A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [18]
“You weren’t thinking that Alice, were you? You looked so peaceful just a minute ago—”
“You’re right, Howard,” I had said. “You’re right! Isn’t it awful”—I stabbed a piece of chicken with my chopstick—“that we know each other so well we can’t even have a little fantasy in private? I was thinking about our strange, lonesome wedding and the warty-headed whatever his name Justice was. Remember what he said about our deep knowledge of one another? We knew nothing about each other! Maybe, actually, we still don’t. Sometimes I think I know the bone-grinding routine of our life, that that’s all I know, up to milk cows, in for breakfast, out to the—”
“Alice,” he had said, shaking his head, “let’s just love each other. Did you ever think it’s as simple as that?”
It wasn’t nearly as simple as that—was it? Could it be? “I know, I know,” I said, leaning over to massage my calf. “I’m talking about—Christ, my leg is knotted up—”
“You’re making it worse,” he had said in his calm and mature sixty-head-of-cattle farmer voice. I was curled over, clutching my leg. “Try to sit up and relax.” The pain was turning the bend in my knee, traveling along my thigh, en route to my stomach. “Relax, Alice. You’re making it worse.”
We had had to go home early. I lay in the hot water in the bath that night absently stroking my irreproachably relaxed calf, thinking about Emma, who had been the reason for our marriage. Emma had been no hardier than a peach in utero, but she had had the power to force us to become a family, to buy the farm at Prairie Junction. She would have been happy in a drawer or a box, and we had gone and got married, bought four hundred acres, a barn, several outbuildings, and a three-story house. She had forced us to go beyond knowing each other deeply, beyond loving each other: She had impelled us to make a life.
I had felt the charley horse coming on again, and I sank down into the tub. As I got older and older and then died somehow or other, I knew I would feel excruciating pain that was only a part of ordinary deterioration. There would be the chronic pain of aching joints, a broken hip, gallbladder surgery, the malignant lump in my breast—the sorts of trials that people endure day in and out. At thirty-two I had the occasional shadow of mistrust. I could imagine, as the years went on, my body becoming something outside of myself, something to cheer on, an old friend who is huffing up the hill on a bicycle. Still, I hoped that there would be no pain so great that it could blot out the time I sat on my father’s shoulders looking at the extraordinary, the magnificent, the gorgeous Gem of Egypt, dwarfing all of mankind.
Howard had come into the bathroom with a candle. He had turned off the light and undressed and climbed into the tub, displacing so much water it rose to my chin. It seemed, just then, like a summer to rejoice in the heat. It was so good of him to think that a rumpus in the bathtub would be fun, so good of him to walk straight in, with a candle, and without saying a word, put his hand on my head, stroke my hair. I moved up to make room for him. It had been a dry spell, as I had told Theresa recently, and who was to blame the hungry farmwife if one quiet night she had pulled a can of store-bought whipped cream out of her bathrobe pocket and squirted some froth on the dairy farmer’s privates? Theresa and I had howled out on the porch, trading the secrets of our marriage beds. I hadn’t taken into consideration how cold the whipped cream would feel, and so I had been surprised when Howard ran squealing like a pig into the hallway. He had tried to be good humored but he couldn’t stand the thought of my spending money on a dairy product when I could skim our own cream off the milk pail.
I had so often been in awe of the luck which had led me to him years before in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That night in the tub I was thankful for Howard, thankful for the prospect of renewal. Although it was cramped in