The Progress of Love

believe it, so they want to see where it happened.”
    “I don’t see their problem,” Clayton said. “I don’t see why they can’t believe it. Mom could believe it all right. Mom wasn’t surprised.”
    “Well, of course I was,” Peg said, and this was the first time Robert had noticed any sort of edge to her voice. “Of course I was surprised, Clayton. Just because I didn’t break out screaming.”
    “You weren’t surprised they could do it.”
    “I hardly knew them. We hardly knew the Weebles.”
    “I guess they had a fight,” said Clayton.
    “We don’t know that,” Peg said, stubbornly working the lotion into her skin. “We don’t know if they had a fight, or what.”“When you and Dad used to have those fights?” Clayton said. “Remember, after we first moved to town? When he would be home? Over by the car wash? When you used to have those fights, you know what I used to think? I used to think one of you was going to come and kill me with a knife.”
    “That’s not true,” said Peg.
    “It is true. I did.”
    Peg sat down at the table and covered her mouth with her hands. Clayton’s mouth twitched. He couldn’t seem to stop it, so he turned it into a little, taunting, twitching smile.
    “That’s what I used to lie in bed and think.”
    “Clayton. We would never either one of us ever have hurt you.”
    Robert believed it was time that he said something.
    “What this is like,” he said, “it’s like an earthquake or a volcano. It’s that kind of happening. It’s a kind of fit. People can take a fit like the earth takes a fit. But it only happens once in a long while. It’s a freak occurrence.”
    “Earthquakes and volcanoes aren’t freaks,” said Clayton, with a certain dry pleasure. “If you want to call that a fit, you’d have to call it a periodic fit. Such as people have, married people have.”
    “We don’t,” said Robert. He looked at Peg as if waiting for her to agree with him.
    But Peg was looking at Clayton. She who always seemed pale and silky and assenting, but hard to follow as a watermark in fine paper, looked dried out, chalky, her outlines fixed in steady, helpless, unapologetic pain.
    “No,” said Clayton. “No, not you.”
    Robert told them that he was going for a walk. When he got outside, he saw that Clayton was right. There were cars nosing along the street, turning at the end, nosing their way back again. Getting a look. Inside those cars were just the same people, probably the very same people, he had been talking to during the afternoon. But now they seemed joined to their cars, making some new kind of monster that came poking around in a brutally curious way.
    To avoid them, he went down a short dead-end street that branched off theirs. No houses had ever been built on this street, so it was not plowed. But the snow was hard, and easy to walk on. He didn’t notice how easy it was to walk on until he realized that he had gone beyond the end of the street and up a slope, which was not a slope of the land at all, but a drift of snow. The drift neatly covered the fence that usually separated the street from the field. He had walked over the fence without knowing what he was doing. The snow was that hard.
    He walked here and there, testing. The crust took his weight without a whisper or a crack. It was the same everywhere. You could walk over the snowy fields as if you were walking on cement. (This morning, looking at the snow, hadn’t he thought of marble?) But this paving was not flat. It rose and dipped in a way that had not much to do with the contours of the ground underneath. The snow created its own landscape, which was sweeping, in a grand and arbitrary style.
    Instead of walking around on the plowed streets of town, he could walk over the fields. He could cut across to the diner on the highway, which stayed open until midnight. He would have a cup of coffee there, turn around, and walk home.
    One night, about six months before Robert married Peg, he and Lee were sitting drinking in his apartment. They were having an argument about whether it was permissible, or sickening, to have your family initial on your silverware. All of a sudden, the argument split open—Robert couldn’t remember how, but it split open, and they found themselves saying the cruellest things to each other that they could imagine. Their voices changed from the raised pitch and speed of argument, and they spoke quietly with a subtle loathing. “You always make me