A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [168]
It was as I tried again, and then again to focus on the speck, that I recalled the day and the time. Howard was going to come soon for his weekly visit. He too would see my pink bandanna and wonder why it fit so snugly over my head. I would try to distract him by saying, Remember the night we swam together in the pond, Howard? Remember how we moved so effortlessly through the water, holding each other as if we were one body? That was the beginning, wasn’t it?
When I went down to see him that afternoon, and when I came to my station and reached for the phone, I saw in that instant behind him, Emma and Claire looking into the communications room. Without thinking I tried to get through the window, as if I thought the girls being there meant the glass would dissolve. They were so beautiful. They were wearing new sundresses and their clean hair was shining. I hadn’t, for a month and a half, been able to count on the fact that they were real, and now there they were, wonderful and alive, curious about the operators, as if the outing was a trip to a museum. I was so glad and I felt a rush of gratitude toward Howard, for knowing, despite my command, that I needed to see them. He was standing up, shouting into the phone, trying, it seemed just then, to keep me from seeing. I couldn’t think why he was blocking the view. He was wearing a blue shirt, looking like a dark shadow in the window, like some ominous figure coming down the street in a cartoon. I was going to say so, into the phone, and then I was going to shout how glad I was to see the girls. I needed to look beyond him, if he would only get out of the way, and I needed to say the lines I had been working on: Remember the pond that night, Howard? Is it love that connects us, is that what it is? I never knew that the feeling I have is regular old love because it’s so—intricate. Perhaps there is another name for it, one we don’t yet know. I used to think that love was simple and noticeable, like rain falling, so that just as you’d look at your skin and say Water, you would also wake in the morning and say Love. But it has been underneath, this new and old thing I feel, subterranean, silent and steady, like blood, rushing along and along without often making itself known.
When I looked at him he was jabbing his finger at the window, as if he meant to poke me. His face was red, bilious. I had never seen him with such an expression, his frown running all the way into his neck. “I love you, Howard,” I tried to say into the window, but he was spitting and frothing, erupting into what looked very much like anger. The room began to lean and spin, slowly, like a merry-go-round just heating up, going at a drowsy pace so that you could still jump aboard if you had your ticket. I wasn’t sure then that the girls were really there, that they weren’t some kind of mirage. I had to get out before I tipped over. The guard tried to make me go back to my station, but he finally let me out when I said, “There is no one here I know.”
Chapter Nineteen
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I NEVER DREAMED THAT Howard would actually sell the farm, that he could part with the barn, and his cows, upon which he lavished what seemed a maternal care. I remember a day long ago when I looked out to see him shining the four-paned windows that are set into each side of the barn near the roof. Our house was falling to pieces and was unclean from top to bottom, and he was polishing the windows up in the haymow, where the dust was thick, like haze.
It was not clear to me that Howard meant to sell the farm, but near the end of the summer his letters became infrequent, short and full of gloom, and, to make matters worse, Theresa stopped writing altogether. There was no balance, no yin for the yang. I was mystified: One day she was telling me how delightful the girls were, how much they meant to her, how stoic I was, and the next day there was nothing. A postcard trickled in a week later, saying that they’d