Lavinia looked at the screen.
Helen turned slowly and glanced back. “I’m calling the manager!” she cried and leaped up. “Stop the film! Lights!”
“Helen, come back!” said Lavinia, her eyes shut.
* * *
When they set down their empty soda glasses, each of the ladies had a chocolate mustache on her upper lip. They removed them with their tongues, laughing.
“You see how silly it was?” said Lavinia. “All that riot for nothing. How embarrassing!”
The drug store clock said 11:25. They had come out of the theater and the laughter and the enjoyment feeling new. And now they were laughing at Helen, and Helen was laughing at herself.
Lavinia said, “When you ran up that aisle crying, ‘Lights!’ I thought I’d die!”
“That poor man!”
“The theater manager’s brother from Racine!”
“I apologized,” said Helen.
“You see what panic can do?”
The great fans still whirled and whirled in the warm night air, stirring and restirring the smells of vanilla, raspberry, peppermint and disinfectant in the drug store.
“We shouldn’t have stopped for these sodas. The police said—”
“Oh, bosh the police,” laughed Lavinia. “I’m not afraid of anything. The Lonely One is a million miles away now. He won’t be back for weeks, and the police’ll get him then, just wait. Wasn’t the film funny?”
The streets were clean and empty. Not a car or a truck or a person was in sight. The bright lights were still lit in the small store windows where the hot wax dummies stood. Their blank blue eyes watched as the ladies walked past them, down the night street.
“Do you suppose if we screamed they’d do anything?”
“Who?”
“The dummies, the window people.”
“Oh, Francine.”
“Well…”
There were a hundred people in the windows, stiff and silent, and three people on the street, the echoes following like gunshots when they tapped their heels on the baked pavement.
A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzing like a dying insect. They walked past it.
Baked and white, the long avenue lay ahead. Blowing and tall in a wind that touched only their leafy summits, the trees stood on either side of the three small women.
“First, we’ll walk you home, Francine.”
“No, I’ll walk you home.”
“Don’t be silly. You live the nearest. If you walked me home you’d have to come back across the ravine all by yourself. And if so much as a leaf fell on you, you’d drop dead.”
Francine said, “I can stay the night at your house. You’re the pretty one!”
“No.”
So they drifted like three prim clothes-forms over a moonlit sea of lawn and concrete and trees. To Lavinia, watching the black trees flit by, listening to the voices of her friends, the night seemed to quicken. They seemed to be running while walking slowly. Everything seemed fast, and the color of hot snow.