Frances ran her eyes along the smiling doctor’s lean, tanned neck and arms, then bolted inside the house and into her bed. After a long period of silence during which she waited, ears attuned, she heard a creaking step or two, then voices. A door whined: Ray and Mark Carol were descending the basement stairs.
“Frances!” Ray called out. “I’m going to show Doctor Carol my game-room!” She thought his voice sounded tense, but could not be sure. Did Ray really seek Carol’s friendship? Frances was too troubled to know. The men’s grit-sounding shoe steps echoed down the stair cavity, Ray’s voice still audible: “Did you know the average career of a Red Baron pilot was only two weeks?”
Closing her eyes to put the fog at bay, wrapping herself in the sheet, she imagined Ray and the doctor playing board-games or re-creating a battle scene, possibly Verdun. After some time, her body softened into the narrow bed; Frances suspected she would rise the next morning to clean the downstairs game-table of a litter of glue, popsicle sticks, drink cups, and other traces of the men’s evening together, but she would not be able to discern the character of that time, nor the degree of suspicion between the men, nor why, in fact, the doctor’s presence jolted her so.
Frances swam in the sheet. Now, the components of night spread as if possessing a rolling mass, and, as if the mass contained her, too, Frances pushed upward, struggling against the town’s grogginess, fog, and sparklike angers that burst for brief moments in her mind as if upon Munson’s wide horizon. A longing arose for her sister who had departed years ago, and for Missie, as did a powerful wish for radishes; she listened outside to a screech of some unknown critter hurtling across the neighborhood yards.
Then, unable to stop herself, Frances deeply imagined the kiss of Doctor Mark Carol, which would have its own texture and taste like chalk or lima beans. As she turned in the bed, Munson’s pressures and demands were upon her as well, powerful as squeezing fists. “But I am Munson!” she cried, giggling too because it was true. She felt folks rustling very close, glum, and whispering inside her; Doctor Carol’s eyes smiled amongst them, no different from her eyes at all. It frightened Frances. She was not herself with all Munson’s voices inside her, and not herself without them, either. She thought sadly of the many shoe-and-skirt sets purchased downtown, and how difficult it would be to depart for good, leaving these behind.
Sleeping, she quickly dreamed herself wandering near a beveled wall in a restaurant not unlike Ming’s tavern, dark and empty. She lay motionless atop a bright orange platform of churning machinery that roared beside her, and she watched oily gears turning larger gears.
She woke in the bed, lost. It was true, perhaps: she must begin her life, but in what way? Doctor Carol’s pearly face appeared again in her mind and she pulsed, lowering herself to the mattress again with a strongly sensual movement, sleeping and waking repeatedly.