Runaway

were still standing, marvels now, in their isolation.
    They stopped in a village built all along one street in a narrow valley. Bedrock stuck out of the valley walls—the only place for many miles around where such massive rocks were to be seen. Juliet remembered coming here when there was a special park which you paid to enter. In the park there was a fountain, a teahouse where they served strawberry shortcake and ice cream—and surely other things which she could not remember. Caves in the rock were named after each of the Seven Dwarfs. Sam and Sara had sat on the ground by the fountain eating ice cream while she had rushed ahead to explore the caves. (Which were nothing much, really—quite shallow.) She had wanted them to come with her but Sam had said, “You know your mother can’t climb.”
    “You run,” Sara had said. “Come back and tell us all about it.” She was dressed up. A black taffeta skirt that spread in a circle around her on the grass. Those were called ballerina skirts.
    It must have been a special day.
    Juliet asked Sam about this when he came out of the store. At first he could not remember. Then he did. A gyp joint, he said. He didn’t know when it had disappeared.
    Juliet could see no trace anywhere along the street of a fountain or a teahouse.
    “A bringer of peace and order,” Sam said, and it took a moment for her to recognize that he was still talking about Irene. “She’ll turn her hand to anything. Cut the grass and hoe the garden. Whatever she’s doing she gives it her best and she behaves as if it’s a privilege to do it. That’s what never ceases to amaze me.”
    What could the carefree occasion have been? A birthday, a wedding anniversary?
    Sam spoke insistently, even solemnly, over the noise of the car’s struggle up the hill.
    “She restored my faith in women.”
    Sam charged into every store after telling Juliet that he wouldn’t be a minute, and came back to the car quite a while later explaining that he had not been able to get away. People wanted to talk, people had been saving up jokes to tell him. A few followed him out to see his daughter and her baby.
    “So that’s the girl who talks Latin,” one woman said.
    “Getting a bit rusty nowadays,” Sam said. “Nowadays she has her hands full.”
    “I bet,” the woman said, craning to get a look at Penelope. “But aren’t they a blessing? Oh, the wee ones.”
    Juliet had thought she might talk to Sam about the thesis she was planning to return to—though at present that was just a dream. Such subjects used to come up naturally between them. Not with Sara. Sara would say, “Now, you must tell me what you’re doing in your studies,” and Juliet would sum things up, and Sara might ask her how she kept all those Greek names straight. But Sam had known what she was talking about. At college she had mentioned how her father had explained to her what
thaumaturgy
meant, when she ran across the word at the age of twelve or thirteen. She was asked if her father was a scholar.
    “Sure,” she said. “He teaches Grade Six.”
    Now she had a feeling that he would subtly try to undermine her. Or maybe not so subtly. He might use the word
airy-fairy.
Or claim to have forgotten things she could not believe he had forgotten.
    But maybe he had. Rooms in his mind closed up, the windows blackened—what was in there judged by him to be too useless, too discreditable, to meet the light of day.
    Juliet spoke out more harshly than she intended.
    “Does she want to get married? Irene?”
    This question startled Sam, coming as it did in that tone and after a considerable silence.
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    And after a moment, “I don’t see how she could.”
    “Ask her,” Juliet said. “You must want to, the way you feel about her.”
    They drove for a mile or two before he spoke. It was clear she had given offense.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
    “Happy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sleepy, Sneezy,” Sara said.
    “Doc,” said Juliet.
    “Doc.
Doc.
Happy, Sneezy,
Doc,
Grumpy,
Bashful,
Sneezy— No. Sneezy, Bashful, Doc, Grumpy—
Sleepy,
Happy, Doc, Bashful—”
    Having counted on her fingers, Sara said, “Wasn’t that eight?
    “We went there more than once,” she said. “We used to call it the Shrine of Strawberry Shortcake—oh, how I’d like to go again.”
    “Well, there’s nothing there,” Juliet said. “I couldn’t even see where it was.”
    “I’m sure I could have. Why