This episode from a forthcoming novel reveals the seldom understood relationship of two women. The author must remain nameless until her work is published.

AN EPISODE

Merritt lay on her back listening to Johanna and her father as they talked about the Spanish war, but she heard only their voices and she noticed how like Johanna's his voice was. The same smooth gentleness, the same unaffected experimentation with tone. Delightful to listen to as sound, blotting out the meaning of the words. Over her head the summer breeze sifted through the leaves of the huge sycamore, turning the light on them, shifting them away from it and she lay watching the light, listening to the sound. Listening to Johanna.

Between them, spread on a cloth over the grass was the remains of their picnic lunch. She raised up on one elbow and took an olive from the jar and lay on her back again, sucking the red pimento from the center. She looked into the empty hole in the olive, wondering how olives were stuffed.

At her feet, Mrs. Seiber leaned against the dappled trunk of the sycamore, a section of the Sunday paper across her lap. She was smoking a cigarette and as she read, her eyes quickly scanning the columns, her hand that held the cigarette swept across the paper occasionally, brushing away the ashes, scattering more. Merritt watched her, framing her in the space between the outline of her shoes. She was small and dark; attractive in a sharp, uncluttered sort of way. Brisk in her movements, with a light clear ring in her voice.

Johann Seiber had found her in Paris and he married her there. She would be the mother his child needed. She was a charming, self-sufficient woman who granted the same self-sufficiency to her husband, to his daughter and to everyone else she knew. If they turned up lacking, she chose to ignore them. She disliked dependency in people. She liked Merritt because she was self-contained. She felt young people in America were too independent for their lack of responsibility, lack of self-sufficiency. Because she frequently compared Johanna with the children of others, she found good reason to be satisfied, but she left it to her father to spoil her.

She folded the paper on her lap and then threw it aside, looking about for the package of cigarettes. Merritt shoved it toward her with her foot and then she sat up, her hands clasped around her knees. Lili Seiber lit her cigarette and without looking up, offered the pack to Merritt, holding the matches on top of the pack with her thumb. For an instant Merritt stared at them and then she reached out and took them in her hand and Johanna's mother became less Johanna's mother and more of Lili Seiber, a woman who was charming and who treated her as an equal. And she felt she had grown up a little more; in a sudden spurt like a graph extending its line, indicating something.

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