Then silence again, save for Jim's shoes. Missy racked her brains. What do you say to boys who don't know the same people and affairs you do? Back there at the party things had gone easily, but they were playing cards or dancing or eating; there had been no need for tete-a-tete conversation. How do you talk to people you don't know?
She liked Jim, but the need to make talk was spoiling everything. She moved along beside his creaking shoes as in a nightmare, and, as she felt every atom of her freezing to stupidity, she desperately forced her voice: “What a beautiful night it is!”
Missy sent him a sidelong glance. He didn't look exactly happy either. Did he feel awkward too?
“Listen to those shoes--never heard 'em squeak like that before,” he muttered apologetically.
Missy, striving for a proper answer and finding none, kept on moving through that feeling of nightmare. What was the matter with her tongue, her brain? Was it because she didn't know Jim well enough to talk to him? Surely not, for she had met strange boys before and not felt like this. Was it because it was night? Did you always feel like this when you were all dressed up and going home from an evening party?
Missy, fighting that sensation of stupidity, in anguished resolution spoke again: “Just look at the moon--how big it is!” Jim followed her upward glance. “Yes, it's great,” he agreed.
A heavy, regularly punctuated pause. “Don't you love moonlight nights?” persisted Missy.
“Yes--when my shoes don't squeak.” He tried to laugh.
Missy tried to laugh too. Creak! creak! said the shoes.
She paused. What was it moonlight always made her feel? Hardly hearing what she was saying, she made herself reiterate banalities about the moon. Her mind flew upward to the moon--Jim's downward to his squeaking shoes. She lived at the other end of town from Raymond Bonner's house, and the long walk was made up of endless intermittent perorations on the moon, on squeaking shoes. But the song of the shoes never ceased. Louder and louder it waxed. It crashed into the innermost fibres of her frame, completely deafened her mental processes. Never would she forget it: creak-creak-creak-creak!
And the moon, usually so kind and gentle, grinned down derisively.