'Salem's Lot(71)

'You listen to me! I won't have you running around like a common trollop with some sissy boy who's got your head all filled up with moonlight. Do you hear me?'

Susan slapped her across the face.

Ann Norton's eyes blinked and then opened wide in stunned surprise. They looked at each other for a moment in silence, shocked. A tiny sound came and died in Susan's throat.

'I'm going upstairs,' she said. 'I'll be out by Tuesday at the latest.'

'Floyd was here,' Mrs Norton said. Her face was still rigid from the slap. Her daughter's finger marks stood out in red, like exclamation points.

'I'm through with Floyd,' Susan said tonelessly. 'Get used to the idea. Tell your harpy friend Mabel all about it on the telephone, why don't you? Maybe then it will seem real to you.'

'Floyd loves you, Susan ' This is . . . ruining him. He broke down and told me everything. He poured out his heart to me.' Her eyes shone with the memory of it. 'He broke down at the end and cried like a baby.'

Susan thought how unlike Floyd that was. She wondered if her mother could be making it up, and knew by her eyes that she was not.

'Is that what you want for me, mom? A crybaby? Or did you just fall in love with the idea of blond-haired grandchildren? I suppose I bother you - you can't feel your job is complete until you see me married and settled down to a good man you can put your thumb on. Settled down with a fellow who'll get me pregnant and turn me into a matron in a hurry. That's the scoop, isn't it? Well, what about what I want?'

'Susan, you don't know what you want.'

And she said it with such absolute, convinced certainty that for a moment Susan was tempted to believe her. An image came to her of herself and her mother, standing here in set positions, her mother by her rocker and she by the door; only they were tied together by a hank of green yarn, a cord that had grown frayed and weak from many restless tuggings. Image transformed into her mother in a nimrod's hat, the band sportily pierced with many different flies. Trying desperately to reel in a large trout wearing a yellow print shift. Trying to reel it in for the last time and pop it away in the wicker creel. But for what purpose? To mount it? To eat it?

'No, Mom. I know exactly what I want. Ben Mears.' She turned and went up the stairs.

Her mother ran after her and called up shrilly: 'You can't get a room! You haven't any money!'

'I've got a hundred in checking and three hundred in savings,' Susan replied calmly. 'And I can get a job down at Spencer's, I think. Mr Labree has offered several times.'

'All he'll care about is looking up your dress,' Mrs Norton said, but her voice had gone down an octave. Much of her anger had left hey and she felt a little frightened.

'Let him,' Susan said. 'I'll wear bloomers.'

'Honey, don't be mad.' She came two steps up the stairs. 'I only want what's best for - '

'Spare it, Mom. I'm sorry I slapped you. That was awful of me. I do love you. But I'm moving out. It's way past time. You must see that.'

'You think it over,' Mrs Norton said, now clearly sorry as well as frightened. 'I still don't think I spoke out of turn. That Ben Mears, I've seen showboats like him before. All he's interested in is - '

'No. No more.'

She turned away.

Her mother came up another step and called after her: 'When Floyd left here he was in an awful state. He - '

But the door to Susan's room closed and cut off her words.

She lay down on her bed - which had been decorated with stuffed toys and a poodle dog with a transistor radio in its belly not so long ago - and lay looking at the wall, trying not to think. There were a number of Sierra Club posters on the wall, but not so long ago she had been surrounded by posters clipped from Rolling Stone and Creem and Crawdaddy, pictures of her idols - Jim Morri?son and John Lennon and Dave van Ronk and Chuck Berry. The ghost of those days seemed to crowd in on her like bad time exposures of the mind.

She could almost see the newsprint, standing out on the cheap pulp stock. GOING-PLACES YOUNG WRITER AND YOUNG WIFE INVOLVED IN 'MAYBE' MOTORCYCLE FATALITY. The rest in carefully couched innuendoes. Perhaps a picture taken at the scene by a local photographer, too gory for the local paper, just right for Mabel's kind.

And the worst was that a seed of doubt had been planted Stupid. Did you think he was in cold storage before he came back here? That he came wrapped in a germ-proof cellophane bag, like a motel drinking glass? Stupid. Yet the seed had been planted. And for that she could feel something more than adolescent pique for her mother ?she could feel something black that bordered on hate.

She shut the thoughts - not out but away - and put an arm over her face and drifted into an uncomfortable doze that was broken by the shrill of the telephone downstairs, then more sharply by her mother's voice calling, 'Susan! It's for you!'  

She went downstairs, noticing it was just after five-thirty'. The sun was in the west. Mrs Norton was in the kitchen, beginning supper. Her father wasn't home yet.

'Hello?'  

'Susan?' The voice was familiar, but she could not put a name to it immediately.

'Yes, who's this?'

'Eva Miller, Susan. I've got some bad news.'

'Has something happened to Ben?' All the spit seemed to have gone out of her mouth. Her band came up and touched her throat. Mrs Norton had come to the kitchen door and was watching, a spatula held in one hand.