Nettles
Our farm was small-nine acres. It was small enough for me to have explored every part of it. Each of the trees on the place had an attitude and a prence-the elm looked rene and the oak threatening, the maples friendly, the hawthorn old and crabby. Even the pits on the river flats had their flats had their distinct character.
The girls as well as the boys were divided into two sides. Each girl had her own pile of balls and was working for paticular soldiers, and when a soldier fell wounded he would call out a girl’s name, so that she could drag him away and dress his wounds as quickly as possible. I made weapons for Mike, and mine ws the name he called. There was a keen alarm when the cry came, a wire zinging through your whole body, a fanatic feeling of devotion. When Mike was wounded he never opened his eyes. He lay limp and still while I presd slimy large leaves to his forehead and throat and-pulling out his shirt-to his pale tender stomach, with its sweet and vulnerable belly button.
One morning, of cour, the job was all finished, the well capped, the pump reinstated, th
e fresh water marvelled at. And the truck did not come. There were two fewer chairs at the table for the noon meal. Mike and I had barely looked at each other during tho meals. He liked to put ketcup on his bread. His father talked to my father, and the talk was mostly about well, accidents, water tables. A rious man. All work, my father said. Yet- he-Mike’s father-ended nearly every speech with a laugh. The laugh had a lonely boom in it, as if he were still down the well.
Sunny and I had been friends in Vancouver years before. Our pregnancies had dovetailed, so that we had managed with one t of maternity clothes. In my kitchen or in hers, once a week or so, distracted by our children and sometimes reeling for lack of sleep, we stoked ourlves up on strong coffee and cigarettes and launched out on a rampage of talk about our marriages, our personal deficiencies, our interesting and discreditable motives, and our forgone ambitions. We read Jung at the same time and tried to keep track of our dreams. During that time of life that is suppod to be a reproductive daze, with the woman’s mind all swamped by maternal juices, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler and “The Cocktail Party”.
He had slept in the guest bedroom the night before but tonight he’d moved downstairs to the fold-out sofa in the front room. Sunny had given him fresh sheets rather than unmarking and making up again the bed he had left for me.
Lying in tho same sheets did not make for a peaceful night. I knew that he wouldn’t come to e, no matter how small the risk was. It would be a sleazy thing to do, in the hou of his friends. And how could he be sure that it was what I wanted? Or that it was what he really wanted? Even I was not sure of it. Up till now, I had always been able to think of mylf as a woman who was faithful to the person who she was sleeping with at any given time. My sleep was shallow, my dreams monotonously lustful, with irritating and unpleasant subplots. All night-or at least whenener I woke up-the crickets wre singing outside my windows. At first I thought it was birds. I had lived in cities long enough to have forgotten how crickets can make a perfect waterfall of noi.
The bushes right at the edge of the grass looked impenetrable, but clo up there were little openings, the narrow paths that animals or people looking for golf balls had made. T
he ground sloped slightly downward, and we could e a bit of the river. The water was steel gray, and lookedto be rolling. Between it and us there was a meadow of weeds, all in bloom-goldenrod, jewelweed with its red-and-yellow bells, and what I thought were flowering nettles with pinkish-purple clusters, and wild asters. Even the most frail-stemmed, delicate-looking plants had grown up almost as high as, or higher than, our heads. When we stopped and looked up through them we could e something coming, from the direction of the midnight clouds. It was the real rain, coming at us behind the splatter we were getting. It looked as if a large portion of the sky had detached itlf and was bearing down, bustling and resolute, taking a not quite recognizable but animate shape. Curtains of rain-not veils but really thick and wildly slapping curtains-were deiven ahead of it. We could e them distinctly, when all we were feeling were light were light, lazy drops. It was almost as if we were looking through a window, and not quite believing that the window would shatter, until it did, and rain and wind hit us, all together, and my hair was lifted an fanned out above my head. I felt as if my skin might do that next.
We remained like this until the wind pasd over. That could not have been more than fiv
e minutes, perhaps onlu two or three. Tain still fell, but now it was ordinary heavy rain. He took his hands away, and we stood up, shakly. Our shirts and slacks were stuck fast to our bodie. We tried to simle, but had hardly the strength for it. Then we kisd and presd together briefly. This was more of a ritual, a recognition of survival rather than of our bodies’ inclinations. Our lips slid against each other, slick and cool, and the pressure of the embrace made us slightly chilly, as fresh water was squished out of our clothing.
The bluest eye
They have the eyes of people who can tell what time it is by the color of the sky. Such girls live in quiet black neighborhoods where everybody is gainfully employed. Where there are porch swings hanging from chains. Where the grass is cut with a scythe, where the grass is cut with a scythe, where rooster combs and sunflowers grow in the yards and pots of bleeding hearts, ivy, and mother-in-law tongue line the steps and windowsills. Such girls have bought watermelon and snap beans from the fruit man’s wagon. They have put in the window the cardboard sigh that has a pound measure printed on each of t
hree edges-qo lbs., 25lbs., 50ibs. –and NO ICE on the fourth. The paticular brown girls from Mobil and Ailen are not like some of their sisters. They are not fretful, nervous, or shrill; they do not have lovely black necks that stretch as though against and invisible collar; their eyes do not bite. The sugar-brown Mobil girls move through the streets without a stir. They are as sweet and plain as buttercake.
