A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [59]
I draped myself over the steering wheel, to rest. If only I could survive until the girls were through high school. It was Claire who would save me, who would take me by the hand and lead me through the difficult years ahead. She was beautiful and easygoing, diplomatic and tolerant. She would be crowned Homecoming Queen and for the first time the people of Prairie Center would turn to us, her parents, and wonder how it was we had produced such a graceful, congenial, amazing child. Having her by our sides would grant us free admission into the very life of Prairie Center, chairs set out for us every morning at Del’s for breakfast, and a standing invitation to Dr. Larson’s annual Memorial Day picnic. “Oh, hang down your head, Tom Dooley,” rang on in my ears. “Oh, hang down your head and cry.”
Emma came tripping out of the house, her bony knees knocking against each other. Claire was waddling behind, short and plump and dark. Emma’s bangs had grown halfway down her nose and her shirt was slipping off one shoulder. She looked so forlorn I had to turn away. I would get everything Howard wanted. We had Nellie’s carefully labeled casseroles, but no paper products or bananas or mayonnaise. I stared at the tattered list while the girls climbed into their seats. We were going off to the store, just as we should. If we could go to the Piggly Wiggly today, then there was no telling what might happen tomorrow. It might be that everything would fall into place and we would keep in motion so continuously, like the planet itself, that we wouldn’t even feel our effort, working to put one foot in front of the next.
My children were sitting in the back seat, each studying a picture book on her lap from the car book bag. They were waiting for me to take them to the store. They didn’t seem scarred, didn’t act like bumpkins. They were wearing name-brand clothes and had somehow managed to come through looking very like their thoroughly modern Prairie Center sisters. I was considering whether or not I should remind them of my bad behavior by apologizing, when the squad car turned up the drive.
Howard came from the milk house and went to the officer. I was already out and to the gate, to the stretch of grass by the garden. I lay down on the parched ground and looked as hard as I could at the blue sky. I wanted to feel the sheerness of space, to somehow reach what was empty and quiet, to hold what was right beyond my grasp.
Howard
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Chapter Nine
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LAST SUMMER WE USED to strike out and drive up and down country roads. Even with the sun blazing away I wasn’t sure which way was east, which was west. The girls would gradually close their eyes and slump over. Or else the corn rows, passing by with machinelike precision, would hypnotize them. They’d sit in a stupor. I tried to brace myself against thought. There was no good in thinking. I concentrated on the asphalt straight in front of the car. We were in a capsule, the girls and I. We were suspended in time and space, while the folk music drifted from the tape deck like smoke. “So be easy and free, when you’re drinkin’ with me. I’m a man you don’t meet every day.” The slightest thing would jolt me back to our present life. A fence, a gate, a cow, wash on the line, the moon in the sky. For weeks just about everything brought me back to Alice. After last summer Emma and Claire also stopped looking at a thing for what it is. They also began to ask, in their own way, What’s here that doesn’t meet the eye? They don’t look at a river without wondering if it’s dirty and if the fish are sick.
On an ordinary morning in the hottest, driest summer on record, two officers got out of their car and went around the house to find my wife lying on her back in the dead grass. She was holding her arms straight up, flexing her fingers. She kneeled while the hefty one handcuffed her and recited her rights in a stream. It is a familiar-enough scene, but startling in one’s own yard. The cop sounded like