Searching for Caleb

The visit had been planned for weeks. The first Monday after she turned eighteen, he said, he would come talk to her parents. (Monday was a slow day at the church.) They had worked it out by letter. It was Arthur's feeling that Duncan was the important one, but as Meg pointed out they needed Justine there to smooth things over. For certainly Duncan would be at his sharpest. He didn't like Arthur. (How could anyone not like Arthur?) What they hadn't counted on was Justine's vanishing, taking Grandfather on one of his trips. Now there was no telling when she would be back, and meanwhile Duncan was coming home from work at any minute.

They would have to handle him alone after all.

Meg always thought of her parents as Duncan and Justine, although she didn't call them that. It might have been due to the way they acted. They were not very parent-like. She loved them both, but she had developed a permanent inner cringe from wondering how they would embarrass her next.

They were so-extreme. So irresponsible! They led such angular, slapdash lives, always going off on some tangent, calling over their shoulders for her to come too. And for as long as Meg could remember she had been stumbling after, picking up the trail of cast-off belongings and abandoned projects. All she really wanted was to live like other people.

She tried to keep the house neat, like her friends' houses, and to put flowers in the vases and to hide, somehow, whatever tangle of tubes and electrical wires Duncan was working on at the moment. But then it seemed so hopeless when she knew how soon they would be moving on. "We're nomads," Justine told her, "think of it that way"-as if making it sound romantic would help. But there was nothing romantic about this tedious round of utility deposits, rental contracts, high school transcripts and interrupted magazine subscriptions. "He's ruining our lives!" she told Justine. Justine looked astonished. "But Meggie darling, we can't be the ones to say-" Then Meg's anger would extend to her mother, too, who was so gullible and so quick to give in, and she closed herself up in her room (if they were in a house where she had a room) and said no more.

She kept herself occupied with sewing, or pasting pictures in her scrapbook full of model homes-French windows and carpeted kitchens and white velvet couches. She straightened up her closet with all her shoes set side by side and pointing in the same direction. She ironed her own dresses, as she had since she was nine. (Justine thought there was no point to ironing, as long as things were clean.) At the age of ten she had baked her first cake, which everyone admired but no one ate because they were too busy rushing off somewhere; they seemed to live on potato chips from vending machines. Nothing ever worked on a schedule. She was encouraged to bring her friends home at any hour of the day or night.

"This family is not a closed unit," Duncan told her-apparently his only rule, if you could call it that. But how could she bring friends when her parents were so certain to make fools of themselves? "Oh, I just love your folks," girls were always saying, little dreaming what agony it would be to have them for their own. For Justine might be found barefoot and waving her dirty playing cards, or sitting at the kitchen table with three or four unsuitable friends, or racing about looking for her broken straw carry-all in order to go to the diner whose food she preferred to her own. She had a high-handed, boisterous way of acting sometimes and she was likely to refer to Duncan publicly as "Meg's second cousin," her idea of a joke. And Duncan! Spouting irrelevant, useless facts, thinking out loud in startling ways, leaving her friends stunned and stupid-looking. His idea of a joke was to hang idiotic newspaper and ladies' magazine pages all over the house, bearing what he thought were appropriate messages. On Justine's birthday he pasted up a bank ad saying WE'RE INCREASING OUR INTEREST, and after Meg spent too much money on a dress (only because she wanted to look like the other girls for a change, not all homemade and tacked together) she found a page Scotch-taped to her closet door:

HAVE YOU EVER HAD A BAD TIME IN LEVI'S?

Then she had snatched up the page and stalked in to where Duncan sat inventing a new keyboard arrangement for the typewriter. "Act your age!"

she told him. But when he looked up his face was so surprised and unguarded, and she saw that he really was aging, there were dry lines around his eyes and two tiny crescents left by his wide, dippy smile. So she laid the paper down gently, after all, and went away defeated.

Now she sighed, remembering, and Arthur squeezed her fingers. "In an hour this will all be over," he told her.

"It will never be over."

"I don't understand."

"We're going to be demolished," she said. "I feel it."