Runaway

easier for her to reach than a table. On it were pills and medicines, talcum powder, moisturizing lotion, a half-drunk cup of milky tea, a glass filmed with the traces of some dark tonic, probably iron. On top of the bed were magazines—old copies of
Vogue
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
    “I’m not,” said Juliet.
    “We did have it hanging up. It was in the back hall by the dining-room door. Then Daddy took it down.”
    “Why?”
    “He didn’t say anything about it to me. He didn’t say that he was going to. Then came a day when it was just gone.”
    “Why would he take it down?”
    “Oh. It would be some notion he had, you know.”
    “What sort of a notion?”
    “Oh. I think—you know, I think it probably had to do with Irene. That it would disturb Irene.”
    “There wasn’t anybody naked in it. Not like the Botticelli.”
    For indeed there was a print of
The Birth of Venus
hanging in Sam and Sara’s living room. It had been the subject of nervous jokes years ago on the occasion when they had the other teachers to supper.
    “No. But it was
modern.
I think it made Daddy uncomfortable. Or maybe looking at it with Irene looking at it—that made him uncomfortable. He might be afraid it would make her feel—oh, sort of contemptuous of us. You know—that we were weird. He wouldn’t like for Irene to think we were that kind of people.”
    Juliet said, “The kind of people who would hang that kind of picture? You mean he’d care so much what she thought of our
pictures
?”
    “You know Daddy.”
    “He’s not afraid to disagree with people. Wasn’t that the trouble in his job?”
    “What?” said Sara. “Oh. Yes. He can disagree. But he’s careful sometimes. And Irene. Irene is—he’s careful of her. She’s very valuable to us, Irene.”
    “Did he think she’d quit her job because she thought we had a weird picture?”
    “I would have left it up, dear. I value anything that comes from you. But Daddy . . .”
    Juliet said nothing. From the time when she was nine or ten until she was perhaps fourteen, she and Sara had an understanding about Sam.
You know Daddy.
    That was the time of their being women together. Home permanents were tried on Juliet’s stubborn fine hair, dressmaking sessions produced the outfits like nobody else’s, suppers were peanut-butter-and-tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches on the evenings Sam stayed late for a school meeting. Stories were told and retold about Sara’s old boyfriends and girlfriends, the jokes they played and the fun they had, in the days when Sara was a schoolteacher too, before her heart got too bad. Stories from the time before that, when she lay in bed with rheumatic fever and had the imaginary friends Rollo and Maxine who solved mysteries, even murders, like the characters in certain children’s books. Glimpses of Sam’s besotted courtship, disasters with the borrowed car, the time he showed up at Sara’s door disguised as a tramp.
    Sara and Juliet, making fudge and threading ribbons through the eyelet trim on their petticoats, the two of them intertwined. And then abruptly, Juliet hadn’t wanted any more of it, she had wanted instead to talk to Sam late at night in the kitchen, to ask him about black holes, the Ice Age, God. She hated the way Sara undermined their talk with wide-eyed ingenuous questions, the way Sara always tried somehow to bring the subject back to herself. That was why the talks had to be late at night and there had to be the understanding neither she nor Sam ever spoke about.
Wait till we’re rid of Sara.
Just for the time being, of course.
    There was a reminder going along with that.
Be nice to Sara.
She risked her life to have you, that’s worth remembering.
    “Daddy doesn’t mind disagreeing with people that are
over
him,” Sara said, taking a deep breath. “But you know how he is with people that are under him. He’ll do anything to make sure they don’t feel he’s any different from them, he just has to put himself down on their level—”
    Juliet did know, of course. She knew the way Sam talked to the boy at the gas pumps, the way he joked in the hardware store. But she said nothing.
    “He has to suck up to them,”
said Sara with a sudden change of tone, a wavering edge of viciousness, a weak chuckle.
    Juliet cleaned up the stroller, and Penelope, and herself, and set off on a walk into town. She had the excuse that she needed a certain brand of mild disinfectant soap with which to wash the diapers—if