This is their fifth day on the road. Four motels, interchangeable, with tawny, fire-retardant carpeting, are all that have intervened. This morning, Day Five, they drive through a strong brown and yellow landscape, ferociously eroded, and it cheers Barbara a little to gaze out at this scene of novelty after seventeen hundred miles of green hills and ponds and calm, staring cattle. “I really should keep a dictionary in the car,” she says to Peter, another languid exhalation.

The car, with its new car smell, seems to hold both complaint and accord this morning. And silence. Barbara sits looking out at the rain, wondering about the origin of the word drizzle-a likeable enough word, she thinks, when you aren’t actually being drizzled upon. Probably onomatopoetic. Drizzling clouds. Drizzled syrup on pancakes. She thrashes around in her head for the French equivalent: bruine, she thinks, or is that the word for fog? “I hate not knowing things,” she says aloud to Peter. Musing. And arranging her body for the next five minutes.

At age fifty-three she is a restless traveler, forever shifting from haunch to haunch, tugging her blue cotton skirt smooth, examining its weave, sighing and stretching and fiddling in a disapproving way with the car radio. All she gets is country music. Or shouting call-in shows, heavy with sarcasm and whining indignation. Or nasal evangelists. Yesterday she and Peter listened briefly to someone preaching about the seven F’s of Christian love, the first F being, to her amazement, the fear of God, the feah of Gawd. Today, because of the rain, there’s nothing on the radio but ratchety static. She and Peter have brought along a box of tapes, Bach and Handel and Vivaldi, that she methodically plays and replays, always expecting diversion and always forgetting she is someone who doesn’t know what to do with music. She listens but doesn’t hear. What she likes are words. Drizzle, she repeats to herself, bruiner. But how to conjugate it?

In the back seat are her maps and travel guides, a bundle of slippery brochures, a book called Place Names of Texas and another called Texas Wildlife. Her reference shelf. Her sanity cupboard. She can’t remember how she acquired the habit of looking up facts; out of some nursery certitude, probably, connecting virtue with an active, inquiring mind. People must never stop learning; once Barbara had believed fervently in this embarrassing cliché, was the first in line for night-school classes, tuned in regularly with perhaps a dozen others to solemn radio talks on existentialism, Monday nights, seven to eight. And she has, too, her weekly French conversation group, now in its fourteenth year but soon to disband.