"I don't think much," Lowry said seriously, "but there are pieces of things in my mind. Broken pieces. They buzz around like wasps and bother me."

Clara glanced up at him as if he'd admitted something too intimate.

"But I don't worry."

"I don't either," said Clara.

He laughed and she pressed herself against him. "Look," she said, "can I ask you something?"

"What?"

"How come you're here with me right now?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

Clara ran from him. She jumped down into the creek bed, where it was dry. "Look at this, Lowry," she said. It was part of an old barbed-wire fence, lying frigid and coated over with bleached gra.s.s. Lowry's look said clearly, So what? Clara said, "You would wonder how things get where they are. This thing here-think where it used to be. Over there's a bicycle tire somebody owned. Wouldn't you like to know how things end up where they do?"

"Maybe."

"They get in the water, then drift down here.... I'm so happy," Clara said exuberantly, hugging herself, "but I don't know why. I love everything the way it is. I love how things look." She actually felt her eyes sting with tears. Up on the bank Lowry sat down heavily and smoked his cigarette. He wore the faded brown trousers he had been wearing all summer and a tan shirt with rolled-up sleeves; he brought his knees up to lean on them and his ankles collapsed themselves in the gra.s.s, so that the outside of his feet were pressed flat against the ground. He looked as if he would never get up again and never care to. "You don't listen to me!" Clara said angrily. "G.o.dd.a.m.n you anyway!"

His gaze was mildly blue. She saw his teeth flash in a brief smile.

"You think I'm just something you picked up on the road, and when you can't find some b.i.t.c.h to lay around with you come around here and visit!- Oh, Christ," Clara said, heaving a large stone out into the water. She laughed and her shoulders rose in a long lazy shrug. "What do you think about when you're with them, then?"

"Clara, I don't think about anything."

"When you're with them?"

"Sometimes I don't remember who they are."

She liked that, but she did not let on. Instead she picked up another stone and threw it out into the water. It sank at once. "But I'm happy anyway," she said. "That's because I'm stupid. If I was smart I wouldn't be happy when everything is so rotten."

"What's rotten?" he said at once.

"Oh, nothing, nothing," she said, waving to dismiss him. She flicked her long hair out of her eyes. It fell far down her back and she'd washed it the day before, somehow expecting him to come, so she knew it must shine in the sunlight. She knew she was pretty and now she wanted to be beautiful. "When things get better I will be beautiful," she promised herself. If Lowry would stand still long enough and she could climb up into his arms and sleep there forever, the two of them entwined and not needing to look anywhere else, then she could relax: then she would grow up, she would become beautiful. She was standing now on a large flat rock near the water, which flowed in a fairly rapid stream in the center of the riverbed. She leaned over to see herself. There was a trembling vague image, not hers. She felt as if love were a condition she would move into the way you moved into a new house or crossed the boundary into a new country. And not just this one-sided love, either; she had enough of that right now. But the kind of love held out to her in the comic books and romance magazines she was able now to read for herself, which she and Sonya traded back and forth wistfully: love that would transform her and change her forever. It had nothing to do with the way other girls got pregnant and fat as cheap balloons-that wasn't the kind of love she meant. The only real love could be between her and Lowry. You couldn't imagine any real love between Sonya, for instance, and her boyfriend who was married. They never felt about each other the way she and Lowry would....

"I remember you that night way back in Florida," Clara said. "I think about that a lot. Who were you with then?"

Lowry shrugged.

She had thought of it to get her mind rid of that memory of Lowry and everything that came with it: going back to his room with him. If she got her mind stuck on that she would be miserable to him, and maybe he was casting his mind around for some excuse to get away from her earlier-here it was about six o'clock and they would have to get some supper. Clara had told him she would make it herself. A tiny churning sensation began in her stomach and subsided at once, at the thought of the food she had bought that might still be there the next morning. She said, "I'm going to walk in here. It's cool." The stream of water was deep on her side. She could look right through to its stony bottom.

"You're going to wade in that?"

She kicked off her shoes. Her feet were tough from going barefoot so much in the summer. Clara stepped into the water and was surprised at how warm it was on top. "I like to wade," she said. "I used to do it when I was a kid." It was the kind of remark other girls probably said; Clara did not really think of herself as lying. The edginess in her voice must have made Lowry conscious of this, because when she glanced around he was looking at her. "What about you, did you play in cricks when you were a kid?"

"I grew up too fast," Lowry said.

She moved slowly through the water, staring down at her pale feet. Her legs were wet up past the knee. She pulled the skirt of her dress up higher. At first her legs were cool where they were wet, then the sun got to them and made them burn. She had to keep flicking her hair out of her eyes when she turned back to speak to Lowry. "I grew up fast, too. I'm just as old as you are if you look at it right."

He made a snorting sound.

"d.a.m.n you, don't laugh at me," she said. She bent to pull something out of the water-a barrel stave encrusted with sc.u.m and tiny snail-like things. She dropped it at once.

"Lowry," Clara said, "did you love your family?"

"I don't know. No."

"Why not?"

"I don't know."

Clara lifted one foot out of the water, gingerly. "I loved my family. I couldn't help it."

"Well, I was born able to help such things," he said. He shifted around, straightening out one leg. She thought there was something uneasy in his voice but she did not want to be so conscious, so meticulous with him. She walked farther out, gathering her skirt up around her thighs. Lowry flicked his cigarette out from him and it landed on the dry riverbed. "I never could see what it was-things between other people," he said seriously. "I mean invisible things. Ties that held them together no matter what, like getting flung up on the beach and dragged out again and flung up again, always together. -Don't walk any farther out, you want to fall in? I'm not coming in after you."

"I'm all right."

"I'd like to have everything I owned in one bag and take it with me. I don't want things to tie me down. If I owned lots of things- like my father did-then they'd get in the way and I wouldn't see clearly. Once you own things you have to be afraid of them. Of losing them."

"I wouldn't mind that," Clara said sullenly.

He did not seem to have heard her. "If I have to kill myself for something, I want to know what it is, at least. I don't want it handed to me. I don't want it to turn into a houseful of furniture or acres of land you have to worry about farming-the h.e.l.l with all that."

Clara glanced back at him. He was just far enough away so that she could not see whether those tiny wrinkles had appeared again around his mouth. "You're getting beyond me," she said, afraid to hear anything more that he had to say.

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, in a different voice, "Clara, are you about done messing around in there?"

She looked up at the sky, feeling her hair fall down long and heavy on her back. In Lowry's voice there was something she had heard once before but now, in her wonder, could not quite recall. She closed her eyes and felt the sun hot against her face.

"Come on out from there," Lowry said.

"Go to h.e.l.l. You're bossing me around."

"Come on, Clara."

"Now you called me Clara. How'd you know that was my name?"

"You're going to walk where the water's going fast, and fall in."

"I am not."

"Well, I'm not going to carry you out, ma'am."

"n.o.body asked you to."

"We should be getting back...."

"I'm in no hurry."

"It might be I am."

"You aren't, either," Clara said, letting one shoulder rise and fall lazily. But she stepped out of the water and onto the dried rocks, which had a curious texture now beneath her cold feet, like cloth. She spread her toes on the whitened rocks as if they were fingers grasping at something. Then she saw, between her toes, a dark filmy soft thing like a worm. "Jesus!" Clara said, kicking. She jumped backward and landed on the other foot and kicked again violently. "Get it off, Lowry!" she screamed. "Lowry-help- a bloodsucker-"

She ran at him blindly and he caught her. Everything was speeded up, even Lowry's laugh, and he was still laughing when he picked the thing off. With a snapping motion of his wrist he flicked it away. Clara knew that her face was drained white and that her muscles had let go, as if that bloodsucker had really sucked away all her blood. She lay back, sobbing, and when her eyes came into focus she saw that Lowry was not smiling any longer.

He bent down by her. "You oughtn't to have done that," he said, not smiling, and Clara stared bluntly into his face as if he were a stranger stopping out of nowhere. He kissed her, and while she tried to get her breath back from that he moved on top of her, and she remembered in a panic that he had done this before, yes, years ago, and it all came back to her like a slap in the face, something to wake her up. "Lowry-" she said in a voice all amazement, entirely removed from whatever was giving him such energy and half-trying to push him away-but everything that might have shot into clarity was ruined by his damp searching mouth and his hand thrust under her, getting her ready in a way she only now realized she had to be gotten ready. In amazement the blue sky stared back down at her, wide and impersonal, deep with the unacknowledged gazes of girls like Clara who have nowhere else to look, the earth having betrayed them; the blue shuddered with a panic that was not fear but just panic, the reaction of the body and not the mind. Her mind was awake and skipping about everywhere, onto Lowry and past him and even onto the Lowry of a minute before who had surprised her so, trying to figure out just what had happened in his mind to make him turn into this Lowry-filling out the gestures of her imagination without having to ask what they might have been. It would never have seemed to Clara that love could be such a surprise, so strange, that she could just lie limp and have it done to her and never be clear enough to antic.i.p.ate any more even when she had tried to figure out what they would all be years in advance- then her amazement turned into pain and she cried out angrily against the side of his face.

She felt him pushing in her, inside her, with all the strength he had kept back from her for years. She pulled at his shirt and then at his flesh under the shirt, as if trying to distract him as well as herself from what he was doing. Lowry's hot ragged breath came against her face and she caught a glimpse of his eyes, not fixed upon her and not ready yet to see anything, and for the first time the kernel behind those eyes gave a hint of itself. She groaned and tightened her arms around his neck, hard, and Lowry kissed her with his hot open mouth and she gasped and sucked in his breath, squirming with this new agony and waiting for it to end, thinking it couldn't last much longer with a kind of baffled and staring astonishment- until Lowry, who was always so calm and slow and seemed to calculate out how many steps would be necessary to take him from one spot to another, groveled on her with his face twisted like a rag in a parody of agony, and could not control what he did to her. She felt as if her body were being driven into the ground, hammered into it. She felt as if it were being dislodged from her brain and she would never get the two together again. Then everything broke and she felt his muscles go rigid, locking himself to her and waiting, suspended between breaths that must have made his throat ache. A soft, surprised sound escaped him that was nothing Lowry would ever have made, and Clara let her head fall back onto his arm without even knowing she had been holding it up and waiting for him to stop.

He lay on top of her and his chest heaved. Now that the day was clear again she touched his hand, smoothed his hair off his forehead. Between her legs her flesh was alive with a pain that was so sharp and burning she could not quite believe in it. She felt as if he had gone after her with a knife. She felt as if she had been opened up and hammered at with a cruelty that made no sense because she could not see what it meant. That logic was secret in Lowry's body. In her imagination-lying sleepless in her bed at night, or dreaming behind the store counter-she had known everything Lowry felt and had felt it along with him, because that was part of her happiness; but when it had really happened it was all a surprise. He had made love to her and it was all over and she knew nothing about it, no more than this pain that kept her veins throbbing.

"Jesus, Lowry," Clara sobbed, "I must be bleeding-" He brought his damp face around and his lips brushed hers, but she pushed him away. She tried to sit up. The pain had shattered now into smaller pains that shot up toward her stomach. Lowry wiped his face with both hands and, still breathing hard, lay down beside her. He was like a man who has fallen from a great height. Clara lay back. Tears were running down both sides of her face, into her mouth. Whether the sky was in focus or not she could not tell. Lowry lay beside her, on his back. Her body burned where he had been. She thought that she would never get over it and that he would never be able to do this to her again. So she lay very still with her pain, as if what she felt had more power over either of them than any other feeling she had showed.

Finally Lowry said, "Now you're not a kid, sweetheart."

She wept bitterly. "I never needed to grow up," she said. "I never needed to be gone after with a knife."

"I'm sorry."

"What the h.e.l.l made you do it?"

He laughed a little. He seemed to be asking her permission to laugh, by the sound of it. "I thought you loved me," he said.

Clara sat up and smoothed her hair back from her face. She took hold of it and twisted it up and back, away from her neck. The perspiration on the back of her neck made her shiver. She looked down at Lowry, who was lying now with his arms behind his head. He smiled at her, then his smile broadened. Clara's face remained rigid. "If I said I loved you, could be I didn't know what I was talking about," she said.

"Could be you don't yet."

She bent her head back again suddenly to look at the sky, but did not see it. In spite of the pain she felt a sensation of joy, something unexpected she didn't want Lowry to see yet. "So, after two years," she said. "You wouldn't ever do it when I was ready, or when I wanted you to or thought I wanted you to. That would have been too easy."

"I didn't want to do it, honey."

"If you find yourself not wanting to do it again, let me know," she said. There was a twist to her mouth she'd copied from Sonya. "I can get something else to do that day."

He smiled at her toughness. "It doesn't mean anything, honey."

"I know that."

"I'm serious. It doesn't mean anything except what it is."

"I knew you would go on to say something like that."

She tried to get up but froze. A sigh escaped her that was a sound of regret for everything, but not serious regret. The only thing that was serious was the pain and she knew now that it would not last long.

Lowry put his arms around her waist. From behind, he embraced her and pressed his forehead against her back; she could feel him there, and she turned a little as if she were listening to his thought with her body. "You are such a b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said. "Do you know that?" His fingers locked together. He lay still. Clara looked down at her bare feet and blinked when she remembered how it had all happened-and there was the spot between her toes, pink from where the blood had been but now smeared around, a tiny dot of blood that was all that was left from the bloodsucker.

Lowry said, "I'm not going to marry you. You know that."

"All right."

"I can't think of you that way. Don't you think of me that way either."

"All right."

"I'm ten, eleven years older than you, sweetheart...." His words sounded sad. Clara glanced down at his fingers, which were making wrinkles in the cloth of her dress; but it was probably ruined anyhow. Her eyes ran along down her thighs to her legs and feet and back up again. She smiled slightly. She would have drawn in a great exultant breath, except Lowry's embrace kept her back. "How do you feel?" Lowry said.

"You must have made me bleed."

"Does it hurt bad?"

"No, it's all right."

"No, really, does it hurt?"

He straightened up and turned her head to him. He kissed her and Clara made a slight gesture of impatience, mock disgust, then he held her head in his hands and kissed her again. She felt his tongue against her lips and smiled while she kissed him. She said, drawing away, "You never kissed me like that before. You're going to love me if you don't watch out."

"That might be," Lowry said.

It was late when they drove back to Tintern, between ten and eleven. Clara's hair was tangled and her face drawn with exhaustion; she lay with her head against Lowry's shoulder. She thought he was holding the steering wheel in a strange way, with a precise, almost drunken attention he had never showed before. Lowry said, when they were parked outside her place, "Are you going to go in or what? You want to say goodbye?"

"No," said Clara.

"Or would you like to take a few days off and come with me?"

"Yes, Lowry," she said. It surprised her to see where they were, even though a moment before she had watched them drive up and stop. The stores on the main street were darkened; only the drugstore was open. Someone sat in the doorway on a folding chair, and another figure was behind him. "Where would we go?" Clara said.

"Thought I'd take a drive to the ocean."

"The what?"

"The ocean. You'd like it too."

"All that way? Drive all that way?"

"I can do it."

"Without sleeping?"

"We could maybe sleep first."

"Yes," she said gently. She tried to open the door but could not pull the handle down hard enough. On her second try she succeeded. Lowry slid over behind her and put his arms around her, his hands over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and buried his face in her hair. Then he pushed her out and followed her upstairs.

When Clara woke off and on that night she felt no surprise at all that Lowry was with her. It might have been that in her sleep she had been with him so much, that now the real Lowry was nothing to alarm her. Being so close to him was like swimming: they were like swimmers, their arms and legs in any easy position, blending together, breathing close together. Her toes groped against his. She thought, It's all decided now. I am a different person to him now. When he made love to her the next morning she began just at the point she had left off the night before, and she had already learned to feel past the pain to the kernel in her he was stirring that was like the kernel in himself he loved so well, that inspired him to such joy. She said, "I love you, I love you," in a kind of delirium, her ears roaring with the flow of her own blood and fit to drown out the silence that had been with her all her life.

At dawn they drove off in his car to the ocean some hundreds of miles away. She brushed her hair with her blue plastic hairbrush, languid and pleased as any married woman, letting her hair fall down onto the back of the seat. She hummed along with the songs on his radio. On the front of the dime store, for the manager she had left a note: "Have been called home, emergency. Will be back Thursday latest. Clara." It was with the little dictionary that Lowry had given her one time that she had looked up, by herself, the word "emergency." This had pleased him. Everything about her pleased him now. She lay back, comfortable in the sun, and thought that now it would be decided between them-what they were to each other, how they had to stay together-and she had only to wait for Lowry to explain it to her.