Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [84]
Carlo asked me to go with him to Denver or possibly Aspen. Carlo’s still Carlo. He wants to know why you haven’t written. (I told him you’re busy saving the world.) I almost think I could go to Denver. Carlo is safe because I don’t really love him that much. If he stopped wanting me around one day, it wouldn’t be so terrible. I wouldn’t die.
Hallie, I realize how that sounds. I feel small and ridiculous and hemmed in on every side by the need to be safe. All I want is to be like you, to be brave, to walk into a country of chickens and land mines and call that home, and have it be home. How do you just charge ahead, always doing the right thing, even if you have to do it alone with people staring? I would have so many doubts—what if you lose that war? What then? If I had an ounce of your bravery I’d be set for life. You get up and look the world in the eye, shoo the livestock away from the windowsill, and decide what portion of the world needs to be saved today. You are like God. I get tired. Carlo says “Let’s go to Denver,” and what the heck, I’m ready to throw down the banner of the Stitch and Bitch Club and the republic for which it stands. Ready to go live in Denver and walk my dog.
I went out at dawn, alone, to mail my letter and prowl my old neighborhood. I kept trying to believe I felt good in this familiar haunt. I’d brought my city clothes: a short skirt and black tights and stiletto-heeled boots (the sight would have laid Doc Homer flat), and I walked downtown among strangers, smiling, anonymous as a goldfish. There was a newsstand four blocks down where I used to go for the Times or the Washington Post, which Hallie and Carlo would spread all over the living-room floor on Sunday mornings. Hallie would constantly ask us if she could interrupt for a second. “Listen to this,” she’d say. She needed to read it all aloud, both the tragedies and the funnies.
I ducked into a coffee shop that had decent coffee and wonderful croissants. As I sat blowing into my cup I realized I was looking around to see who was there—a habit I must have picked up in Grace, where you looked at people because they were all identifiable.
A man at a table very close to my elbow kept looking at my legs. That’s another thing you put up with when you’re tall—men act like you’ve ordered those legs out of a catalogue. I crossed them finally and said, “See, look, I’ve got another one just like it.”
He laughed. Amazingly, he wasn’t embarrassed at all. I’d forgotten how the downtown scene could be—people cultivating weird-ness like it was a disease or a career. He had a neatly trimmed beard and was extremely handsome. “How Emma Bovary,” he said.
I smiled. “You seem to have lost your syntax. Perhaps you’re in the wrong place. The Café Gertrude Stein is down the street.”
“Well,” he said. “Well well well. Perhaps you could provide me with some context. Do you have a name?”
“Cosima. It means Order in the Cosmos.”
“Cosima, my love, I’m in desperate need of order. If you have the New York Times in your bag there, I’d be willing to marry you.” I had the New York Times.
“I’m not in the habit of marrying strangers,” I said. I was suddenly disgusted with what I was doing. I’d go anywhere Carlo wanted, I’d be a sport for my students in Grace, I’d even tried to be a doctor for Doc Homer, just as I’d humiliated myself in the old days to get invited to birthday parties. If I kept trying to be what everybody wanted, I’d soon be insipid enough to fit in everywhere. I grabbed my bag and stood up to go. I told the man, “You don’t have the slightest idea who I am.”
The second night in Tucson I slept