A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [84]
That day I first met Alice I asked her if she could come back the next week, to help. She said she didn’t know. When I mentioned that it was busy as early as 6 A.M., that I had to unload and sell simultaneously, she said, “I’m not up that early.”
I thought of thanking her for her help and leaving it at that. She had a basket filled with leeks. I didn’t think that single people bought leeks. A person bought leeks to make soup for a household. I knew that if I let her go I might not see her again. I got her to sit on the back of my pickup truck. “You’ll get your farm,” she declared, after I’d quickly outlined my idea for the rest of my life. It wasn’t that she was clairvoyant. She said that of course she didn’t really know what was going to happen, but that if a person was quiet and observant the way she’d been for twenty-odd years, you got a feel for the patterns and the personalities. She said that all she’d done through her long school career was sit at her desk with her arms folded across her chest and watch the teachers, the students, and the administrators. She dreamed about their lives, and imagined them in various predicaments, to save herself from dying of boredom. She advocated public schools and the rigors of monotony, in fact, because she said it forced a person to cultivate an inner life.
Some Saturdays, over the course of that autumn, she came to help, and others she didn’t. I lost sleep when she didn’t come. I thought about her all the time when I was awake. Once I knew her address I worried that she would move without telling me. I worried that she’d change her phone number or that she’d walk by my table hand in hand with someone else.
The first time she took a shower in my apartment she came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her head in a turban. She was wearing my tartan bathrobe, a flannel thing my mother had given me and I had never worn. She stooped to put on her shoes. There was one blond strand of hair down her back, that hadn’t been caught up in the towel. She’d come with her clean knapsack and taken from it things which intrigued me. They turned out to be everyday products in exotic packaging. She’d brought a toothbrush made from boar’s bristles and toothpaste in a black tube, a birth-control device and accompanying gel, and a wooden soap box which she said was impractical. I was still young enough to hope that having, living with, the right hard-headed woman, was the key to happiness. She was self-contained, I thought, didn’t need anyone to show her the way. As she stooped in her turban, it seemed to me that if every man had a woman who looked like Alice in my bathrobe the world would be an untroubled place.
At Christmas, when I took her to visit my mother, Emma was conceived. My father had always threatened to disinherit me if I got a girl pregnant outside of wedlock. Even in high school I had been scrupulous. They say that some women know when conception has occurred, that their sixth sense tells them. My mother had shown us to our separate bedrooms. When I thought she was asleep I crept down the hall like a teenager to Alice’s bed. At the moment of penetration Nellie crashed into the bathroom. She began brushing her teeth and then tapping her toothbrush on the porcelain sink. I clapped my hand over Alice’s mouth. I wasn’t sure my mother was ever going to get the water out of the bristles. It was a persistent, demanding sound, like the racket people make on champagne glasses with their forks at a wedding. I remember thinking that that is probably the noise sperm and egg make as they collide and burst into one.
Everything fell into place. Three weeks later Alice discovered that she was pregnant. A month later she turned twenty-five and