“I like watching from here. You have snow on your eyebrow. No, now it’s worse. You have snow on your glove.”

When he left, Catherine felt forlorn. Forlorn! The very word was like a bell. She was sitting alone in a cold tree, and everyone else was laughing, and sledding, and running up and down hills. He had said it, and there was no way he could unsay it. Catherine had vaguely expected to hear those words someday, just as she vaguely expected to hear “Will you marry me?”—she felt it was inevitable, there was no way around it—but they would be uttered by someone she could not even imagine. They had nothing whatever to do with anyone she knew, or with this town, or with this life. When she heard them, she would be somewhere else. She would not even be herself.

He had looked down strangely at her, lying in the snow. Now she would never know what he was thinking. She could never trust him. She wondered whether he had felt that way all of a sudden, or whether he had been feeling that way a long time. Once, in sophomore year, he had drawn a heart in the black wax of her dissecting pan. It had been a frog’s heart, with labels like PULMONARY VEINS and RIGHT AURICLE. He had drawn a feathered arrow going through it.

“Hey, are you all right?”

Catherine started; she had not heard Bev come up.

“Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine. What’s wrong with everybody tonight?”

“You’re sitting in a tree, Cath. Nobody else is sitting in a tree.”

“Well, I believe in Nature. I believe Americans ought to get back to Nature, like the Indians. God, can’t a poor working girl enjoy Nature without everybody having a conniption fit? Slaving in the factory nine to five, six days a week, ten children, my husband drunk every night—”

“Hell, honey, you think you got problems. My husband don’t drink, but I got ten drunk children. Listen, a bunch of us are going inside now, O.K.? I’ve had enough of Mother Nature for one night. Time to catch a little of the Sonia Holmes show. They’ve got Potato Frills, Cath. Suit yourself. I tried.”

Catherine watched them tramp down to the driveway and into the garage. The inner door opened, and she heard shouts and laughter and music: piano chords, not records. Only Roger and Bill Newmeyer stayed outside, sledding hard, over and over again, with a concentration and seriousness that seemed to her beautiful. Someone smoking a cigarette came up from the house—it was George Silko—and joined them for a time, but the spirit of pure, silent concentration had been broken, and soon all three went down to the house. Catherine was alone, in her tree.