PARTISAN REVIEW
537
stove. My wife got up and with a sharp twist turned the damper
down and returned to her chair without looking at me. They went
back to what they had been talking about - Rose's mother. The
three women, my wife, tall and dark, and her two shorter, unmarried
friends, leaning intently across the kitchen table, fooling with coffee
cups and paper napkins and cigarettes, one or two of the three talk–
ing in pleasant, intimate voices about a mother: as
if
I had not
come in from the barn demanding to know who in hell had left the
water running, because the goddamned pump was sucking air again,
and for Christ's sake, this was not Megalopolis and
if
the well goes
dry we'll be up shit's creek, and it meant that now I'd have to shut
off the pump and leave us without water at all for hours, until the
water table comes back,
if
the water table comes back, and
if
the
goddamned pump hasn't already burned itself out from sucking air
for God knows how long. What the hell's the matter with you? I
asked her. Can't you hear the grinding noise it makes when it starts
to suck air? And it was also as if my wife had not told me to shut
my goddamned mouth.
Where are you going? was what she said, almost casually, as
I stomped across the kitchen and pulled my coat off the hook by
the door. I glared at her. Then I stuffed my arms into the heavy
coat, yanked open the door and stalked out into the blowing snow,
closing the door with a quick jerk, as
if
pulling my hand out of a
pan of hot water.
The Volkswagen started gradually, reluctantly, stiff in the late
afternoon cold, but it started. While the motor warmed up, I got
out of the car and thrashed through the piling snow and with my
bare hand brushed the windows clean. Coming around from the
far side of the car, I caught a glimpse of my wife's face at the
kitchen door. She was staring quizzically through the small, square
window in the door, as if at the weather. Then she turned away and
disappeared. I got into the car, backed it slowly down the driveway
to the road, leaving foot-deep ruts in the snow behind me, then drove
lurchingly away, plowing carelessly through the small, shifting drifts.
A half-mile of unpaved, snow-banked road, the car busting the fast–
building drifts that lined the inside edge of the snowbanks, spraying
high, white foxtails over the fenders, and I was on the main road.
It was nearly dark, so I switched on the headlights. Turning left,
I headed towards Portsmouth. The main road had already been
