Machine Dreams

company but it wouldn’t matter; Clayton and the other men would have gone home when Mitch did. Tonight was the New Year; my God, time passed. Already, she was twenty-three, married a year and a half. And last summer, she hadn’t remembered her wedding anniversary at all—Mitch had told her that morning that his Aunt Bess and Uncle Clayton were having dinner for them. Jean had used her lunch hour to go downtown and buy Mitch a shirt; she’d planned to buy it anyway, to replace one she’d burned with the iron. Anniversaries: maybe she just remembered death instead of life. That was bad. But death wouldn’t let youforget, would it? Life did; life let you go on for long weeks and never think at all. You just lived, nothing was wrong; those weren’t bad times. Mitch would never have remembered the anniversary if Bess hadn’t had the dinner—he didn’t remember such things. But wives were supposed to. Jean frowned and touched her face; she felt so at loose ends: that was it. In the warm interior of the car, she unbuttoned her coat. Damn it, she was a good wife, she knew she was. She kept her temper and was a help to him, and didn’t interfere with what he knew about; she was a good cook and usually did things right. Being a wife was a job, like being a secretary or a student. And if you took pride in what you did, you did things well. Mother had had no illusions about it. Oh, had she ever really loved a man, and been carefree? Strange to think she’d probably loved Dad in the beginning, but then she’d loved her children. Dad had really been a child himself, even though he’d been so much older: first he was eccentric and successful, then he was eccentric and broke. Jean could almost hear her mother laugh, softly and without bitterness. If she were here, there’d be someone to be honest with, someone to laugh with at how things went.
    I’m strong, Jean thought, I’ll pull myself right out of this and have a good time at the party. She turned onto the rough graveyard road and passed the darkened concrete company. One bright light burned atop a pole near the trucks and the MITCH CONCRETE sign was dusted with snow. Making the blind turn up the cemetery entrance, past the stone pillars that looked so forboding, she felt shaky and ill again. Lord, what was wrong with her? She felt such a fool. She drove slowly along the narrow road and turned on the high beams to make herself feel less alone; finally she stopped beside the family plot. None of the stones had much meaning to her except the one that was off by itself; she’d just had it put there last summer. Graves: what did they mean? Her mother wasn’t even here, if people ever were; she’d hated funerals and left instructions she be cremated. But she’d told them what to put on a stone, when Jean and her brother and sister could bear the expense. And there was a wisdom to it; people had to have a place to make remembrance. Jean looked at the stone. It was smooth granite the color of pewter and relatively small, not evenwaist high. Yet it had a weight, a power: it marked a place. Jean’s brother and sister were much older and lived in distant towns. What family did she really have of her own blood, except this stone. She thought of the saying “you can’t squeeze blood from a stone” and heard it said in her mother’s voice, like a joking and fond reprieve.
    She took off her mittens, flinging them down on the seat, and held to the steering wheel of the Nash. Aloud, she said, “Everything is all right. His business is doing well enough. We’re building a nice house.” Then she looked at her mother’s gravestone and began to weep. There was no one here to know; she wept loudly, hearing her own harsh sounds as though they were part of the weather, the cold wind. The Nash shook slightly, buffeted in the dusk, and Jean felt a silly fondness for the car; it was so new and big and blue, and signified such expectation. Somehow that fact made her sadder; she wept harder, and felt ridiculous.
    Minutes passed. Snow blew across the stone like a moving veil. She couldn’t read the words from where she was, but she could see the writing. Well, yes, so it was over. Now what? She sat quietly, the weeping finished, and watched the passive movement of the snow. It was slow and ceaseless, as soft against the stone as the stroke of a hand. Jean heard a word in her mind,
sleep
or
peace
—she couldn’t tell which—and she was tired, so tired. Safe and tired as she