Her parents and her brother had been killed in a car accident when she was six; she hadn't gone along that day to see her aunt and uncle, staying behind instead to play with a friend from down the street. They had liked brother best anyway, she could remember that. Brother hadn't been like her, little halfling stolen from an orphanage cradle at the age of four and a half months. Brother's origins had been clear. Brother had been - trumpets, please - Their Own. But Nadine had always and forever belonged only to Nadine. She was the earth's child.
After the accident she had gone to live with the aunt and uncle, because they were the only two relatives. The White Mountains of eastern New Hampshire. She remembered that they had taken her for a ride on the Cog Railway up Mount Washington for her eighth birthday and the altitude had caused a bloody nose and they had been angry with her. Aunt and Uncle were too old, they had been in their mid-fifties when she turned sixteen, the year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon - the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy. A lovenight. And if the boy caught her she would have given him whatever prizes were hers to give, and what did it matter if he caught her? They had run, wasn't that the important thing?
But he hadn't caught her. A cloud had drifted over the moon. The dew began to feel clammy and unpleasant, frightening. The taste of wine in her mouth had somehow changed to the taste of electric spit; slightly sour. A kind of metamorphosis had taken place, a feeling that she should, must wait.
And where had he been then, her intended, her dark bridegroom? On what streets, what back roads, clocking along in outside suburban darkness while inside the brittle clink of cocktail chatter broke the world into neat and rational sections? What cold winds were his? How many sticks of dy***ite in his frayed packsack? Who knew what his name had been when she was sixteen? How ancient was he? Where had been his home? What sort of mother had held him to her breast? She was only sure that he was an orphan as she was, his time still to come. He walked mostly on roads that hadn't even been laid down yet, while she had but one foot on those same roads. The junction where they would meet was far ahead. He was an American man, she knew that, a man who would have a taste for milk and apple pie, a man who would appreciate the homely beauty of red check and gingham. His home was America, and his ways were the secret ways, the highways in hiding, the underground railways where directions are written in runes. He was the other man, the other face, the hardcase, the dark man, the Walkin Dude, and his rundown bootheels clocked along the perfumed ways of the summer night.
Who knoweth when the bridegroom comes?
She had waited for him, the unbroken vessel. At sixteen she had almost fallen, and again in college. Both of them had gone away angry and perplexed, the way Larry was now, sensing the crossroads inside her, the sense of some preordained, mystic junction point.
Boulder was the place where the roads diverged.
The time was close. He had called, bid her come.
After college she had buried herself in her work, had shared a rented house with two other girls. What two girls? Well, they came and went. Only Nadine stayed, and she was pleasant to the young men her changing roommates brought home, but she never had a young man herself. She supposed they talked about her, called her spinster-in-waiting, maybe even conjectured that she might be a carefully circumspect lesbian. It wasn't true. She was simply -
Unbroken.
Waiting.
It had seemed to her sometimes that a change was coming. She would be putting toys away in the silent classroom at the end of the day and suddenly she would pause, her eyes lambent and watchful, a jack-in-the-box held forgotten in one hand. And she would think: A change is coming... a great wind is going to blow. Sometimes, when such a thought came to her, she would find herself looking back over her shoulder like something pursued. Then it would break and she would laugh uneasily.
Her hair had begun to gray in her sixteenth year, the year she had been chased and not caught - just a few strands at first, startlingly visible in all the black, and not gray, no, that was the wrong word... white, it had been white.
Years later she had attended a party in the basement lounge of a frathouse. The lights had been low and after a while the people had drifted away by twos. Many of the girls - Nadine among them - had signed out for overnight from their dorms. She had fully intended to go through with it... but something that was still buried beneath the months and years had held her back. And the next morning, in the cold light of 7 A.M., she had looked at herself in one of a long line of dormitory bathroom mirrors and saw that the white had advanced again, seemingly overnight - although that, of course, was impossible.