The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley

to render sleep unlikely for the time being. She smoothed her sheet and blanket and slid farther into the bed. Even after her eyes had adjusted, the room was dark; the streetlight was ten yards down, and there was no moon. Nancy and Kevin’s rhythmic banging was actually rather comforting, she thought. She lay quietly for a moment, and then sat up and turned on the light. She felt for her book under the bed. The banging stopped and did not start again, and Lily reached for the light switch, but as her hand touched it, Nancy cried out. She took her hand back and opened her book, and Nancy cried out again. Lily thought of the upstairs neighbor, whom she hadn’t heard all evening, and hoped he wasn’t in yet. The bed in the next room gave one hard bang against the wall, and Nancy cried out again. Lily grew annoyed at her lack of consideration. She put her feet on the floor. Once she had done that, she was afraid to do anything else. It was suddenly obvious to her that the cries had been cries of fear rather than of passion, and Lily was afraid to go out, afraid of what she might see in the next room. She thought of Kevin’s big chest and of Nancy’s carelessness about Kevin’s feelings. She opened the door. Lights were on everywhere,shocking her, and the noise of some kind of tussle came from their bedroom. Lily crept around the door and peeked in. Kevin had his back to her and was poised with one knee on the bed. All the bedcovers were torn off the bed, and Nancy, who had just broken free, was backed against the window. She looked at Lily for a long second and then turned her head so that Lily could see that her hair had been jaggedly cut off. One side was almost to her shoulder, but the other side stopped at her ear lobe. The skein of hair lay on the mattress. Lily recognized it now. Seeing Nancy’s gaze travel past him, Kevin set down a pair of scissors, Lily’s very own shears, that had been sitting on the shelf above the sewing machine. Lily said, “My God! What have you been doing?”
    Looking for the first time at the hair on the bed, Nancy began to cry. Kevin bent down and retrieved his gym shorts from under the bed and stepped into them. He said to Lily rather than Nancy, “I’m going outside. I guess my shoes are in the living room.”
    Nancy sat on the bed beside the hair, looking at it. It was reddish and glossy, with the life of a healthy wild animal, an otter or a mink. Lily wished Nancy would say that she had been thinking of having it cut anyway. She thought of saying herself that Nancy could always grow it back, but that, too, was unlikely. Hair like that probably wouldn’t grow again on a thirty-year-old head. Lily picked up the shears and put them back on the shelf above her sewing table and said, “You were making love?”
    The door slammed. Nancy said, “Yes, actually. I wanted to. We decided to split up.” She looked at Lily. “And then when I got in bed I felt happy and free, and I just thought it would be nice.”
    “And Kevin?”
    “He seemed fine! Relieved, even. We were lying there and he was holding me.”
    “I can’t believe you—”
    At once Nancy glared at her. “You can’t? Why are you so judgmental? This whole day has been one long trial, with you the judge and me the defendant! What do you know, anyway? You’ve never even lived with anyone! You had this sterile thing with Kenneth Diamond that was more about reading poems than screwing and then you tell my husband that I’m not in love with him anymore! Of course he was enraged. You did it! You hate tension, you hate conflict, so you cut it off, ended it. We could have gone on for years like this, and it wouldn’t have been that bad!”
    “I didn’t say I knew anything. I never said I knew anything.”
    Nancy put her face in her hands and then looked up and said in a low voice, “What do I look like?”
    “Terrible right now—it’s very uneven. A good hairdresser can shape it, though. There’s a lot of hair