Three Short Novels by Gina Berriault

unfamiliar, and now the bruise increased the strangeness. As she drove with the drowsing boy, it seemed to her that his elusiveness was an accusation that she had always, since his birth, held other persons to be more valuable than he, that all her time was spent in the company of other persons for whom she must make herself valuable, when who were the others, after all? He was to repay her in kind, she knew. It was inevitable. He was to spend his life in the company of persons whose value for him she would never be able to comprehend, and she felt a deep stirring of curiosity about that life of his beyond his fourteen years and about those persons, some not yet born, who were to rake his mind and his heart with their being.
    On either side of the highway stretched rows of low, tangled vines, their green muted by the fine dust concocted of hot sun and vastopen fields. For miles she drove through sun-bleached hills, ranging in color from almost white to a dark gold, and early in the afternoon she turned along by the sea. Her body felt fragile, but the sun on her bare arms and legs and on the crown of her head was a healing warmth. They found a pink stucco motel, primly neat, fronted by geometrical patches of grass and gravel, and ringed by cypress. The walls of the room were coral pink and the spreads on the twin beds were also coral, scrawled with white nautical designs. They left their cases on the beds and walked to the restaurant close by, whose enormous sign was like a lighted tower signaling ships at sea.
    She walked in, aware of their complementary beauty, the young mother and her young son, both pretending an easy familiarity with the place, although his pretense, she knew, was the result of shyness. He walked behind her, yet she knew, from having turned other times in other restaurants to ask him something, just how he looked, how one thumb was hooked in his back pocket and how he glanced neither to the right nor to the left but kept his gaze down to the level of her ankles.
    She was glad to see that there were waiters here and no waitresses, and to their young waiter she made evident her consciousness of him as a man in the way she rested her elbow on the table and set her profile on view, and in the way she took a cigarette from her purse and smiled at him to light it for her. She shared her graces between the waiter and her son who, because of his attack on Russell, had made the unspoken demand of him to treat him as the man he was to become; and, afraid of that demand, she required an obvious flirtation with the waiter, almost an infatuation. The waiter’s eyes wobbled away when their glances met. He told them, as he picked up soup bowls and laid down salad bowls, keeping his elbows close to his sides, that the weather yesterday had been very nice, the sun up hot and early. It was time, he said, for the fog to roll in. “Is there any fog on the horizon?” he asked, like one denied the sight of theday, although the restaurant’s front windows looked out to sea. She reported that they had seen no fog, nothing, and laughed with the waiter over his moody refusal to glance out the window at the clear day that others were free to roam around in.
    The tide was out when they strolled down to the water, so far out it left exposed a wide stretch of wet sand reflecting the sandpipers running over it. With his trouser legs rolled up, gesturing widely, David told her that the water was drawn far out like that before a tidal wave. He seemed elated by the prospect. She walked in step with him over the firm wet sand and through cool gusts of wind raised by the breakers. The flock of sandpipers rose up incredibly swift, skimming over the waves, turning so fast in one instant, flashing white, then dark. Far up the beach, the flock curved in again and landed. On the horizon lay a slate-blue bank of fog.
    â€œYou want to bet tomorrow is foggy?” she said, hugging herself against the thought of it.