Tales of Darkness
and the Unknown,
Vol. XIV:
The White Glove
1
In senior year of high school I became friends with Emily Hohn. It happened quickly: one day she was that quiet girl in English class, the next we were friends. She had passed in and out of my attention over the last year or so, and it was as if I suddenly turned my head in her direction. I liked her calmness, her unruffled sense of herself, her way of standing as if she could feel the ground under her feet. As for me, I was a floater, a cloud-man, tense, jittery, cat-wary, all nerves and bone, and I’d spent the last year so desperately in love with another girl, so whipped-up and feverish, that even my happiness had felt like unhappiness. Emily Hohn’s quietness drew me in as if it had been waiting for me all along. It wasn’t only her calmness that attracted me. That would be unfair. I liked looking at her—at her thickish brownish shortish hair shot through with lighter strands that caught the sun, her small neat hands with close-cut nails, her round wrists, one of which had a pale chicken-pox scar, her slightly lowered eyelids that made her look a little sleepy, her slow smile. She reminded me of things I liked: streetlights at night, a peaceful room. I liked her clothes—the trim fresh-smelling pastel shirts, the knee-length skirts in black or dark green wool, the cardigans worn open with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms, the broad leather belts, dark red or black, with big square buckles that made me think of picture frames. I liked watching her crinkle her eyebrows when she tried to figure something out. I liked the way she sometimes reached over and scratched the back of her left hand with two fingers of her right. Most of all, I liked that she didn’t stir me up—didn’t move her body a certain way. I was sick to death of all that. I wanted something I could count on. I was grateful for stillness.
I walked her home from school one day, a warm October afternoon that felt like summer. Under branches of sugar maple and red maple we walked through flickers of sun and shade—here and there, in the still air, a yellow-red leaf came drifting down. I carried my books against my hip and my autumn jacket slung over one shoulder. Emily had tied her burnt-orange sweater around her waist, like a backward apron, and she carried her blue pebbly three-ring binder and her crisply covered schoolbooks in an upward-tilted pile against her white blouse. Speckles of sunlight danced on her as she walked, as if bits of light were being tossed at her through the leaves.
She lived in an older neighborhood, on a street where the houses had wide front porches, and tree roots pushed up chunks of sidewalk. On her porch sat a glider with faded flowery pink cushions, beside a green wicker table that held a glass of lemonade. A rake stood up against a window shutter; a bicycle leaned against a cushioned wicker chair. Everything about the house pleased me—the tarnished brass knocker on the gray front door, the living room with its dark blue couch and its deep armchair next to a pair of old moccasins, the scent of furniture polish mixed with a bready sweetish smell of baking, the sunny yellow kitchen with its bright porcelain rooster on the windowsill. On top of the refrigerator sat a cookie jar shaped like a bear hugging his belly. Emily’s mother was standing at the sink, washing a big breadboard sticky with dough. Over a flowered dress she wore an apron decorated with richly red apples, each with two green leaves. She turned and began wiping her hands briskly on the apples. “Oh my, I can’t shake your hand or I’ll—Emmy, take the young man’s jacket, why don’t you. I’m Emily’s mother, and you must be—Will. Well, Will. Would you like a soda? A piece of raspberry pie?”
I spent that afternoon creaking in the glider in the warm shade of the front porch, sipping root beer and eating raspberry pie. Emily sat next to me with an open French grammar facedown on her lap, pushing with one leg to keep us gliding—into the sun and back into shade, into the sun and back into shade. From time to time her mother opened the front door and asked if I’d like another piece of pie or a brownie with walnuts or an oatmeal cookie. Some girls were jumping rope across the street; farther off came the quick clean sharp bursts of a basketball against driveway tar. At the same time I heard the scratch of a rake pulling over leaves. I could feel myself settling into those sounds as into my own childhood—and the warmth, the slap of the rope, the creak of the glider, the dripping sunny hands of Mrs. Hohn, the square porch posts, the dip of the telephone wires between poles, all seemed to me, as I half closed my eyes, to be part of Emily herself, as if she were flowing into the peacefulness of an October afternoon.
2
I began walking home with her every day, dragging my feet through unraked leaves that sounded to me like waves drawing back on a beach. As the weather grew colder we moved indoors—sometimes to the living room, where we sat on the dark blue couch beside the armchair, sometimes to the kitchen table, with its maplewood chairs that had floral-patterned cushions tied to the seats. After a while we’d go upstairs to Emily’s room, where I straddled the wooden desk-chair and faced Emily, who sat on the big bed with her back propped up against the headboard and her legs stretched out on the pink spread. I admired her desk, an old-fashioned one with pigeonholes and a writing surface that swung out on brass hinges. In one corner of the room sat a small bookcase no higher than my waist. It held a pale blue leather jewelry box, eight or nine books, a Ginny doll with one arm, and many boxes of puzzles. The small number of books surprised me, since I had two large bookcases in my room, a row of books on my dresser, and piles of books on the floor by my desk. But I quickly came to connect the absence of such things with Emily’s calmness, as if books and edginess belonged together. We talked, we laughed, we did homework—I at the desk, she on the bed. Sometimes, turning over my shoulder, I would simply look at her, as she sat reading calmly on the bed with her black flats on the floor and her ankles crossed, reaching now and then to scratch the back of her left hand with two fingers of the right.
At 4:00 there would be a knock on the half-open door and Mrs. Hohn would sweep in with a tray bearing glasses of milk and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. At 5:30 I would hear Emily’s father opening the two front doors, the storm door and the wooden door, and ten minutes later he would drive me home. Mr. Hohn was a mild, balding man with large melancholy eyes and a rueful smile. He did something in insurance, collected plate blocks and first-day covers of every newly issued American stamp, and liked to ask me serious questions about whatever book I was reading. He said things like “Can you hand me that thingamajigger?” and “That’s for darn sure.” I felt so welcomed by the Hohn family, so bathed in their atmosphere, that when I entered my own house, with its bookcases and its polished dark piano with piles of yellow music books and its faint sweet odor of pipe tobacco, it was always with a slight shock of estrangement, before familiarity settled over me.
I kept planning to invite Emily to my house, but I never did. At my place, we would have done my kinds of things—I’d have shown her my books, and my records, and my twin-lens reflex, and my collection of labeled minerals from quarries all over Connecticut. I would have played the piano for her, a piece by Chopin or Debussy, and then, to show that I wasn’t stuck up, a boogie-woogie by Clarence Pine Top Smith. My parents would have welcomed her and made her feel at home. And as I imagined these things, all of which had happened many times before, a tiredness came over me, as if I were rehearsing for a play that I’d just finished performing in. It was as if, in my house, I could feel a continual soft pressure on me—emanating from the piano, from the reading chair in my room, from the mahogany bookcase in the front hall—to be the person I was, the one I felt I somehow had to be. What I liked about Emily’s house was that I didn’t have to be anything at all.
On weekends my father graded papers at home and let me have the car. When I asked about a curfew, he looked up from the armchair by the lamp table and said, “Your mother and I expect you home before the year is out.” Every Friday night I would drive over to Emily’s house, and every Saturday I would drive over in the late morning and stay past midnight. We did homework in Emily’s room; I helped Mr. Hohn rake leaves and clean the roof gutters; I sat in the kitchen peeling carrots and cutting the ends off string beans while Mrs. Hohn prepared the pot roast or the roast lamb. After dinner, Emily washed the dishes and I dried them with a thick dish towel decorated with little bluebirds. Then the four of us would play Scrabble at the dining room table, under a small brass chandelier with narrow bulbs shaped like flames. Mrs. Hohn liked to press her hand to her chest and say that, good gracious, with me around, who needed a dictionary, but she was a skillful and relentless player and usually won—the two of us always came in first or second, while Emily and her father trailed far behind. Something gentle and unaggressive in Mr. Hohn’s play, which reminded me of his melancholy eyes, seemed to invite defeat; but I was merciless. “I can’t believe these letters,” Mrs. Hohn would say, or “Em, don’t do that,” as Emily reached over to scratch the back of her hand. Mrs. Hohn liked to win; we inspired in each other a spirit of friendly fierce combat. At times, lashed to competitive fury by Mrs. Hohn, I glanced at Emily as she sat staring mildly at her tiles. For a moment her calmness baffled me, as if we were playing different games. Then the battle was over, with laughter and headshakes, and Mrs. Hohn served cookies and cider and apple crumb cake, while outside the winds of November rattled the dining room windows.
One Saturday afternoon when I was in the backyard helping Mr. Hohn repair a wood-framed storm window that we’d taken down and set against the house, he looked up and said, “Looks like we need a plane. Wait here and I’ll—or heck no, come on down.” He opened the sloping door, led me down six steps, and reached for a key hidden on the ledge above the red cellar door. In the deep basement he led me past the furnace and boiler to a shelf that held a ball-peen hammer, a spirit level, and a shiny black plane with a wooden knob. “Since we’re down here,” he said, and motioned me along with two quick curls of a forefinger. We came to a wall piled high with boxes; a tall metal cabinet with two doors stood in a corner. Mr. Hohn opened the metal doors. I saw a row of little dresses all hanging on small white plastic hangers. “Emmy’s,” he said. He took one out, on its hanger, and held it up for me—a little blue dress with a white collar. “Three years old.” He shrugged, rubbed the back of his neck, and hung up the dress. “We kept planning to give them away, but somehow—” He sighed. “Well!” he said, and closed the doors. Turning abruptly, he led me back up the steps into the backyard.
Meanwhile, in school, I waited for the day to end so that I could walk home with Emily. I liked to look over at her, in the classes we took together. Unlike me, always restless, always a little bored, Emily gazed at the teacher with full attention, or else bent her head over her notebook and wrote steadily. Sometimes she would give a subtle yawn, which revealed itself as a slight stiffening of her under-eye skin. Sometimes she would reach over and scratch the back of her left hand with two fingers of the right.
One day as I sat down in the cafeteria with my shepherd’s pie and my Devil Dog, I noticed that the back of Emily’s hand was a little red. “How’s your hand?” I asked. She immediately placed it on her lap. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s this dry heat.” She pointed to a hissing radiator.
3
On a dreary Monday morning shortly before Christmas break, when the sky was so gray and dark that the school windows glowed, as at a night dance, I arrived late at the lockers and rushed into homeroom seconds before the bell. Emily’s seat was empty. Her desk, without her, seemed to be drawing attention to itself, like a lamp without a shade. It struck me that she’d never been absent before—it wasn’t the sort of thing she did. All that day her absence pressed on me. She seemed, absent, more insistently present than when she was actually there. Under the fluorescent ceiling lights I had the sensation that she was visibly, luminously, missing. At my house I let myself in with my key. I dropped my books on the kitchen table, where they slowly began to topple, and dialed Emily’s number. Mrs. Hohn answered the phone as the books slid along the tabletop. Emily was fine, there was nothing to worry about. She had gone to the doctor for a checkup. She was resting now, she’d be back in school probably tomorrow. Could I think of a six-letter word for “enliven”?
When I entered homeroom the next morning, Emily was sitting at her desk. Her ankles were crossed under her chair. The yellow collar of her shirt lay neatly on her dark green sweater. On the back of her left hand was a small white square of gauze, taped on all four sides.
On the way to English she said, “He doesn’t want me to scratch it.” She gave a little shrug. “Some sort of skin thing. It’s embarrassing.”
“No it isn’t,” I said. “No way. Absolutely not.”
During Christmas vacation I spent so much time at the Hohns’ that my mother started saying things like “We hardly see you anymore” and “I hope you aren’t wearing out your welcome over there.” Once she looked sharply at me and said, “Is everything all right, Will?” Every morning I took the long cold walk to Emily’s house; I returned only at night, driven by Mr. Hohn. Late one afternoon the sky turned dark and a heavy snow began to fall. I was invited to spend the night in the upstairs guest room, under a sky-blue quilt covered with pictures of gray cats and red balls of yarn. I wore a fresh-laundered pair of Mr. Hohn’s flannel pajamas, too wide and too short, striped white and dark blue. Emily, looking in on me, said, “You look—you look—” and gave a whoop of laughter, then covered her mouth with her hand. “Just let me know if you need anything,” Mrs. Hohn said, and closed the door.
I lay in bed, in the quiet house, under the thickly falling snow. A novel by Turgenev rested open and facedown on my stomach. On the dresser stood a little porcelain man playing a fiddle, a blue glass bird, and half a dozen tiny dolls seated on two wooden benches, facing a miniature teacher standing at a blackboard. Over the dresser hung a painting of a deer in a forest, drinking from a sunlit stream. When I turned out the lamp on the night table, I could sense, behind the drawn shades, the snow falling in slanting steady lines. I imagined the streetlights shining through the falling snow.
For a long time I lay awake and peaceful in the dark, listening to quiet bursts of warm air coming through the vent at the base of the wall and a faint creak of floorboards in the attic. When at last I went to a window and pulled aside the heavy stiff shade, with its strip of wood in the cloth above the shade pull, I was startled to see a clear night sky. In the light of streetlamps, a glowing snow lay over sidewalks and bushes. It covered the fire hydrant across the street, rose thick along tree branches, swept up to the top of a corner mailbox.
Late the next morning I sat in the warm yellow kitchen peeling potatoes onto a paper towel, while Mrs. Hohn reached into a chicken and pulled out glistening dark innards, like wet stones. Emily and her father were out doing errands. “You know,” I said, “I can’t help thinking about Emily’s hand. I was wondering—”
“There’s not a thing to worry about, Will,” Mrs. Hohn said. “It’s just a pesky rash. Be a dear and fetch me down that platter, the bone-china one with the windmills. I don’t know what those people were thinking, putting up shelves fit for a giant.”
4
School startled me. It was as if I’d forgotten all about it during that snowy vacation, composed, it seemed to me, of long evenings playing Scrabble with the Hohns under the flame-shaped bulbs and one brilliant blue afternoon in the backyard building two snowmen with Emily: one with a wide-rimmed red hat on its head and a paper rose stuck in its chest, the other with a pipe in its mouth and an empty can of Campbell’s tomato soup on its head. School was a clash of olive-green lockers, a scraping of many desks. Already I was looking forward to summer. I would be sitting near Emily in the warm shade of her backyard, in an aluminum chaise longue with six adjustable positions, reading a library book whose stamped card served as a bookmark, while beside me, on a round white wrought-iron table with an openwork top, a glass of homemade lemonade with a slice of lemon in it stood next to a plate of fresh-baked brownies with walnuts.
One morning toward the end of January I stepped into homeroom and saw that Emily wasn’t there. I could feel disappointment spreading in me like tiredness. And yet, at the very center of my disappointment, I was aware of a prickle of satisfaction—for hadn’t I known she was bound to be absent again? All that day I tried to savor her absence. It would, I told myself, make her presence all the more vivid and dramatic. The next morning, when I entered homeroom, I didn’t allow myself to look in the direction of her desk. Instead, I imagined Emily seated there in her dark green or burnt-orange sweater, with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms and the collar of her shirt lying on both sides of her neck. When, overcoming my reluctance, I turned to look at her, I was so shocked by the sight of her empty desk that I glanced down at my watch, as if to see how much time was left before she really wasn’t there.
At home I sat on the wooden steps between the kitchen and the back porch, with the telephone cord squeezed in the closed door, and called Emily. Mrs. Hohn answered. Emily was fine. She’d had to have a little work done on her hand; she was resting now. I wanted to know what kind of work. “Some minor surgery—nothing to worry about, Will. She came through with flying colors. I’m so proud of her. She’s resting now. She ought to be back to school in a couple of days. I’ll tell her you called. She’ll be so pleased.” Only in my room, as I sat bent over my typewriter on its rattly metal table next to my desk, did I understand what I’d wanted to say to Mrs. Hohn. Why didn’t you tell me? Why? In my mind I shouted into the telephone. Anger burned in me like fever.
She was absent the next day, and the next. I called each afternoon; always Mrs. Hohn assured me that Emily was resting. The medication had left her feeling a little woozy, Dr. Morrison had said it might have that effect, she’d be up and about in no time. The next day Emily was absent again. At home I sat on the wooden steps, on the cold porch, with the phone in my lap, and did not call. I understood that Mrs. Hohn would tell me nothing—that my questions disturbed her. I called my friend Danny and invited him over for a game of chess.
The next day she wasn’t at her locker. I was unsurprised—so deeply unsurprised that I felt no disappointment—and as I entered homeroom I glanced wearily in the direction of her desk, which when it was empty always stood out sharply, like a chair in an old View-Master reel. Emily was sitting quietly there. I’d been so certain of the empty desk that for a moment I became uneasy, as if I were in one of those TV dramas where you open a familiar door and enter another world.
She was sitting very still. Her books rested in two neat piles on the rack under her chair, and her forearms lay on the blond writing surface. She was wearing a pleated tan skirt and a dark red wool pullover with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms. On her left hand she wore a white glove. The glove was tight at the wrist and then flared out a little. Her gloved hand lay motionless, the fingers curved and slightly spread, facing down. She sat upright and stared straight ahead. The whiteness of the glove, the stillness of her arms, the slight tension I could see in her neck, all this made me think that it must be another girl, who was wearing Emily’s clothes and taking her place in class, so that the other Emily, the one who didn’t wear a white glove, could continue to lead her life elsewhere, for reasons she would later explain to me.
I sat down and looked over at her. She sat to my right and two seats up. She did not glance over to me. Her hair, thick with complicated small waves, concealed most of her face, except for her small rounded chin and the sharpish tip of her nose. I wondered who she was, this statue-girl with her one white glove. I glanced at the clock. I looked down at my own left hand, which had assumed the position of the gloved hand, and glanced back at her. She had turned her head in my direction and was giving me one of her slow smiles—and I felt so filled with gratitude that it was as if I had wronged her and been forgiven.
In the hall I nodded casually toward the glove. “So what’s that all about?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just some minor surgery. No big deal. He wants me to keep it covered.” She shrugged her right shoulder. “Nothing to worry about.”
I waited for her to say more, as though she’d stopped in the middle of a sentence.
“Then I won’t worry about it,” I said, and in my mind I heard my father saying: “Case closed.”
Emily said nothing. I shrugged and said, “Case closed.”
And as I walked home with her that day, wearing thick blue gloves of my own, I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t worry about it when I stepped into the warm yellow kitchen and greeted Mrs. Hohn, who smiled radiantly at me and said, “Welcome back, Will—this place hasn’t been the same without you.” I was back from exile, back in the peaceful place, after Emily’s minor surgery that was already a thing of the past, though recent enough to require a protective covering; there was probably a bandage of some sort underneath, which would have attracted its own kind of unwelcome attention; already the white glove seemed less strange, like a new hairdo that took a bit of getting used to.
Upstairs in Emily’s room I straddled the wooden desk-chair, with my forearms resting on the back, while she lay on the bed against two pillows. Her white-gloved hand rested beside her on the pink spread. I tried not to look at it. She wanted to know everything she’d missed in English and Problems of American Democracy, and I went through the classes day by day, after which I told her about Larry Klein’s latest antic: he had skipped class and was found seated in the empty auditorium, and when he was brought to the principal’s office he said he thought seniors could skip class at their own discretion. “That’s what he said: ‘at their own discretion.’ Sanders just stared.” The glove didn’t move. There was a knock at Emily’s door. Mrs. Hohn entered, with a tray of chocolate chip cookies and two glasses of lemonade. “Now you two just relax and enjoy yourselves,” she said. “And if you want anything, just holler.” At 5:30 I heard the opening of the storm door and the wooden door. The glove shifted slightly. I stood up and gathered my books. “See you tomorrow,” I said, and glanced at the glove, which had moved from the spread to Emily’s lap.
Mr. Hohn drove me home. The streetlights had come on, though there was light left in the sky; on one side of the street it was nearly night, and on the other it was still late afternoon. Through lamp-lit porch windows I could see parts of couches and table lamps and shimmering television screens. Mr. Hohn gripped the wheel with a pair of yellow-brown leather gloves that had a pattern of little holes on the back of each finger. “I was wondering,” I heard myself say, as I stared at the bent fingers, “about Emily’s hand.”
“The operation was successful,” he said, with his eyes on the road, “which is one good thing, let me tell you”—and at the word “operation” I imagined Emily’s hand streaming with blood.
“Mr. Hohn,” I said as we entered my neighborhood. “What exactly is wrong with Emily’s hand?”
“Now that,” he said, keeping his head motionless but swinging toward me his melancholy gaze, “is a good question.” He swung his gaze back. “A very good question.”
5
We returned to our old ways, Emily and I. It was as if nothing had changed. But I was aware at every moment of the white intruder, drawing attention to itself, demanding awareness. At the wrist it was fastened by two small white buttons. They looked like ordinary buttons, with a glimmer of iridescence when they caught the sun. On their left was a small overlap of cloth, which formed a shadowy opening that revealed nothing. The glove seemed tightly bound, as if it were meant not to slip out of place, so that I imagined Emily had trouble bending her wrist, or even moving her fingers. I wondered whether she took the glove off at night—whether she took it off at all.
In class I watched her sit down at her desk. I noticed that she rested her gloved hand very carefully on the writing surface, where she left it motionless for as long as possible. Once, after a pencil rolled off the edge and struck the floor, she bent over to retrieve it, leaving her left hand in place. Her body, for a moment, was twisted unnaturally.
It struck me that the glove was harming Emily’s grace of movement, penetrating her with a slight clumsiness. When she walked with her books cradled in her arms, she was careful not to let her gloved hand touch them—she supported the weight a little awkwardly with her left forearm. Now and then I saw a red mark on the underside of her forearm, from the edge of her notebook. At home, when Mrs. Hohn brought in sugar cookies and lemonade, Emily would lift the glass with her right hand, take a sip, set down the glass, and pick up a cookie. Her gloved hand, with the slightly curved fingers, lay rigidly in her lap.
I quickly came to know every detail of that glove. It fit snugly over the thumb but less tightly over the fingers. The left edge, where the white glove often rested, was faintly darkened. A triangle of small creases was visible in the place where the thumb joined the forefinger. A spot of blue-black ink showed on a knuckle.
Sometimes, staring at the glove in class, I could feel, on my own hand, the white cotton binding me. Then I would wriggle my fingers rapidly, or massage the back of my left hand, over and over, with the palm of my right.
But there was something else about the glove that troubled me, beyond the sharp fact of its presence. Ever since I’d become friends with Emily, I had felt an easy flow between us, an openness, a transparency. This restful merging, this serene interwovenness, was something I had never known before, something that reminded me of her porch in sunlight, or the night of the snow shining under the streetlights. The glove was harming that flow. It was, by its very nature, an act of concealment. Emily herself, by eluding the question of her hand, by refusing to reveal whatever it was she was hiding under the white cloth, was forcing me to think about her in a secretive way. It occurred to me that the glove was changing her—turning her into a body, with privacies and evasions.
But if the glove was creating a new Emily, a hidden Emily, it was also doing something to me. The peace I’d always felt in her presence was being replaced by wariness, by an almost physiological alertness, as if my body were warning me to watch her closely. At the same time, I was no longer able to look at her whenever I wished. Before the glove, I could turn my head frankly in her direction. Now, I felt compelled to throw furtive glances at her, like a stranger yielding to a forbidden desire.
One afternoon as we were making our way along an aisle of the auditorium, where someone was scheduled to bore me to death with a speech about career choices, I noticed Emily’s white glove knock lightly against the back of a seat. Her body stiffened; for an instant she closed her eyes. Then she continued forward, holding her left hand in front of her as, with her right hand, she smoothed back her hair, in little quick movements, again and again.
Now and then an image would surge up in me, of her hand under the glove—the skin a burning red, or purple and yellow, as if recently crushed by a rock. Maybe there was some sort of scar, a harsh red line slashing across the back of the hand like a trail of fire. Maybe it was worse—a raw shiny pink wound sunk into the flesh. I understood that I was fastening my attention on Emily Hohn in a way I had never done before; that what drew me was no longer her stillness, or her gentleness, but the thing hidden by her glove; and I imagined myself tearing off that white disguise and beholding, in terror and exhilaration, her mangled hand.
A warm day came, taking everyone by surprise. Through the open windows we could hear the engine of a crane as it lifted steel beams at the back of the school. Later that day the weather grew cold, but we knew the turn had come. Icicles on eaves glistened and dripped. The last snow began to melt in the shadows of garages and under bushes hung with brown leaves. Willows, still yellow, glowed in the sun. The white glove, resting in a bar of sun on a desk beside a window, was so fiercely white that it hurt my eyes. Within the whiteness I could see the creases plainly, the faint discolorations, a small darkish stain beside one button. Somewhere a dog barked. And a restlessness came over me, the restlessness before spring, when the world, in that in-between season, is waiting for something to happen.
6
One night I woke in my warm room. I could hear the heat blowing through the vent at the base of the wall. It seemed to remind me of something, and all at once I saw the blue-and-white-striped pajamas, the tiny dolls on their wooden benches, the glowing snow stretching away. Emily lay in her room, fast asleep. Or was she also awake? Perhaps she had taken off her glove, which rested on the covers, the five fingers slightly curved. At the thought of the glove I felt a pressure in my head, like a thumb pushing against my temple, and when I swung out of bed and thrust aside the white blinds, which rattled like coat hangers, I saw that the sky was a deep and glowing blue, the blue of warm spring evenings.
I opened the front door and stepped outside. The chill startled me—it was a blue brisk night, with a big white rippled-looking moon that made me think of refrigerator frost. I turned up my shirt collar and walked quickly under that moon, a heavy cold stone that at any moment was going to rip out of the sky with loud tearing sounds. In the distance I could hear the trucks on the thruway like low rumbles of thunder.
It was a long walk, and for a while I forgot everything but the clear black lines of television antennas against the blue night sky and the curved shadows of telephone wires like strips of black typewriter ribbon stretching across one side of the road. After a while I came to a familiar neighborhood. Porch screens, catching the moonlight, became for an instant opaque aluminum walls, which suddenly vanished to reveal shadowy wicker chairs and leaning bicycles. The windows of Emily’s house were dark. I walked along the strip of grass between the side of the house and the driveway of cracked tar. In the backyard I opened a sloping door and descended six steps. At the cellar door I reached up for the hidden key.
I made my way slowly through the dark cellar, lit here and there by long rectangles of moon-glow, and climbed the wooden stairs to the upper door. It opened onto a small space off the kitchen. A single plate leaned in the dish rack. I passed into the living room and turned onto the carpeted stairs. Halfway up I stopped, with one hand on the banister. Until that moment it hadn’t struck me how easy my break-in actually was. The sheer ease of it exasperated me. Shouldn’t the house have protected itself against intruders? The house trusted the world—it believed that it was safe from harm, that darkness was the beginning of rest. But things were no longer that way. Harm walked in the night. The glove was up there, in her room. It was always with her, always touching her—the white companion.
I continued up the stairs to the almost black landing, where I thought I recalled a painting of a red barn, and climbed the final three stairs. Then I seemed to remember that the painting showed not a barn but a barnyard, where a woman was flinging feed from her apron at white chickens. In the darkness of the upstairs hall I passed the Hohns’ bedroom and felt along the wall for Emily’s door. The familiar doorknob turned with ridiculous ease, and the door opened without a sound.
The shades on the double window were drawn, but a blurry bar of light lay at an angle on one wall. Emily was asleep on her back, her head turned to one side. On the bedspread her right arm was flung across her stomach. Her left hand, still bound in the white glove, lay beside her on the pillow. The palm was up, the fingers slightly curved. Quietly I closed the door behind me.
I came up to the bed and bent slowly over Emily. As I did so, I had the sense that I was introducing myself with a formal bow. The glove lay motionless. It seemed to be holding its breath. In the darkness made less dark by the blurry bar of light, I could see the two buttons at the wrist. I realized there were three of us in the room: the glove, Emily, and me. If I undid the buttons and pulled at the white fingertips, only the glove and I would know. “Emily,” I whispered, “are you awake?” But Emily was far away.
The glove lay very still on the pillow. It seemed to be expecting me, seemed almost to mock me a little: Here we are, you and I, what are you going to do about it? I reached out and touched the lower button with the tip of my forefinger. It felt like an ordinary button, with a slightly raised rim and a depression in the center. I could see the four holes and the tight lines of white thread crossing. The buttonhole was nearly concealed by the button. I would have to press the button through the taut slit, while at the same time I was careful not to push down on her wrist. If, with fanatical patience, I succeeded in forcing the button through without waking Emily, I would have to repeat the operation with the second button. But the glove, which fit tightly, would still be on her hand. I would have to remove it with extreme care, holding her bare wrist with one hand while I pulled at the cloth fingers with the other. At any moment her eyes might begin to open. She would see a dark figure bending over her, she’d feel a hand on her skin. The glove sat there, exposing its two buttons. They were looking at me. They were daring me, with little white smiles, to get on with it. And an anger came over me—at the grinning white buttons, and the smug white glove, and the fat white moon, and the careless house, which entrusted itself to the night, and at innocent Emily, lying there too peacefully, though with a slight look of strain between her eyebrows, and at the sky, and the stars, and the rushing-apart universe, and the vain fool who stood in the dark bedroom like a killer with an upraised knife—like a strangler with a cord in his hands—like a boy lost in a forest. “Emily,” I whispered, “I wasn’t here,” and fled into the night.
7
Spring came. Under budding branches I walked with Emily along squares of sidewalk that sometimes showed the imprint of numbers or the swirl of a trowel. The sides of roads were dusted by maple flowers, dark red and yellow-green. On some afternoons it was warm enough to sit out on the front porch, which Mrs. Hohn had swept clean of brown, crackly maple wings left over from the fall. Emily and I never spoke of the white glove. One day she was absent; after school I didn’t call. The next day she appeared with a new glove, white and clean, exactly the same as the first, its two buttons faintly iridescent in the sun. She held her arm very carefully and lowered it slowly to the desk. As we walked home in hot sunlight, I watched the glove pass through new leaf-shadows and patches of sun. On the porch Mrs. Hohn served us rhubarb pie and a fruit-juice punch. She set down the plates and glasses on the green wicker table. “Not yet,” she said, holding up a handful of mail like a fan of cards. Emily and I were still waiting to hear from colleges. The idea of college seemed so remote that it was like a game I had played in childhood, in which you pretended to be a famous person, like George Washington or Babe Ruth.
I remained watchful—it was all I could do. I saw the glove resting motionless on the desk, in a band of sun. The fingers, slightly curved, lay in shade; suddenly the glove darkened; beyond the window, a shadow spread across the grass; a moment later the glove glowed brilliant white. Or it lay on its side across Emily’s lap, as she sat in the glider with her legs tucked under and sunlight on her knees.
It stayed so still that sometimes, as I watched it lying there, I imagined it contained an artificial hand, stiff and shiny, like the one I’d seen a few years ago in a department store window, lying on the floor next to the foot of a mannequin with red hair. At other times, when she lowered it carelessly, I would see her lips tighten and small lines appear between her eyebrows. Then I would imagine sharp strokes of pain branching through the hand, like flashes of lightning.
Once, as she sat reading, I saw her right hand move across the desk to the back of the gloved hand and begin to scratch. As if startled awake, she snatched away her hand, glancing about as if she’d been caught in a shameful act. And once, when I left her on the porch to get a glass of water in the kitchen, where I sat talking with Mrs. Hohn, I returned to find Emily scratching furiously at the back of the glove, raking her close-trimmed nails across the cloth, over and over, while a flush showed at the top of her cheek and a coil of hair shook on her neck.
One warm afternoon I was sitting on the glider, holding a book open on my lap as I gazed across the street. Emily sat beside me, with her gloved hand resting in her lap. Beyond the porch posts it was a brilliant blue day. Across the street a small group of girls were jumping rope; the rope slapping the sidewalk sounded like sharply clapping hands. A squirrel skittered across the porch roof. Emily shifted her legs. I glanced at the glove, which hadn’t moved, and looked back at the street.
“You’re making it worse,” I heard her say, in a voice so quiet that I wondered whether she had spoken at all. The glider creaked.
“Worse!” I whispered. “How could I—”
“By thinking about it,” she scarcely said. I could feel her looking at me, as if she were touching my face.
“I never think about it,” I said, turning suddenly, but Emily was leaning back with half-closed eyes.
That night, as I sat at my desk, it struck me that her words, which had barely crept out of silence, might have had another meaning. I had thought she meant that I was making it worse by drawing attention to something she wanted to forget. But now I wondered whether she’d meant that I was literally making it worse—harming her hand by my thoughts, which she could feel pushing painfully against it, like sticks.
A few days later, Emily and I were walking home under the maples. I was talking and gesturing with my right hand, which suddenly struck Emily’s left elbow. “Sorry!” I almost shouted.
Emily smiled at me. “You didn’t exactly kill me, you know,” she said, with a little laugh.
I gave a little laugh of my own. “So tell me,” I said. “What does the doctor say?”
Emily stiffened. In the silence I could hear her wide leather belt creaking as she walked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing? The guy just stands there, like an idiot?”
“Nothing good. Nothing that helps. They don’t know anything. Anything anything anything.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.”
One night I dreamed that Emily held out her gloved hand to me. “I can’t get it off,” she said. I fumbled with the buttons, which wouldn’t come undone, and as I unrolled the glove clumsily, for it clung tightly to her skin, I uncovered a smooth, pink, perfectly formed foot.
I could sense a change. In class she would lower her hand hesitantly to the desk, as if the slightest touch were more than she could bear. When she walked in the corridors, she cradled her books clumsily with her right arm, so that they were crushed up against her. Sometimes a book would slide slowly from the pile and fall to the floor with a sharp noise, like a shot. Then, before I could get to her, she would crouch down quickly, sitting awkwardly on her upraised heels, with one knee higher than the other, and balance her books in her lap while she reached for the fallen book with her right hand.
That was what I saw; but there must have been many things I didn’t see, small embarrassments and humiliations. She had already withdrawn from typing class; she no longer went to gym. When I passed her in the halls, she was always walking alone. People gave her a little distance. No one wanted to brush against the white glove. It was easier to pretend she wasn’t there.
I watched her—watched that glove. It clung to her hand like a growth on her skin. Emily was right: I could feel my thoughts scratching at the whiteness, like fingernails. Sometimes, glancing over, I would see a white wound, a bright gash in her flesh—and I would reproach myself, for after all, it was only a glove.
One rainy Saturday night I was sitting on the couch beside Emily in her dark living room, watching a black-and-white movie. A man in a rumpled suit and a dripping hat was walking along a deserted road at three in the morning, in a splattering downpour that seemed to be part of the rain outside. I had driven over after dinner in my father’s Dodge; Mr. and Mrs. Hohn had retired upstairs after the ten o’clock news. When her parents left, Emily had turned off the lamp on the table between the couch and the armchair, for her father always liked to have a light on when he watched television. The room wasn’t entirely dark; television light flickered on the mahogany lamp table, and light from a streetlamp entered beneath two slightly raised shades and lay in dim stripes along one wall. Emily sat on my left, with her cordovan loafers off and her legs tucked under. Her knees were toward me; the white glove lay stretched along her thigh. The whiteness grew brighter and dimmer as the movie changed.
I could hear the rain falling on the porch roof and dripping along the side windows, and I could hear the movie rain beating against the deserted road. Now and then there was a crack of thunder, which might have come from either place. It was the sort of night I liked best—the sound of movie rain, the different sound of real rain, the dark room touched by streetlight, Emily sitting quietly beside me with her legs tucked under, the peaceful house. But the glove lay there, invading the night, disrupting the dark with its irritating whiteness. I wished that she’d covered it with a blanket, or held it farther away. It was so close that I could have reached over and unbuttoned it without shifting more than a shoulder.
The movie ended. The last scene showed a close-up of the man, who was sitting at a bar with rain dripping from his hat. Emily rose, walked over to the television, and turned it off. She came back to the couch and sat down, stretching her legs out on the coffee table. Her ankles lay next to a little porcelain man playing an accordion. In the dark living room I could hear the rain, which was coming down quite hard, and it occurred to me that the exaggerated sound of the movie rain had actually been the sound of the real rain striking Emily’s porch roof and dashing itself against the bushes by the windows. We sat in the dark, as we often did, and Emily said, “It’s nice, sitting in the dark.” “Yes,” I said, “it’s nice.” The gloved hand lay in her lap. It rested on its side, the palm facing me; a dim streak of light touched her bare forearm and the wrist of the glove. I could see the two buttons very clearly.
“Look at that,” I said, and lightly touched her forearm where the dim light lay across it. She looked down at her arm, where my two fingers rested. I moved my fingers slowly down her forearm until the side of a finger touched the edge of the glove. Slowly I lifted one finger and stroked the white cloth. It was softer than I had imagined. “What are you doing,” Emily whispered. “Nothing,” I said. I began stroking the part of the glove that lay over her wrist. Emily’s right hand descended onto my fingers. She lifted my hand and placed it on her collarbone. With the fingers of her right hand she unbuttoned the top button of her shirt. Then she undid the button below. I felt the sudden edge of her white bra and the skin below her collarbone; my thumb touched the small connecting strap that joined the parts of the bra. I understood, with absolute clarity, that she was offering me her breasts in place of her hand. An immense pity came over me, for Emily Hohn, for the two of us sitting there like sad children, for the dark room and the spring rain, before anger seized me. She was hiding something from me—trying to put me off the scent. I reached down and began to unbutton the glove. Emily cried out—a single high sharp note, like the wail of an animal—then knocked my hand away and swung out of the couch. In the dark her hair looked wild, and for a moment, as she loomed over me, I had the sense that she was standing in the rain, glaring down at me, her hair dripping, her face shining, as I lay in a puddle at the side of the road with the rain beating against my face.
8
She was absent the next day. At home I dialed her number and hung up after the first ring. I was angry at myself in every way, but it was more complicated than that—I felt I’d been driven to the edge of what I could bear by the oppressive white glove. In all this, Emily wasn’t innocent—she knew something and refused to speak. Exactly what I’d hoped to accomplish by removing the glove was no longer clear to me. But the glove had disturbed the harmony between us, had introduced a note of uncertainty, of opacity. If I longed to see what lay underneath, it wasn’t simply in order to gratify a by now ferocious curiosity, but to release Emily and me from the spell of secrecy, to return us to peacefulness—for there was no peace between us anymore, only the mocking white glove. I hated that glove, hated the way it sat there without doing anything. I wanted to tear it off and set it on fire. Better yet, I would bury it in my backyard. Then a tree would grow, and every spring, when the maples put out their yellow-green and dark red flowers, the buds of my tree would open into white gloves.
When she appeared at school the following day, she rigorously avoided my gaze. She looked tired and drawn; her anger, if it was that, seemed a kind of sadness. I stayed out of her way. It was all fine with me—fine to smash things up, fine to be done with it all. High school would end, I would drag my way through the stupefying summer, then off to college and a new life, hey ho. It was all fine: dead and fine. She was already a memory—the girl with the white glove.
A week passed, the weather grew warmer. On the way home from school I heard the sound of hedge clippers and electric edgers. Someone was tarring a driveway. The smell of fresh tar mingled with bursts of cut grass. In school the windows were wide open and I could hear the dark cry of a mourning dove and the leathery smack of a baseball against a glove. One afternoon at my locker I heard a voice say, “Are you angry at me?” and I felt as if a hammer had struck the side of my head.
“Angry! No, why would I, not really, I thought you—”
“So would you like to”—she shrugged—“I don’t know, come over?”
Then I was walking home with her, through flickers of light and shade. On the front porch we sat on the glider. Mrs. Hohn brought out a plate of sugar cookies, each with a dab of jelly in the center, and glasses of iced tea. It was as if nothing had happened—had anything happened?—but I felt something unspoken in the air, like a heaviness. I glanced at Emily. She was staring straight ahead and holding a cookie in her hand, stroking it with her thumb. Sugary granules fell in her lap. I stared out past a square porch post, one side in sun and one in shade. Shadows of maple leaves moved on the sunny part. Emily said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”
“Thinking?”
“About—you know.” She shrugged her right shoulder—a quick impatient little shrug, which made the right side of her collar lift and fall. “I’m ready now.”
“Ready! I don’t know what you—”
She looked at me. “To—you know—show you.”
Her eyes burned at me—I had to look away.
“Only if you—” was all I could say.
It was to take place Saturday night. Her parents were going out and they wouldn’t be back before midnight. She’d been thinking about it, ever since that night, and she now saw that it was the right thing to do. She had feared I would never visit her again, once I knew. She’d been afraid, she’d been ashamed, but she was no longer that way. Her mother wanted it kept a secret. Her mother would kill her. But Emily trusted me. It was meant to be.
“There’s just one thing,” she said.
“Which is?”
“Whether you’re really sure.”
“You mean whether I’m sure you—”
“I mean sure you really want to.”
“What makes you think—”
“It’s just that it’s not—it isn’t what you think.”
“I don’t think anything.”
She threw me a look. “I mean it might really bother you. I mean more than you think.”
“But you—you’re the one—”
“It’s you—it’s you—you don’t like it when things—you know, when things—”
“When things—”
“When things aren’t—when they’re not—not the way you—”
And an irritation came over me, for it was as if I were the one being tested.
“Oh, don’t worry about me. But are you sure you—”
“Oh yes—yes—I mean if you’re sure you—”
This was on a Tuesday. During the rest of the week we fell into our old habits with a kind of gratitude. It was early June; under the maple leaves Emily walked through trembling spots of sun with a light jacket tied around her waist. From the porch I watched the girls across the street jumping rope. Overhead a squirrel scampered across a telephone wire and leaped onto a branch. In the warm summery air I could hear the smack of the rope, the soft clatter of a basketball against a backboard, the slam of a wooden screen door. Beside me, on the glider, Emily sat with her legs tucked under. Her black flats rested on the floor of the porch and her gloved hand lay in her lap. She was wearing a rose-colored shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly above her elbows and a tartan-plaid skirt held in place at the side by a gigantic safety pin the size of a pocket comb. On the green wicker table, a black tin tray painted with pink flowers held a pitcher of pale yellow lemonade in which dark yellow slices of lemon floated. We talked about a paper for English, and her friend Debby’s troubles at home, and the summer. She wished she could go on a family trip the way she used to in her childhood—she missed that camp in New Hampshire—while I argued that summer was a perfect time for doing absolutely nothing. “What do you mean by ‘nothing’?” Emily asked. The rope slip-slapped. In the gleaming windshield of a parked DeSoto, I could see a perfect reflection of green leaves, brown branches, and blue sky. “Nothing,” I said, “is the least amount of effort over the greatest amount of time.” “That,” said Emily, “is so—” and burst out laughing. The glider creaked. The sun shone down.
9
On Friday night I played Scrabble with the Hohns on the dining room table, under the little brass chandelier with six bulbs shaped like flames. Beside the table stood a wheeled cart on which lay a plate of homemade peanut butter cookies and four glasses of limeade, each at a different level. “Don’t,” Mrs. Hohn said, glancing at Emily. I stared at my tiles, which were not promising. Later, when it was time for me to go, all three of them stood in the little front hall. The wooden door was open, and through the screen door I could see dark leaves shining green beside a streetlight, and a pale band of sky over the black rooftops. “Night, Will,” Mr. Hohn said. “Drive safe, now.” “Good night, Will,” Mrs. Hohn said, raising her hand shoulder-high and bending her fingers twice. “And thank you for keeping Em company tomorrow night. Not that she isn’t perfectly capable of taking care of herself, Lord knows. My big girl.” She placed an arm around Emily’s shoulders and looked at me fondly. “You’re all so grown up now! I can hardly believe it.”
When I drove over to the Hohns’ on Saturday evening, Emily opened the door. Her parents had already left. For a while we sat on the faded pink cushions of the glider, in the warm dusk. It was the time of day when leaves are dark and the sky is watery pale. The world seems unable to make up its mind, as if at any second it might become deep night or a new day. Suddenly the streetlights came on. “I’ve never seen that before!” Emily cried. I said, “I can’t really remember whether I have or not. It’s strange. Wouldn’t I remember something like that?” “When I was little,” Emily said, “I once saw it raining on one side of the street—right over there—and not on this side. It was magical. I ran over to touch the rain and then I ran back into the sun. And then, a few years later, maybe seventh grade, when I remembered it, I couldn’t be sure it had really happened. I couldn’t feel the memory, you know what I mean? And I still can’t be sure, even though”—she waved her hand rapidly in front of her eyes—“oh, let’s go inside, I hate these idiotic bugs.”
I followed her into the living room and sat down next to her on the dark blue couch beside Mr. Hohn’s armchair, with its slightly sagging cushion and its yellow hexagonal pencil lying on one arm. On the coffee table stood the little accordion player. His head was tilted to one side and he was looking at me with a mad grin. I leaned back, but Emily stood up and said, “Let’s go upstairs!” I followed her up the carpeted stairs, sliding my hand along the dark banister. At the landing I glanced at the painting, but it was hidden behind the glare of its glass. For some reason I thought: Now I will never know. In Emily’s room I pulled out the wooden desk-chair and sat with my arms crossed on the back. Emily sat on the side of the bed. Her feet hung just above the floor. The gloved hand lay in her lap.
She patted the bed beside her and said, “Sit over here.” Carefully I made my way to the bed and sat down. “There’s no use waiting,” she said. Her voice sounded excited and weary at the same time.
She lifted the gloved hand slowly from her lap, as if it weighed a lot, and turned her forearm so that the two white buttons were exposed.
“All I ask,” she said, “is that you promise me one thing.”
I thought about it. “All right, I promise.” I looked at her. “So what do I have to—”
“That you won’t hate me.”
“Hate you!” It struck me that I shouldn’t be having this conversation, that things were taking a wrong turn. “Why would I—”
“Because it’s bad. It’s not what you think. It’s—wrong.”
“Wrong? That’s a strange thing to—”
“I didn’t want you to know. But you want to. You want to.”
“But not if—”
“You’re always thinking about it. Judging me. Holding it against me.”
“That’s not—I’m not holding—”
“Always looking. Making it worse.”
“But that’s—”
“Promise.”
“I promise—I promise—but listen—Emily—” I stood up and began pacing up and down in front of her, like a man in a hotel room in a movie. “You don’t—not if you—I mean, I don’t have to—”
“But you do. You do. You have to. I know you. That’s—who you are. You have to. Everything was so fine, and now—”
“It’s still fine. And you’re bound to get better, I’m sure the doctor—”
“It’s not like that—you don’t know. You want everything to be a certain way. But it isn’t. It isn’t. Look. Look. I’ll show you.”
Swiftly, angrily, she undid one white button. The glove seemed to expand slightly, as if it had been closed very tight. She began fumbling with the second button, the one closer to her hand. “Don’t just stand there,” she said fiercely. “Help me.” I sat down next to her and began working the button through the hole, which was stretched to a thin line. The glove was bound so tight that it must have chafed her wrist, which looked a bit red, unless it was my tugging and pulling that was bringing the blood to the surface.
“I think I’ve got it—wait—Emily—just a—there!” The glove was now open at the wrist, though I could see nothing of the hand itself. “That must be a relief. Do you want me to—”
“Just help me get this—”
The glove seemed to be moving, rippling a little, as if, released from the buttons, it was stretching its muscles. I grasped the edge near the bottom, while Emily pulled at the fingers. The glove seemed stuck, and I imagined that it would always be like this—the glove on the hand, the frantic tugging and pulling, Emily and I on the edge of the bed, day after day, forever—but all at once something gave way and the glove slipped quickly from the hand.
“See!” she said, holding her head away, as if her hand might do something to her.
The hand was thickly covered by crinkly dark hair, which grew more sparsely on the fingers and the palm. Through twists of hair, the skin on the back of the hand looked raw and shiny, as though it were wet. Smaller, tightly curling hairs grew in the spaces between the fingers and in the grooves of the finger joints. An ointment or secretion glistened on the thumb knuckle. Not far from the hand, the glove lay on the bed, its bottom wide open, like a mouth.
“Now you’ll never—” she cried. For a moment I thought she was going to swing her hand against my face. I leaned away from her, keeping my eye on the glove, in which I could see bits of hair and wet-looking stains. “You hate me!” she said bitterly, and when I raised my eyes I saw in her face an appalling sweetness, as if she were asking me to forgive her.
10
I woke late Sunday morning with a tickle in my throat; by mid-afternoon my eyes were burning and I had a temperature of 102. All that week I stayed in bed, shivering and sweating. Through heavy-lidded eyes I saw my mother’s delicate fingers holding before me a glass thermometer with a silver tip. Worst of all was a sensation of itching all over my body, as if clumps of hair were growing. Then it was over, through my window screens I could hear the sound of two separate lawnmowers, and I returned to school on Monday, nine days after my visit to Emily. When I entered homeroom I saw her sitting there the way she always did, staring straight ahead. Her gloved hand rested on the desk. I tried to catch her eye but she did not turn her head. In English I kept looking over at her, but she was always turned away; at the lockers I started toward her but stopped. In her room that night I hadn’t known what to do. After a while I’d helped her on with her hideous glove and buttoned it tight. My hands itched, and I had the sensation that my fingertips were cracking apart, bursting with hairs. “I have to go,” I said suddenly, and didn’t move, then abruptly left. At home I took a shower and rubbed my hands and body hard with a scratchy washcloth. When I looked at myself in the mirror, my chest was red and raw-looking.
School was nearly over. For the next week and a half I saw her always partly turned away, as if she’d become a profile. At home I studied intensely and without interest for final exams. I was tired of my room, tired of the town, sick of everything—I wanted high school to end. One hot night I woke suddenly in the dark. It was nearly two in the morning. I dressed quickly, crept out of my room and into the attached garage, and slowly raised the door. At Emily’s house all the windows were dark. They shone like obsidian in the glow of a streetlight. Had I expected her light to be on, had I wanted her to be waiting for me? I thought of the night when I’d broken into her house and entered her room, and as I watched the front porch from my father’s car I understood that this time I had come out only to sit awhile, as if I were looking for something that had once been there.
One afternoon in August I emerged from a new bookstore in the center of town and saw Emily across the street. I stepped back into the shade of the entranceway. She was walking with a girl I knew. They were wearing jeans rolled up to mid-calf, low white sneakers without socks, and plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Emily had on a straw sun-hat I had never seen before. She was laughing—a carefree, easy laugh. On her left hand she wore the white glove. I wanted to run across the street and shout at her that everything was all right, she could stop hating me now, things were still the same, weren’t they, we could walk along the sidewalk under the maple trees through spots of sun the way we always did and sit on the glider in the warm shade of her front porch forever, but Emily and her friend turned under an awning and entered a store, and later that afternoon, as I leaned back on my elbows at the beach and stared out at a sandbar with a white-and-red beach ball on it, I felt that I was about to understand something of immense importance, everything was about to become clear to me, but a boy came running along the sandbar and kicked the beach ball and I watched it fly lazily into the blue air, rising slower and slower until it stopped and seemed to float there before falling toward the shallow green-brown water.