The Progress of Love

afternoon off. He’s getting to think like he owns me.”
    “Can’t have that,” said Colin.
    About her boyfriends, he usually took a lightly critical tone.
    Sylvia was a short woman with a large head—made larger by her fluffy, graying hair—and broad hips and shoulders. One of her boyfriends used to tell her she looked like a baby elephant, and she took that—at first—as an endearment. Colin thought there was something clumsy and appealing about her figure and her wide-open face with its pink, soft skin, clear blue eyes under almost nonexistent eyebrows, her eager all-purpose smile. Something maddening as well.
    The subject of Ross was one of the few things that could make her face tighten up. That, and the demands and peculiarities of boyfriends, once they were on the wane.
    Was Eddy on the verge of waning?
    Sylvia said, “I’ve been telling him he’s just too darn possessive.” Then she told Colin a joke that was going round at the hospital, about a black man and a white man at the urinal.
    “If you’re working the early shift,” said Colin, “how do you know what time Ross gets up?”
    “Somebody complaining about Ross, is that it?”
    “Well. They’re just saying he likes to keep his own hours.”
    “They’ll find out. If they have any mechanical thing or electrical thing that goes wrong, they’ll be glad they got Ross. Ross has just as many brains as you do but they have gone in a different direction.”
    “I won’t argue that,” said Colin. “But his job is on the grounds.”
    Glenna said that the reason Sylvia proclaimed Ross to be a genius—aside from the fact that he really was clever about engines—was that he had the other side of a genius. He was absentminded and not very clean. He called attention to himself. He was weird, and that was the way a genius was supposed to be. But taken by itself, said Glenna, that wasn’t enough proof.
    Then she always said, “I like Ross, though. You can’t help liking him. I like him and your mother. I like her, too.” Colin believed she did like Ross. He wasn’t so sure she liked his mother.
    “I only go over to your place when I’m invited, Colin,” was what his mother said. “It’s your home, but it’s Glenna’s home, too. Nevertheless I’m glad Ross feels so welcome.”
    “I went in the office today,” Colin said, “and there was Davidson looking out the window.” He hadn’t known whether or not he was going to tell his mother about the hats. As usual, he wanted to get her a little upset about Ross, but not too upset. The sight of Ross working away there, with the electric clippers, all alone on the school grounds, a floppy pink straw hat perched on his seed-corn cap, had seemed to Colin something new, newly disturbing. He had seen Ross in odd getups before—once in the supermarket wearing Sylvia’s blond wig. That seemed more calculated than today’s appearance, more definitely a joke, with an audience in mind. Today, too, Ross could be thinking about all the kids behind the widows. And teachers and typists and Davidson and anybody driving by. But not them particularly. Something about Ross today suggested the audience had grown and faded—it included the whole town, the whole world, and Ross was almost indifferent to it. A sign, Colin thought. He didn’t know what of—just a sign that Ross was farther along the way that Ross was going.
    Sylvia didn’t seem concerned with that part of it. She was upset, but for another reason.
    “My hat. He’s bound to lose it. I’ll give him Hail Columbia. I’ll give him proper hell . It may not look like much, but I really value that hat.”
    The first words Ross ever spoke directly to Glenna were “Do you know the only thing that’s the matter with you?”
    “What?” said Glenna, looking alarmed. She was a tall, frail girl with dark curly hair, a white skin, very light blue eyes, and a habit of holding on to her bottom lip with her teeth, which gave her a wistful, worried air. She was the sort of girl who often wears pale blue (she had a fuzzy sweater on, of that color), and a delicate chain around her neck, with a cross or heart on it, or a name.(Glenna wore her name, because people had trouble spelling it.)
    “The only thing the matter with you,” said Ross, chewing and nodding, “is that I didn’t find you first!”
    A relief. They all laughed. This was during Glenna’s first dinner at Sylvia’s house. Sylvia and Colin and Glenna were eating take-out Chinese