Behind her, the door closed with a light, firm double report. Therese turned and found Carol looking at her puzzledly, her lips parted a little as if in surprise, and Therese felt that in the next second Carol would ask, “What are you doing here?” as if she had forgotten, or had not meant to bring her here at all.
“There’s no one here but the maid. And she’s far away,” Carol said, as if in reply to some question of Therese’s.
“It’s a lovely house,” Therese said, and saw Carol’s little smile that was tinged with impatience.
“Take off your coat.” Carol took the scarf from around her head and ran her fingers through her hair. “Wouldn’t you like a little breakfast? It’s almost noon.”
“No, thanks.”
Carol looked around the living room, and the same puzzled dissatisfaction came back to her face. “Let’s go upstairs. It’s more comfortable.”
Therese followed Carol up the white wooden staircase, past an oil painting of a small girl with yellow hair and a square chin like Carol’s, past a window where a garden with an S-shaped path, a fountain with a blue-green statue appeared for an instant and vanished. Upstairs, there was a short hall with four or five rooms around it. Carol went into a room with green carpet and walls, and took a cigarette from a box on a table. She glanced at Therese as she lighted it. Therese didn’t know what to do or say, and she felt Carol expected her to do or say something, anything. Therese studied the simple room with its dark-green carpet and the long green pillowed bench along one wall. There was a plain table of pale wood in the center. A game room, Therese thought, though it looked more like a study with its books and music and albums and its lack of pictures.
“My favorite room,” Carol said, walking out of it. “But that’s my room over there.”
Therese looked into the room opposite. It had flowered cotton upholstery and plain blond woodwork like the table in the other room. There was a long plain mirror over the dressing table, and throughout a look of sunlight, thought no sunlight was in the room. The bed was a double bed.
And there were military brushes on the dark bureau across the room.
Therese glanced in vain for a picture of him. There was a picture of Carol on the dressing table, holding up a small girl with blond hair. And a picture of a woman with dark curly hair, smiling broadly, in a silver frame.
“You have a little girl, haven’t you?” Therese asked.
Carol opened a wall panel in the hall. “Yes,” she said. “Would you like a Coke?”
The hum of the refrigerator came louder now. Through all the house, there was no sound but those they made. Therese did not want the cold drink, but she took the bottle and carried it downstairs after Carol, through the kitchen and into the back garden she had seen from the window. Beyond the fountain were a lot of plants some three feet high and wrapped in a burlap bags that looked like something, standing there in a group, Therese thought, but she didn’t know what. Carol tightened a string that the wind had loosened. Stooped in the heavy wool skirt and the cardigan sweater, her figure looked solid and strong, like her face, but not like her slender ankles. Carol seemed oblivious of her for several minutes, walking about slowly, planting her moccasined feet firmly, as if in the cold flowerless garden she was at last comfortable. It was bitterly cold without a coat, but because Carol seemed oblivious of that, too, Therese tried to imitate her.
“What would you like to do?” Carol asked. “Take a walk? Play some records?”
“I’m very content,” Therese told her. She was preoccupied with something, and regretted after all inviting her out to the house, Therese felt. They walked back to the door at the end of the garden path.
“And how do you like your job?” Carol asked in the kitchen, still with her air of remoteness. She was looking into the big refrigerator. She lifted out two plates covered with wax paper. “I wouldn’t mind some lunch, would you?”
Therese had intended to tell her about the job at the Black Cat Theatre. That would count for something, she thought, that would be the single important thing she could tell about herself. But this was not the time.
Now she replied slowly, trying to sound as detached as Carol, though she heard her shyness predominating, “I suppose it’s educational. I learn how to be a thief, a liar, and a poet all at once.” Therese leaned back in the straight chair so her head would be in the warm square of sunlight.
She wanted to say, and how to love. She had never loved anyone before Carol, not even Sister Alicia.
Carol looked at her. “How do you become a poet?”
“By feeling things--too much, I suppose,” Therese answered conscientiously.
“And how do you become a thief?” Carol licked something off her thumb and frowned. “You don’t want any caramel pudding, do you?”