Winter Wheat Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gotham, and he was always reminding me of my separateness from it, almost from Mom, too. All day I had forgotten them; I had had such a good time with Kay and Marge and Bill. I came back to them now.
    There wouldn’t be much to do today. Dad would care for the stock and go over to talk to Bailey at the elevator after a while. Mom would wash the curtains and blankets in my room, probably, and make it clean to close up until I came back to it again. When she was through in the house she’d go out and work around the chicken house. She kept it as slick as some people in Gotham keep their own places—or she’d work in the garden. She always kept busy. But they’d miss me. Supper would seem lonesome. I could feel their missing as though I were right there with them missing someone else. I wonder if a child can feel like a parent to her own parents. I do sometimes.
    I tried to think of last night. It was just last night. Dad had called to Mom to come out. I thought of them sitting there on the bench together. They were happy in their way; they were just so different, I told myself.
    Bill went inside to talk to the soldier he had met after lunch. Marge left to write a letter.
    “It’s a lot easier to write home from the train than when you first get there,” she said.
    I thought of writing. I would write often so Dad would have letters to take home to read to Mom. But I couldn’t write tonight.
    “I’m going to do my nails. I have a date meeting me at the station,” Kay said.
    I sat alone in the end of the train, watching the shapes of trees and barns and riverbanks hurry away into the dark. I would have given anything to be back home. I felt the train taking me away, faster and farther every minute, from Dad and Mom and all I had ever known. Or was it the train?

4
    I THINK I liked everything about the university.
    There was a girl named Vera across the hall in the house where I had a room who was so homesick she used to cry herself to sleep. I heard her one night and took her into my room to cheer her up.
    “If you lived in one of the women’s dormitories or a sorority house, it’d be different, but in a hole like this you might as well be dead and buried,” Vera said in the midst of her crying.
    I looked around my room. It wasn’t handsome. The brown-and-green-leaf wallpaper showed tack holes and a long water stain. The couch that was my bed was lumpy. The desk was too small to rest my whole arm on when I wrote. The easy chair Vera was sitting in was a rocker set up on a kind of platform. It squeaked more than the springs in the truck. The rug had two spots on it. I guess I hadn’t looked at the room very hard before. It rented for $15 a month. But I wasn’t in it except at night, like the house at home during seeding or harvest.
    “The room doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be here much of the time,” I told Vera.
    “I am. I come back from classes and I get so blue I can’t even study.”
    “Tomorrow you go with me. We’ve got the lib. and the woman’s lounge at the Union to study in. The whole range is ours.”
    And the next day I met Vera after class and walked the length of the mall with her. But she walked along discontentedly looking at the fur jackets on the girls we met. In the woman’s lounge—that name makes me think of Bailey’s cat stretched out on the ramp at the elevator—she sank down in one of the low squashy chairs and I sat down in another. The light is soft in there because the blinds and the colors of the curtains and rug and chairs are the very colors you see on the flats at sundown. And it was bigger than the dance hall at Sun River.
    “Why don’t you camp out here? I do when I have time.”
    “I might,” she said. “Do you know that some of the sorority houses are furnished better than this even?”
    I nodded. She made me think of Dad a little, the way she kept thinking of other places all the time. I had been invited to a sorority. Kay and Marge looked me up and took