Family Linen Read Online Free Page B

ago. His name was Joe Ross Miller. Joe Ross Miller started to drink coffee with Sybill every morning. He asked her opinion of world events. He confided in her about his wild son, his shy daughter, his neurotic wife. They had a lot in common, Sybill found, including a distaste for the messier, unrestrained elements of family life. They shared a sense of the way things should be. After a month or two, Joe Ross Miller’s manner toward Sybill changed. He began to stand a lot closer to her, to brush her hand accidentally. He asked her leading, suggestive questions, such as whether or not she liked taking long hot baths. Although he was bald except for a fringe like a monk at the back of his head, Joe Ross Miller had eyes like Omar Sharif, dark and hot. He had big strong white workingman’s hands, with dark curly hairs on the knuckles. After he had been at the technical school for three months, Sybill knew he wanted to have an affair with her.
    But she was spared the big decision, after all. Sybill’s father (or stepfather, to be exact) died that winter, in late December, and while she was at home helping her mother run the funeral, Joe Ross Miller gave notice at the technical school, citing “personal reasons,” and disappeared. Sybill never found out what those “personal reasons” were. He might have found a better job; he was always dissatisfied, always looking. Or his neurotic wife might have had a complete nervous breakdown. Or he might have had one himself! What Sybill preferred to believe, though, was that Joe Ross Miller had left because of her, because he had decided to give her up. Since he knew they could never marry, seeing her that way, every day, had been too painful for him to bear. Actually, Sybill found, she was glad he made this decision. It was more sensible all around. When she returned to work after her stepfather’s funeral, she cleaned out her desk and opened the window and stood in front of it for a long time, letting the cold winter air sweep her up like a benediction.
    Since that time—and that was a long time back—a man simply had not occurred. And gradually even the
idea
of a man has stopped occurring, so that without realizing it, without making any conscious decision, Sybill has put those things out of her busy, useful life as firmly as she sets out the trash on a Tuesday morning.
    Only sometimes there comes in even such a life as hers that kind of moment which comes to us all—a moment like a dark red leaf spiraling down through the summer air to land on the picnic blanket. So here’s Sybill, crying on the sofa in her tasteful condominium, having just offended her best friend Betty Long. Sybill, crying because suddenly there are big jagged holes in this life which has seemed to her now for so long like a roll of fabric over at Cloth World, floral print polyester perhaps, rolling on and on forever in a perfectly straight even path—
    Darkness is falling fast. Sybill stands up and presses her hot face against the cool glass of her sliding glass door and looks past her grill and the redwood railing of her deck, down into the pale blue glowing kidney-shaped pool below. Mr. Hollister is in there swimming laps, back and forth, as regular as a motorboat, leaving a regular wake. That young couple, the Martins, have put their baby in one of those round floats with a seat in the middle of it, in the shallow end by the steps. The Brown boys are swimming in the deep end with two other boys Sybill doesn’t know. She’ll have to speak to their parents, again. Some people will take advantage of you no matter how nice you are, abusing whatever privileges you care to offer . . . give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Momentarily, this thought cheers Sybill. But then she notices Marietta Billings, a divorced dancing instructor, over there in the darkness half hidden by a striped umbrella, not swimming at all of course, just sitting out in