A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [47]
I took a breath. I was going to open my mouth and bellow across the mountains, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.” The echo would come back, Knowwhattodo, whattodo, whattodoooo. Instead a noise came up from my throat, as if a rope had been made tight around my neck. I didn’t have the strength to dress and go down to the kitchen, and the bed looked so beautiful, stripped of the top sheet, like a clean white raft. I sank back down wanting to chart a course, to have it take me someplace.
“Shit,” Howard whispered. He rarely swore and therefore his curses always carried a punch. “What’s going on? Bear up, Alice. Go get breakfast. Keep in motion, for the sake of Emma and Claire. Keep in motion. Say that to yourself.”
He forced open our sticky drawers and pulled out my underwear, a brassiere, a gray T-shirt, and a pair of shorts. Then he yanked me up and began dressing me. He lifted my feet and put them through the underpants holes. It was important, I considered, to wake Emma and Claire every morning and feed them, and make them rest in the afternoon, so that they could grow up and have children, and make them get up and feed them, and tell them to rest, so that they could grow up and have children. That was called motion, and it was good. I drew the underpants from my ankles to my waist. I remembered long ago lying with my head on my hands on mercifully hot cement, watching the women and Aunt Kate swimming laps at rest time at the public pool. The women all looked the same in their tight bathing caps that mashed their foreheads into their eyes. The back of their legs were mottled like cottage cheese. They swam languorously, their dimpled arms coming over their heads in the crawl. When they got to the other end they turned on their backs and came kicking home. I had eaten my breakfast and gone to bed, perhaps had a brief teenage moment of absolute beauty, and woken up into one of the middle-age swimmers.
“I have a floral bathing suit with a skirt and padded cups,” I said.
“I’m not going to let you do this.” He was talking to me calmly while he put the shirt over my head. “No one blames you. You understand that.” He took hold of my hands and stuck them through the armholes. “You’re making yourself feel responsible for an accident that could have happened to anyone. Did you call Theresa? You do the shorts. I’ll get Claire. Emma needs you. She doesn’t know what is going on. She needs you, Alice.”
He was speaking just the way my father would have if he’d ever really talked to me.
“And brush your hair. Please,” he called from down the hall. “Dave and Phil are coming out this morning.”
I puzzled over that information. Dave and Phil. When he reappeared with Claire in his arms I was still trying to think.
“What, Alice?”
Just as he was asking in his kind, kind voice I remembered Dave, the soil scientist from the University of Wisconsin, and Phil, his graduate student. They were monitoring our farm for foxglove and earthworms, phosphorous and nitrogen.
“I did talk to Theresa,” I said.
“Great. That’s great.”
She had said at first that she couldn’t pass the time of day with me, and then she had spilled over with news as if she hadn’t talked with anyone for weeks. If I’d been Theresa I would have turned the love she felt for me into hate; I would have quite easily and naturally fed the festering thing. Is it possible, I would have liked to ask Howard, if I’d had the courage—do you think it’s possible that she’ll forgive me?
I went through the motions of breakfast. Milk on the table, spoons at each place mat, Life, Grape-Nuts, Cheerios, and cornflakes in a line, to suit everyone’s fancy. After we ate I held Claire in my lap, Emma at my side, and we read from our illustrated book of fairy tales. Next I sat on the floor and dressed and undressed the baby dolls. Their miniature white plastic shoes said on the bottom: “Made in China.” Wrinkled, bent Chinese women were sitting in an airless factory in Hong Kong stitching up