Free Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner

in search of the hostess, did not see her, cocked her eyebrows, and smiled down on Mason her brilliant smile. “Where does the evidence say I’m from?”
    “Somewhere north. Malad? Brigham City? Cache Valley?”
    Comic dismay, real puzzlement. “What are you, a medium or something? How’d you know?”
    “From the way you say “ ‘carn bread.’ ”
    Now an uncertain glance through her lashes. “Oh.”
    “What’s the matter? Don’t you like being from—where is it? Cache Valley?”
    “I’m sarry if I talk like a hick.”
    “Oh now, come on,” Mason said, contrite. “Who said you talk like a hick? You talk like somebody from up around the Idaho border. You made me feel I’d come home.”
    “Yes,” the girl said, rather sullenly, he thought. She was still smiling, but the smile had flattened against her marvelous gleamy toothpaste-ad teeth. As if indifferently, she looked across the Sky Room’s wavering candles. “Jist give me a year,” she said. “If I could git out of here and down to the Coast I’d sure wear the Cache Valley out of me. You wouldn’t know then where I’m from.”
    “Maybe you’re better off here,” Mason said. “Don’t knock Cache Valley, or Salt Lake either. You might not like California half as well.”
    “Mmm.”
    “California food doesn’t taste the way this dinner did. They do something to it. It isn’t served as pleasantly. The sunsets are watery.”
    She blinked and smiled and found something to deal with somewhere else in her section. How standard, touching, in the end uninteresting. Dissatisfied provincials, exportable dreams, upward-and-outward mobility. Mason knew all about it.
    Venus, in the few minutes his eye had been off it, had slid down behind Antelope Island. He drained his coffee cup, ready to leave. From the second table down, against the windows, a party of four came past, holding him for a minute in his chair. Their table stood disheveled under its soiled dishes and crumpled napkins. A busboy, his face fiery with acne, wheeled up a cart and began to clear away.
    Click. Involuntary narrowing of the eyes.
    He moves dazed through magic. If you should draw him, you would have to put x’s where his eyes should be, like a funny-paper character who has been hit on the head. He is fourteen, and enchanted. His motions are somnambulistic and his mind numb, but his senses are wide open. The breeze that sweeps through the wall-less pavilion brings in midway sounds: nasal chanting of barkers, thunder of the roller coaster with its obbligato of squeals, shuffling of many feet, cries and mutterings, the rumble and twitter of voices. And midway odors: taffy, pop-corn, cotton candy, rancid grease from hot-dog and hamburger stands, the encompassing smell of the salt flats. The shore breeze blows them into the pavilion and through the tables and across the dance floor and through the unused tables on the other side, picking up in passing all the dining-room odors of roast beef, barbecue sauce, spare ribs, coffee, vinegar, floor wax, a sudden sourceless onion smell of female perspiration, an equally sudden and sourceless whiff of perfume. Tangled and braided, smells and sounds blow through the room and through Bruce and are swept out over the lake.
    The lake side, where he is standing, is dark and quiet. Only a mangy velvet rope holds the tables in; beyond are timbers and the sense of water. When the music stops, he can hear the slosh of brine against the pilings down under, and from far off, as ifthey came floating on the water, the clear voices of bathers over on the north side, where Chet works. The darkness isolates and protects him. From here in the shadow, when there are no tables to be cleared, he can look and listen.
    His eyes are dazzled by the tent of hazy luminance through which he sees. The revived saxophones sob through his soul. The people at the tables are more dressed up and romantic than ordinary people. Some are eating, some have already begun to