The Awakening Read online

  Taylor announced that Amanda was going to read for them.

  “Don’t let me stop you,” Hank said from behind his paper, but he was aware of the heavy silence in the room and knew he was supposed to give proper attention to the show. Slowly, he folded his paper, put it aside, then sat primly with his hands folded in his lap like a proper young gentleman.

  Amanda, wearing a prim little blue dress with a sedate lace collar, was standing perfectly straight before the two of them, holding her poetry book open. As he would have guessed, she read the most boring poems ever written: William Collins’s “Ode to Evening,” Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” He would have fallen asleep except that her reading gave him a chance to look at her: long, thick, lush lashes, a full mouth that moved enticingly as she talked. He listened to her voice, felt it caress the lovely words and wondered how it would sound if it were murmuring love words to him.

  But any love words she said would be to Taylor. Hank looked at Taylor and saw the man wasn’t enjoying her reading so much as judging it. He looked like a teacher with a student—not like a man listening to the woman he loved.

  Hank was aware that Amanda had stopped reading and he watched while she walked toward Taylor and handed him the book. She gave him a soft, tentative smile and said, “Please,” in almost a whisper. Hank felt a pang of jealousy as cold, unsmiling Taylor took the book from her. Hank thought that if Amanda had smiled and said please to him, he’d certainly smile back; in fact, he just might do anything she wanted. But Taylor just took the book, opened it and began to read John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.”

  While Taylor read in a monotonous voice, Hank watched Amanda, saw the way she looked at Taylor as if he were a god, as if he had the power of life and death, yet Taylor seemed to be oblivious to her adoration. It suddenly made Hank angry that Amanda should give so much and get so little in return. If she were his he’d give to her. He’d give all she could take and then some. If he were engaged to her he’d not spend his evenings reading poetry to her, he’d take her into the lanes where the jasmine grew and he’d kiss her while slipping that awful dress from her shoulders. He’d—

  “Dr. Montgomery?”

  He came out of his reverie to hear Amanda. She was holding out the book of poetry to him.

  “Perhaps you’d read something for us?”

  Hank was so deep in his thoughts that at first he didn’t understand what she was saying.

  “Dr. Montgomery is an economist,” Taylor said in that brittle way of his. “I doubt if poetry interests him.”

  Hank didn’t take the book but looked at Amanda, his eyes as hot as he was feeling, and he began to quote from William Butler Yeats.

  “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

  Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

  By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

  He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

  “How can those terrified vague fingers push

  The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

  And how can body, laid in that white rush,

  But feel the strange beating where it lies?”

  There was silence in the room when he stopped speaking, and he was aware only of the lovely blush stealing up Amanda’s neck and onto her face.

  “I cannot say that that was to my taste, Dr. Montgomery,” Taylor said in a remote voice. “Amanda!” he said sharply, making her turn her attention back to him. “I think you should read another selection.”

  Suddenly, Hank couldn’t bear to be in the same room with them. “If you will pardon me,” he said, and without waiting for anyone to do so, he left the room. He went outside, but even there he felt hemmed in, as if he were suffocating and couldn’t get enough air. He went to the big garage where his car was, and before he thought about what he was doing, he was in the Mercer and driving away.

  The cool wind on his face and body made him feel better. He drove down the rough dirt road, faster and faster still, pushing the Mercer to its limits, knowing that its brakes weren’t worth a damn, but he needed the speed and the feeling of freedom. He needed to put some distance between himself and that house. “…her thighs caressed,” he thought. “…fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs.”

  The car was doing sixty when he saw the girl. She was standing in the middle of the road, startled by the car’s headlights as she crossed. She just stood there, frozen in space, as Hank approached faster than she’d ever seen anything move.

  Hank had the reflexes of a race car driver, and he swerved to the right a foot before he hit her and plowed into a fence, tearing up posts for fifty feet as Hank used all his strength to slam on the brakes, trying to stop the speeding car. He took up about twenty feet of a row of Caulden’s hop plants before the car at last stopped.

  It took him a second to recover as he just sat there, staring at the hop field illuminated by the car lamps. Then he began to move, to pull hop vines and strings from around him so that he could get out the doorless side. His legs were weak but they gained strength as he started back to the road, so that he was running by the time he reached the girl.

  It was dark but he could see her sitting in the middle of the road. He didn’t think he’d hit her, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  “Are you all right?” he asked anxiously, kneeling in front of her.

  “I ain’t never seen somethin’ move that fast,” she said in wonder.

  As Hank inspected her, he smelled liquor on her breath and realized she was drunk. Gently, he took her arm and hauled her up. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

  Smiling, she collapsed against him, her body like rubber. “You the one stayin’ at the Cauldens’?”

  “I am. Come on with me. If I can get my car out I’ll take you home.”

  “Home with you? Amanda won’t like that.”

  “She’ll never notice,” he said, his arm about her waist as he supported her and led her to the car.

  He had to tear away more vines and string to make room enough to get her in the passenger seat.

  “Nice,” she murmured and leaned back against the leather seat.

  He spent another few minutes cleaning off the front of the car and inspecting the ground. It was dry and he thought he could get out without help. He bent the broken fencing back, then got in the car.

  The only light was from the moon and the headlamps, but he could see that the woman was young and pretty in a dark, flamboyant way. She wore heavily applied cosmetics on a face that was already strongly featured, but the red lipstick drew his attention to her lips.

  When she saw him looking, she smiled in a slow, seductive way. “I like a man who drives fast.”

  He started the engine and began to back out. “Where can I take you?”

  “Charlie’s Roadhouse,” she said.

  Hank hesitated for only a moment, then said, “All right.” It might make him feel better to see a little life. “Only if they don’t have poetry readings.”

  She laughed in a way that made him know that she’d been to Charlie’s Roadhouse several times before and knew there were no poetry readings.

  He enjoyed the ride to the roadhouse with her, enjoyed seeing a woman relaxed in the seat, not sitting stiffly and inhumanly. He liked seeing a woman who looked as if she might be able to laugh.

  The roadhouse was about five miles out of town, set a little back off the road behind a graveled parking lot, about three autos parked there now. The lights and the sound of laughter drew Hank inside.

  The girl had already got out by the time Hank had walked to her side. She was wearing a cheap red satin dress and her lipstick was smeared at one corner of her wide mouth, but the drive seemed to have cleared her head because she was standing on her feet more steadily.

  She took his arm and pressed her body close to his. She was well rounded and pleasing now, but in a few more years she’d be fat.

  “The gang’s gonna be green w