A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [83]
Not that she and I hadn’t had unpleasant weeks or even months in our marriage. Not that there weren’t times she’d bitch unmercifully. I’d dig my fists in my pockets and get busy. There were whole seasons when she was harried, when everything irritated her. You’d want to stay out of her way. Ours was not an easy life and carrying her nursing jobs, as well as the household and the chores, was a strain. Still, I refused to believe that she wasn’t made of strong stuff, that she would buckle under what was our chosen path. The two or so times we actually fought she smashed a plate and stormed out into the night. I have always disliked an argument. When I tried to be the voice of reason, when I pointed out that it might be wiser to continue what I mildly referred to as, “the discussion,” she flew off the handle again. Later, in jest, she accused me of being more even and mature than any reasonable person could tolerate.
I met her in Ann Arbor, when I was growing vegetables down by the old railroad tracks. I used to take my goods to the market once a week and set up two sawhorses and a board. I’d put out my broccoli, pea pods, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers. Anyone would have admired the enormous purple cabbages that I’d picked at dawn, with dew on the outer leaves. I had always wanted to be a farmer, although my father was determined I be a businessman. I studied History at first, and after he died I took up Dairy Science. I was an undergraduate for an embarrassing number of years. Alice walked by my table one morning when I was in my last semester. I remember how she stood staring at the eggplants. They were beautiful, as shiny as patent leather. Her blond hair was in a braid, coiled and pinned to the back of her head. She was carrying a basket filled with leeks over her arm. She was the most statuesque person I’d ever seen. She was wearing a strange thing, a quilt, a bed cover that had been cut up and made into a wrap. I wasn’t in the habit of making remarks to women I didn’t know. All the same I heard myself saying, “You must be hungry after the long trip on the Mayflower.”
She continued to study the eggplants, and when she’d had enough she looked directly at me. “I am,” she said, without blinking.
I was distracted then by the Oriental men surrounding my produce. I didn’t have time to watch her back away. “How much? How much?” They were all asking at once, holding up their vegetable of choice. I was tossing bags at them, telling them to help themselves, racing between the scale and the change drawer. I bumped into her because she was somehow right next to me, in her bedclothes, trying to read the price sign upside down on the other side, on the customer side of the table. She was on my side now. She was frowning, counting on her fingers, trying to work out the sum of two-and-a-half pounds of broccoli at forty cents a pound. She had gone over the holy invisible line between vendor and buyer. She’d walked straight over to my side and without instruction began to determine weight and count out change.
I had been with enough other women through the years who were appealing at first because they were so eager to please. I used to fall for the long-brown-haired girls with big white teeth who tried so hard to be interested in the world and life. I finally figured out that they were only after the drama of romance. There was a particular way they’d sit at my feet and turn their bright faces to look up at me. They’d switch their political allegiance if I said so,