Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [60]
As soon as I ask the question, I’m embarrassed. Probably they had sex all night.
“He’d get home from practice late. We’d eat. We might listen to music for a while. Then he’d study. I might read or watch TV. Sometimes I’d knit.”
“You knit?” I ask, surprised.
She nods.
“I knit all the time,” I say, barely able to contain my excitement. “That hat you wore today? The purple-and-white one? I knit that, like, a year ago.”
“Cool,” she says.
“I never meet anyone who knits. Except old ladies. Marion down at the store knits.”
“Who taught you?”
“My mother.”
“My grandmother taught me,” Charlotte says. “She taught me to knit and to paint and to sew. She used to insist that I speak only French to her.”
“Not your mother?” I ask.
“My mother’s always worked at the mill.” Charlotte puts all the dirty dishes in the sink. She wipes off the trays and sets them onto the top of the fridge. “In the summer James and I would sit in the backyard. The landlord let me have a garden. I had some vegetables, but mostly flowers.”
My father has set the stove to two hundred degrees, which is enough to warm the kitchen, but there are no chairs in the room on which to sit. I return to the den, just as my father is bringing in a load of wood. He sets it by the fire without a word and goes outside again. After a time, Charlotte joins me by the fire.
“What year are you in school?” I ask.
“Sophomore,” she says.
“You won’t go back?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Not there anyway.”
“Because he might be there?”
“He plays hockey. He’s on a scholarship for it.” She pauses. “He wants to go to medical school.”
“Wow,” I say, picking at the rug.
“It’s why I couldn’t tell anyone,” she says.
“Didn’t anyone notice?”
“I wore loose sweatshirts and sweatpants,” she says. “I had one seminar course, which I dropped. The rest were lecture courses in auditoriums. Eventually I dropped those, too.”
“But didn’t your friends or roommate say anything?”
“I spent all my time at James’s apartment. I hardly ever saw my roommate. Maybe she thought I was putting on weight, I don’t know. I gained weight all over. You probably wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I’m supposed to be skinny.”
I cannot imagine it. Charlotte looks perfect as she is.
“People probably would have begun to notice except that the baby came early,” she says. “A month, I think.”
“You don’t know?” I ask.
“Not really.”
“Your family didn’t know about the baby?”
“My parents would have killed me. They’re strict Catholics. And my brothers—I can’t even think what my brothers would have done.” She shakes her head once quickly. “I know this is kind of hard to understand,” she says, looking straight at me. “But I kind of gave myself over to him. To James.”
“You did?”
“And Nicky?”
“Yes?”
“I wanted the baby. I really wanted it.”
“What’s it feel like?” I ask.
She tilts her head and studies me. “You don’t have anyone to talk to about this, do you?”
“No.”
“You can’t ask your father.”
“No.”
“A friend?” she asks.
I think about Jo, the Viking goddess. “I don’t think she knows any more than I do,” I say.
Charlotte brings her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them. The position must hurt, though, because she immediately sets her legs to one side. “It’s unlike anything you can ever imagine,” she says.
The world outside our house is silent—no humming of motors, no groans from the furnace, only the fire snaps. Occasionally, through the windows, I can hear the scrape of a shovel against the snow.
“You know that something is, I won’t say wrong, but different,” she says. “Right away. Food doesn’t taste right.” She touches her throat. “There’s a kind of metallic taste right here. Foods you used to like a lot smell bad. And your breasts hurt. They get swollen and tender. And then you realize you didn’t get your period when you were supposed to. So I bought a test. In a drugstore? And there it was, big as life. The pink doughnut.”
I am pretty sure I know what the pink doughnut means.
“I waited another couple of weeks before I told James. By then I wasn’t feeling well.