So as Wanda and Dotty and Molly approached the car, Molly quickened her last three strides and opened the front door, and Wanda followed Dotty into the back seat. Bruce drove out of the circular driveway and at the road turned right instead of left and Molly said nothing, waited in the sudden and brief quickening of her heart and breath, but Wanda and Dotty said nothing about the turn and the direction Bruce took, did not even give it an instant of divining silence: they kept talking and Dotty laughed at her fingers, said they were too drunk to roll a joint. Then Wanda and Dotty were gone and Bruce was driving to her house and Molly was trying to know what she ought to feel now, alone with him, or trying to feel what she ought to feel, or know what she did feel. She was not sober, and she was shy as with a stranger, and she tried to say something in the silence, and having to try tightened her stomach, and opened her to remorse and yearning. For they ought to be touching, and gentle, and they ought to fill the car with whatever sounds lovers made.

  It was Bruce who finally spoke, when he stopped at the top of her driveway and turned off the engine and put his arms around her and kissed her, his lips open but his tongue withheld, a kiss so tender that it felt shy. Then he looked at her and asked if she would like to go to the beach tomorrow, in late evening, when the sun was setting and everyone had gone home and they could walk on it with the seagulls and sandpipers. She said yes and kissed him; a kiss she willed herself to give; yet when she felt and tasted his mouth her tension dissolved and she leaned into him, held him, and for those moments felt what she had wanted to, what she had believed during the quiet ride that she ought to: a yielding of herself to him, to his knowing her, and from his hard chest against her breasts she drew the comfort she was certain now that he gave. Then she went inside and heard his car start and back down over gravel as she climbed the stairs and quietly passed her mother’s closed door, and went into her room. Almost at once she slept.

  Now in the car with Bruce she sat again in tactile silence, and the car seemed strange too, smelling of an engine in the summer heat, and upholstery, and summer air coming through the windows, for until she actually entered it the car smelled forever in her mind of marijuana and cigarettes and the exhaled odor of beer; last night the windows had been closed; Bruce had said: You can’t open windows when girls are in the back seat.

  “I read all afternoon,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “In the hammock.”

  “What did you read?”

  “For Whom the Bell Tolls. Or a lot of it. By Hemingway.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “No. We read A Farewell to Arms. In English.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It’s sad. But it’s good.”

  “I think this one will be sad too. It’s so exciting, I can’t stop reading it. But I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s in Spain. In a civil war. I don’t even know when.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “They’re fighting the fascists.”

  “That’s good.”

  He climbed up away from the river, through a neighborhood with old trees, toward the highway.

  “And there are Communists. And Robert Jordan is an American fighting with them. He’s a Spanish teacher. Can you believe it? From University of Montana. Can you see Howell going off to war?”

  “I’m trying to.”

  He entered the three-lane highway and drove northeast; she had never ridden alone with him, on a drive in daylight, and she was relieved when he moved into the middle lane and stayed at fifty-five miles an hour while on both sides cars and trucks passed them.

  “I don’t know shit about history,” she said. “I’ve never had a history course that got up to World War I.”

  “Neither have I. The school year ends.”

  “It’s crazy. There was this important war going on, and everybody’s ready to die for it. Even this American, Robert Jordan. And I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

  “Knowing about it? Or that it happened?”

  “Knowing about it. It had to be important for the people in it.”

  She looked out her open window at the green hills and trees, then a dirt-streaked camper passed them, moving across her vision; the rear license plate was from North Carolina.

  “Heading to Maine,” she said. “Or Canada.”

  Bruce moved behind the camper, then left the highway and drove toward the sea, and quietly she watched the houses they passed: small yards, shaded by trees, most of them pines, and small houses: a juxtaposition of Americans she knew nothing about, people who were called working people because they did the real work, whatever that was, some fathers mowing lawns, others sitting with beer on their front steps, the wives probably inside cooking the dinners. Someone had told her that blue-collar people ate before six, then drank beer. Their children were on the lawns, with gloves and baseballs or toys, and she believed she could see in their faces some predetermined life, some boundary to their dreams, enclosed as tightly as their bodies were by their lawns and small houses. They were five minutes from the beach, these families, and Molly’s notion was that they never went there. That they received the ocean’s weather, and its smell too when the wind blew from the east, yet some routine of their lives—work, habit, or something of the spirit— held them at home as surely as it contained their hopes. She had never seen anyone like them at the beach. In the faces of a group of teenagers who stood under a tree and watched her and Bruce passing, she saw a dullness she thought was sculpted by years of television, of parents who at meals and in the evenings had nothing to say to them, nothing to teach them; and breathing now the first salt air coming through her window, she thanked her mother. Then the houses were behind her and on both sides of the car the tall grass of a salt marsh gently swayed, its green darkening in the setting sun, and she touched Bruce’s shoulder, squeezed its hard width, and said: “Maybe I’ll major in history.”

  He looked at her, and before he looked at the road again, the relieved expectancy in his eyes reminded her that this touch was their first since last night. She left her hand resting on his shoulder, moving with its motion as he steered.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said. “It’s like the whole world started fifteen years ago. My mother told me about Vietnam. And old movies.”

  “And old songs.”

  “Oh: those. They were before her time. She likes jazz.”

  “I’ve been wanting to tell you something for a long time. I’m sorry your father took off.”

  “ I cursed him today.”

  “On the phone?”

  “I’ve never talked to him on the phone. I cursed him at the kitchen table.”

  “What’s it like? With just a mother?”

  “I don’t know. She’s all I’ve ever had. Look, the tide’s in.”

  They crossed a bridge over a tidal stream of rapid blue water moving at the tops of the banks. With her hand on his shoulder he turned north, then east, and parked facing a sand dune. In front of the car he took her hand and they climbed the dune. He was right: the beach was empty save for gulls standing in groups, their tails to the sea, and sandpipers darting across the sand. The surf was high and loud, and washed far up the slope of the beach. Beyond the white foam of the breakers and green of the shallow water the sea was deep blue to the horizon where it met the arcing cover of the sky, a clear and lighter blue. She wished she had remembered to bring her shawl, but her legs in denim and boots were warm; and her face, and her arms and body in the cotton shirt, still held that afternoon’s slow burning in the sun, and the cool salt air soothed it. But soon she would be cold.

  Holding hands, they descended the dune with short quick steps, then walked toward the surf. Sandpipers flew away from them, low over the beach; the seagulls in their path became restless, walked as a group farther up the beach; one flew ahead of the rest, then a second, and they both landed, but the others walked only far enough to allow Molly and Bruce to pass behind them. At the edge of the surf, where it hissed and spent itself at their feet, Molly shivered. Bruce put his arm around her and held her against his side.

  “We should have brought sweatshirts,” he said.

  “Nobody knows what to wear to the beach.”

  “In New England, anyway. Let’s keep moving.”

  She put her arm around his waist, and they walked south; his body shielded her from the breeze; in the distance she could see the ferris wheel at Salisbury, where the beach ended at the Merrimack River; in front of them the sandpipers flew and landed, and she said: “What are we doing?”

  “Walking on the beach. Getting ready to freeze our asses off. Maybe we’ll get hungry.”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  “Only for eight years.”

  “Belinda’s big brother. You don’t know me.”

  “I know you’re a fox.”

  “For eight years?”

  “Three.”

  “So what are we doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “In the book. That I was reading this afternoon. They only have three days.”

  “Who?”

  “The lovers.”

  “Why?”

  “He has to blow up a bridge. Probably he’ll get killed.”

  “How does he know that?”

  “He doesn’t. But he feels it. And a gypsy woman sees it in his hand. If we just had three days I’d know what we were doing. Did I tell you I’m a virgin? If you can call it that now.”

  “No. But I knew.”

  She stopped, releasing his waist, and faced him.

  “How?” With a new shame now, seeing Shelley at the beer cooler— I’m fucked up—and probably she had made love for years, did it all the time with what’s-his-name, and Bruce had been with girls like her—I’m fucked up—and then last night she had been on the couch, a naked clumsy frightened—

  “Hey. Hey, Molly.” He held her biceps. “I could just tell, that’s all. I was surprised. I mean that you wanted to go upstairs. I thought that’s why you wanted to go. And you took me. Out of all those guys.”

  “Was I that shitty?”

  “Don’t say that. It’s—” He looked above her head at the sky, and squinted his eyes against the last of the sun. “Sweet,” he said. “You’re sweet.”

  “Really?”

  “What do you think I’m here for? Not shitty, Molly. Sweet.”

  “Is that what you’re here for?”

  “Jesus. Let’s walk back. When that sun goes, we’ll freeze.”

  He turned her and held her on his lee side and they walked north. She watched the rose and gold above the distant pine trees that hid the sun.

  “I didn’t come out here to make love,” she said.

  “Maybe I didn’t either. Why did you?”

  “To see if I wanted to. No. To understand last night. If it was just coke and beer. Can we just—”

  Then she watched the sand ahead of their feet and listened to the roaring and smacking waves to her right and looked at the shadows cast now by the dunes. Far beyond them the pines in the sunset were darker; soon the red sky at their crowns would be twilight, the trees black.

  “Just what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what’s so bad. I don’t know.”

  “Let’s go to one of those beach stores. We’ll get sweatshirts. With I Heart New Hampshire or something. Then let’s go to Salisbury. Eat. Ride the roller coaster.”

  “No roller coaster.”

  “The ferris wheel.”

  “Okay.”

  Their sweatshirts were red with a white breaker on the chest and, beneath it, in white block letters: Seabrook Beach, N.H.; in the store, they pulled them over their heads, and when Bruce’s hair and face pushed through the collar, he said: “Seabrook Beach, home of the nuclear power plant they can’t get built; and if they do there are no—I repeat no—escape routes.”

  He paid for them, and as they walked to the car he said: “So maybe we just have three days anyway.”

  “It’s not built yet,” she said as he drove out of the parking lot: “And if we only had three days we wouldn’t need that rubber.”

  “What rubber?”

  “In your wallet.”

  “You didn’t see that.”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  “Holy shit. You know something?”

  “What.”

  “This is the weirdest first date I’ve ever had in my fucking life.”

  “Me too,” she said. “In my sucking life.”

  “Molly.”

  She smiled and lit a cigarette, passed it to him, and lit one for herself. She did not know what it was: the darkness spreading in the sky, the headlights now of cars, her hunger for Italian sausage and egg rolls, but now they were all she knew and wanted, those and the ferris wheel circling above the lights and crowd and at its top showing you the white breakers and black sea and the paler dark sky at the horizon; and she felt too a control, a power, new and solid: she could tease him. She could do whatever she wished. When he stopped at a red light she leaned over and kissed him, mouths open, a brief kiss, and she felt she was his girl.

  Felt it too with the taste of egg rolls and hot mustard and duck sauce in her mouth as the ferris wheel began its slow circle, and she was warm in her sweatshirt—was any material softer than a new sweatshirt?—and their seat went back and up, Bruce’s arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist, tightly there between him and the wood of the seat as they rose above the people in the streets and the six policemen leaning against their motorcycles, and the buildings—bars and short-order restaurants and food and game stands—above the lights, but not beyond the voices of the crowd and the roller coaster’s clacking roar and disco music from one of the hurtling rides, and the smells of hot grease and sausage; up to the top of the circle where for moments she saw the sea but not as she knew it and loved it. For the breakers were hidden by buildings and there were too many bright lights so all she saw was an expanse of black, too wide and its length forever, without horizon, for with so many lights there was only the low sky above the amusement park. It frightened her, that large black space that was not sea and sky at all, yet she stared at it, as though looking at the night of her death. Then the blackness was gone behind roofs and lighted walls and her legs hung over the street as backward she circled down past the man controlling the wheel, then up again, and as they rose she said to Bruce, loudly over the street voices and the roller coaster and screams from it and the cacophony of music from rides and booths and nightclubs: “Watch the ocean!”

  Holding him tightly she watched it with him, her face beneath and parallel to his, and she glanced at his mouth and left eye to see if he saw it too, felt it, but she could not tell, and she looked again at that black space and tried to imagine fish in it, and ships on it, but all she saw was Molly Cousteau, not scattered ashes now, nor ashes drawn back and contained again by flesh and voice, and eyes with vision; but Molly as one tiny ash on the surface of the earth, looking into the depth of the universe, at the face of eternity.

  So she told him. Not on the wheel, or when they left it and moved through the crowd on the streets to his car, and not while he slowly drove, changing gears, with the congestion of cars leaving Salisbury, then merging and increasing speed and the spaces between them, stopping once more at a traffic-lighted intersection, before dividing, taking separate roads to the north and south and west, and Bruce reached the highway and its middle lane, and she felt his body relax even as he lit a cigarette and settled in his seat. Felt like his girl again, as she told him of looking at death from the ferris wheel, felt like his girl when he listened, and said he had not felt it on the wheel, had felt only her against him, and her arm behind his waist, and her hand pressing his side, and himself holding her. But he had felt it before. Earlier in the summer, at night, in a strange mood, not sad or depressed or anything like that, but strange, and he wanted to be alone and drove without music to the sea and walked on the beach, at Seabrook, where they had walked at sunset, and he had stood looking at the ocean, at its huge deep blackness coming at him, coming straight to him till it stopped on the sand, and he was afraid. Really afraid. And he tried to talk himself out of it, because at first he thought what he feared was something stupid like a sudden tidal wave, the sea rising to take him and pull him away. Or that the sea could actually decide to drown him. That it was alive and could do it if it wanted to, just send in a big wave to knock him down and a current to take him under and out. Then he realized it wasn’t drowning. It was that he felt so small. Tiny. And so empty. He tried to remember school, where he did well, and being class president, and having friends all around him. He did not have a girl then but he tried to remember old ones, their faces, the way they smiled at him. But he could not make the girls real so he could feel them, and he could not make school and his friends real, or even Belinda and his parents and his bedroom. So he could not feel himself. Except as that tiny empty breathing thing under stars in the biggest sky he had ever seen, frightened by the sound of the breaking waves and all that black out there. He turned his back on it and walked as quickly as he could over the sand. Only pride, as though he were being watched, kept him from running. On the ride home he played a cassette; the front windows were open, and his speakers were behind the back seat, and he turned the volume all the way up, so the music was louder than the rushing air.

  She felt like his girl too when he parked on a country road not far from her house, and unbuckled his seat belt and she unbuckled hers. The car was on grass beside the road and under the branches of trees, and dark woods were on both sides of the road, a different darkness here, a quiet enclosing private dark that turned her to his lips and hands. His hands on her body were slow and as gentle as they could be, with the gearshift and hand brake between them. Then he stopped and pulled off his sweatshirt and she pulled off hers and they tossed them into the back seat. She received his tongue, and his hands unbuttoning her top button, then the next and the next until he reached her waist and she drew in her stomach muscles so he could unbutton the jeans, and with her legs she pushed herself upward so he could pull the zipper down. Then she pushed her jeans beneath her knees, until they stopped, and were crumpled at her feet, lower than the high leather calves of her boots, and she saw herself sitting on a toilet. But then he unbuttoned the lowest button of her shirt and helped her arms out of its sleeves and dropped it onto the back seat, and they embraced above the brake and gearshift, and she heard his side hitting the steering wheel. As they kissed she unbuttoned his shirt, unbuckled his belt, then he opened his door and took off his shirt and was gone, around the front of the car, his brown chest darker than the air above the road, lighter than the trees, as he moved to her door and opened it and with his toes pushed off his sneakers and stepped out of his jeans and scooped them and his shoes from the earth and shoved them behind her seat. Then he was holding the calves of her boots; and slowly still, gently, he turned her toward him, and pulled off one boot at a time and put it on the floor behind her, and lifted her jeans from her ankles and laid them in the back seat. The brake was against her back as he drew her pants down her legs and she watched them, pale in his hand above her, as he dropped them over the seat. He stepped out of his underpants and crouched to enter the car, then murmured something, not a word, only a sound like pain or anguish, a sound more intense than that of mere hurry in the quiet of the trees, and he reached into the back seat, and she listened to his wallet sliding out of denim, then the tearing of foil. Her back was still against the brake, and she said: “How do we —”