Runaway

she used ordinary soap the baby would get a rash. But she had other reasons, irresistible though embarrassing.
    This was the way she had walked to school for years of her life. Even when she was going to college, and came home on a visit, she was still the same—a girl going to school. Would she never be done going to school? Somebody asked Sam that at a time when she had just won the Intercollegiate Latin Translation Prize, and he had said, “ ’Fraid not.” He told this story on himself. God forbid that he should mention prizes. Leave Sara to do that—though Sara might have forgotten just what the prize was for.
    And here she was, redeemed. Like any other young woman, pushing her baby. Concerned about the diaper soap. And this wasn’t just her baby. Her love child. She sometimes spoke of Penelope that way, just to Eric. He took it as a joke, she said it as a joke, because of course they lived together and had done so for some time, and they intended to go on together. The fact that they were not married meant nothing to him, so far as she knew, and she often forgot about it, herself. But occasionally— and now, especially, here at home, it was the fact of her unmarried state that gave her some flush of accomplishment, a silly surge of bliss.
    “So—you went upstreet today,” Sam said. (Had he always said
upstreet
? Sara and Juliet said
uptown
.) “See anybody you knew?”
    “I had to go to the drugstore,” Juliet said. “So I was talking to Charlie Little.”
    This conversation took place in the kitchen, after eleven o’clock at night. Juliet had decided that this was the best time to make up Penelope’s bottles for tomorrow.
    “Little Charlie?” said Sam—who had always had this other habit she hadn’t remembered, the habit of continuing to call people by their school nicknames. “Did he admire the offspring?”
    “Of course.”
    “And well he might.”
    Sam was sitting at the table, drinking rye and smoking a cigarette. His drinking whisky was new. Because Sara’s father had been a drunk—not a down-and-out drunk, he had continued to practice as a veterinarian, but enough of a terror around the house to make his daughter horrified by drinking—Sam had never used to so much as drink a beer, at least to Juliet’s knowledge, at home.
    Juliet had gone into the drugstore because that was the only place to buy the diaper soap. She hadn’t expected to see Charlie, though it was his family’s store. The last she had heard of him, he was going to be an engineer. She had mentioned that to him, today, maybe tactlessly, but he had been easy and jovial when he told her that it hadn’t worked out. He had put on weight around the middle, and his hair had thinned, had lost some of its wave and glisten. He had greeted Juliet with enthusiasm, with flattery for herself as well as her baby, and this had confused her, so that she had felt her face and neck hot, slightly perspiring, all the time he talked to her. In high school he would have had no time for her—except for a decent greeting, since his manners were always affable, democratic. He took out the most desirable girls in the school, and was now, as he told her, married to one of them. Janey Peel. They had two children, one of them about Penelope’s age, one older. That was the reason, he said, with a candor that seemed to owe something to Juliet’s own situation—that was the reason he hadn’t gone on to become an engineer.
    So he knew how to win a smile and a gurgle from Penelope, and he chatted with Juliet as a fellow parent, somebody now on the same level. She felt idiotically flattered and pleased. But there was more to his attention than that—the quick glance at her unadorned left hand, the joke about his own marriage. And something else. He appraised her, covertly, perhaps he saw her now as a woman displaying the fruits of a boldly sexual life. Juliet, of all people. The gawk, the scholar.
    “Does she look like you?” he had asked, when he squatted down to peer at Penelope.
    “More like her father,” said Juliet casually, but with a flood of pride, the sweat now pearling on her upper lip.
    “Does she?” said Charlie, and straightened up, speaking confidentially. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. I thought it was a shame—”
    Juliet said to Sam, “He told me he thought it was a shame what happened with you.”
    “He did, did he? What did you say to that?”
    “I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he meant.