The Progress of Love

slightly offensive. She thought the woman was selling something.
    “She is not here,” the woman said. “No. She is not here.” Her face was puffy and unsmiling, her lipstick clownishly thick, and her eye makeup blotchy. Her voice was heavy with some insinuation Denise could not grasp. She would not talk that way if she was trying to sell something. Could they owe her money? Had Peter run across her property or bothered her dog?
    “My father’s here,” Denise said contritely. “Would you like to talk to him?”
    “Your father, yes, I will talk to him,” the woman said, and hoisted her large, shiny red handbag up under her arm. “Why don’t you go and get him, then?”
    Denise realized then that this was the same voice that had said, “I wish I had a girl this size to help me.”
    “The lady who does catering is at the door,” she said to her father.
    “The lady who does catering?” he repeated, in a displeased, disbelieving voice, as if she had invented this lady just to interrupt him.
    But he wiped his hands and went off down the hall. She heard him say smoothly, “Yes, indeed, what can I do for you?”
    And instead of coming back in a few minutes, he took this woman into the dining room; he shut the dining-room door. Why into the dining room? Visitors were taken into the living room. The bacon, lying on a paper towel, was getting cold.
    There was a little window high in the door between the kitchen and the dining room. In the days when Sophie was a little girl, there used to be a cook in the kitchen. The cook could watch the progress of the meal through this window to know when to change the dishes.
    Denise raised herself on tiptoe.
    “Spy,” said Peter, without looking up from his book. It was a science-fiction book called Satan’s World .
    “I just want to know when to make the sandwiches,” Denise said.
    She saw that there had been a reason for going into the diningroom. Her father was sitting in his usual place, at the end of the table. The woman was sitting in Peter’s usual place, nearest the hall door. She had her purse on the table, and her hands clasped on top of it. Whatever they were talking about demanded a table and straight-backed chairs and an upright, serious position. It was like an interview. Information is being given, questions are being asked, a problem is being considered.
    Well, all right, thought Denise. They were talking about a problem. They would finish talking about it, settle it, and it would be over with. Her father would tell the family about it, or not tell them. It would be over.
    She turned off the radio. She made the sandwiches. Peter ate his. She waited awhile, then ate hers. They drank Coke, which their father allowed them at lunch. Denise ate and drank too quickly. She sat at the table quietly burping and retasting the bacon, and hearing the terrible sound of a stranger crying in their house.
    From the plane on her father’s birthday, they had seen some delicate, almost transparent, mounded clouds in the western sky, and Denise had said, “Thunderclouds.”
    “That’s right,” said the pilot. “But they’re a long ways away.”
    “It must be pretty dramatic,” said Laurence, “flying in a thunderstorm.”
    “Once, I looked out and I saw blue rings of fire around the propellers,” the pilot said. “Round the propellers and the wing tips. Then I saw the same thing round the nose. I put my hand out to touch the glass—this here, the plexiglass—and just as I got within touching distance, flames came shooting out of my fingers. I don’t know if I touched the glass or not. I didn’t feel anything. Little blue flames. One time in a thunderstorm. That’s what they call St. Elmo’s fire.”
    “It’s from the electrical discharges in the atmosphere,” called Peter from the back seat.
    “You’re right,” the pilot called back.
    “Strange,” said Laurence.
    “It gave me a start.”
    Denise had a picture in her mind of the pilot with cold blue fire shooting out of his fingertips, and that seemed to her a sign ofpain, though he had said he didn’t feel anything. She thought of the time she had touched an electric fence. The spurts of sound coming out of the dining room made her remember. Peter went on reading, and they didn’t say anything, though she knew he heard the sound, too.
    Magda is in the kitchen making the salad. She is humming a tune from an opera. “Home to Our Mountains.” Denise is in the dining room setting the table.