From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [37]
“We havent any meat,” Karen said desperately. “This is the maid’s day off. I wasnt going out to shop until this afternoon.”
“Oh,” Holmes said.
“But I’ll fix the toasted cheese for you,” she said.
“Okay,” he smiled. “Cheese will be fine.”
He followed her out to the kitchen and while she got the lunch ready, sat at the kitchen table following her with his eyes. When she measured out the coffee, his eyes watched her solicitously. When she greased the skillet and set it on the burner, his eyes watched her, carefully protecting. Karen prided herself on her cooking, it was her only art and she had learned to do it well and with the least amount of wasted time and motion. But now, for some reason, she forgot about the coffee, and it boiled over. When she grabbed up the pot she burnt her hand.
Holmes jumped up with magnificent speed and grabbed a dishtowel to wipe up the stove. “Now, now,” he said. “Just forget it. I’ll clean it up. You sit down. You’re worn out.”
Karen put her hands up to her face. “No, I’m not,” she said. “Just let me fix it. I’m sorry I boiled it. I can fix it all right. Please. Let me fix it.”
It was then she smelled the smoke. She caught the cheese sandwich just in time to keep it from burning. It was black on one side.
“Thats all right,” Holmes smiled bravely. “Now just forget it, darling. I dont want you to get upset. This is perfectly all right.”
“Let me scrape it for you,” Karen said.
“No, no. Its perfectly all right like this. This is good. It really is.”
He chomped on the sandwich to show how fine it was. He ate it with gusto. He did not drink any coffee.
“I’ll catch a cup at the PX,” he smiled. “I have to go back over to the Company to sign some papers anyway. You go in and lie down and get some rest. It was really a fine lunch, truly it was.”
Karen stood in the screendoor watching him go down the alley. After he was gone she went back in the bedroom. She put her hands down at her sides and forced herself to relax them. She coughed once or twice, rackingly, but she did not cry. She made herself breathe deeply. She relaxed her muscles, but the nerves inside them went on fluttering frantically.
Furtively, as if it had an intelligence of its own, her hand moved up to her stomach and touched the ridge of scar tissue, and the horror she held of her own body, of the pusiness, of the cheesy degenerations, began to rise up queasily. The grape torn open and the seed plucked out, withering before it ever came to fruition.
That isnt so, she told herself, you know it isnt so. You’ve borne his heir for him, who can say your life is fruitless? How can you be fruitless? You’ve been a mother, haven’t you?
There must be more, there must be, something told her, someplace, somewhere, there must be another reason, above, beyond, somewhere another Equation beside this virgin + marriage + motherhood + grandmotherhood = honor, justification, death. There must be another language, forgotten unheard unspoken, than the owning of an American’s Homey Kitchen complete with dinette, breakfast nook, and fluorescent lighting.
Among the broken bathroom fixtures and the sticky brightly colored rainwashed labels on the emptied cans, Karen Holmes was searching through the city dump of civilization, desperately hunting for her life, and the muck she got upon her fingers didnt matter.
There was so much of it already, Karen felt, upon her.
Chapter 7
PREWITT WAS SITTING on his bunk waiting for chow, playing solitaire to forget the sense of strangeness, when Anderson and Clark, the G Company buglers, came in the big unsympathetic squadroom. He had carted his stuff over from A Company and stowed it, made up the bare mattress into a precisely square-cornered bunk, arranged his uniforms in the wall locker, rolled a neat combat pack and old timer’s envelope roll, set his shoes and foot locker on the stand, and he was home. He had put on a clean suit of tailormade blue fatigues and sat down with the cards. In less than half an hour he had accomplished