that shut her up for a day or two. He knew she knew he was referring to the Crests, who had the grocery store in town. Dan Crest was rumored to have had a crush on Rosanna, which was why he gave her more for her eggs and butter all through the Depression than he gave anyone else. Maybe the farming came from the Vogels — his grandmother Langdon cared so little about farming now that she had plowed under her rosebushes in case she got the money to go to Europe all of a sudden. His mother’s brothers, alive and dead, were as wedded to the land as Joe was, so who was Rosanna to talk?

He might pat his belly with regret, but when he stepped into the kitchen after kicking off his boots on the back porch, the Parkerhouse rolls cooling on the table looked damn good, buttery little half-circles, crispy on the bottom and the top. You didn’t have to put another dab of butter on them. He shouted, “Lois?” But there was no answer, so he went through to the living room and looked out the window. Lois had set Annie’s playpen on the porch, in the middle of a patch of sunlight. Poppy, the six-month-old spaniel puppy, was in there with Annie, sort of flopped on the toddler’s legs, with her head back and her tongue hanging out. Annie was stroking Poppy on the chest with both her hands — nicely, as Joe had taught her. Annie seemed to be a real dog-lover — if there was a dog in the room, she wanted to be with it.

Lois got good cream from the Whiteheads, who had several Jerseys. She thought chickens were disgusting, but eggs were divine, and she didn’t waste her egg whites on angel-food cake — she preferred meringues and soufflés. As for the yolks, well, nothing like a smooth hollandaise or some vanilla ice cream. When Rosanna came over on her birthday, and Lois served chocolate mousse with whipped cream instead of angel-food cake, Rosanna didn’t say a disapproving word, ate every last bite. Lois’s Joy of Cooking had already fallen to pieces; Minnie had bought her Betty Crocker, which Lois read after dinner as if it were a novel. Then Minnie brought home a copy of a magazine for gourmets, which were people who liked to eat, and Lois pondered these recipes, whispering words to herself—“mortadella,” “tagliatelle,” “scaloppini.” She made one recipe, noodles with a fancy sauce. They had all the ingredients (beef, pork, veal, bacon, onion, carrots, celery), except for something called a truffle, which Minnie maintained was like a mushroom. At the end, she stirred in some Jersey cream. It was good.

Now Joe saw her looking up into the butternut trees, though they wouldn’t blossom for another month. Her mother had baked with butternuts all the time, and so, last fall, she had done it herself, and Joe had to admit that the cookies were delicious. Rosanna wouldn’t taste one; she had said, “Is there poison ivy in the salad, then?”