Off Season - Jack Ketchum [11]
By the time she’d hauled the kindling through the kitchen and set it down next to the stove she was utterly done in. Everything ached. If she allowed herself to lie down now it would be all over, and she’d wake some time next morning. At dawn, she thought, since her bedroom had an eastern exposure. It was lovely how all these little bits of information were coming back to her. Eastern exposure. How to build a good fire. Beating the dust out of the cushions.
In recent years her visits to the country had been infrequent. There was a friend in New Hampshire and another in northern Vermont. Once every two or three years she’d drive up to visit. It was a catch-as-catchcan way to learn but Carla was a good observer and remembered what she saw. She and Marjie had always had a fine time on those trips—in fact it was the visits to New Hampshire and Vermont that had prompted this trip, though the state of Maine was wholly new to her. They both had always liked the country. Any country. She sat down at the kitchen table for a moment.
She thought about her sister. Marjie was also a good observer—maybe too good. Sometimes Carla thought that watching was all she’d ever do. She was as good an illustrator as Carla had ever seen and a pretty decent painter too, but she’d refused to do anything with her talents. Instead there had been a dreary succession of part-time jobs; typing jobs, receptionist jobs, sales jobs—she remembered one particularly ludicrous one in the toy department of Bloomingdale’s during the Christmas season, Marjie selling baseball bats and electronic games to East Side brats whose mothers all wore furs and carried monogrammed designer handbags and seemed to hate the kids they were buying for. Nothing else had been as bad as that.
Except, perhaps, her sex life. God knows that was a mess. Either she would fall in love at the drop of a hat with somebody who ought to have been a one-night stand, and this schoolgirl non-relationship would go on for months, or else she’d hibernate in her apartment for weeks at a time and see nobody at all, like a wounded animal licking its wounds and waiting for the snow to disappear.
At least there were signs that that much was changing. This guy Dan she was seeing loved her and was willing to say so. And though Marjorie was not so willing, she seemed to be staying with it for a change, seeing what she could make of it and what would develop. At least she wasn’t hiding.
But she still wished she could see a little outright strength and resolve in her sister. Maybe because she herself had come by a good dose of it over the last few years. If anything, Carla worried now that she was getting a bit too tough for her own good, that she was making a bad trade off between emotions and her efficacy in the world, and she wondered if she were still capable of falling in love now and then—when she had time to wonder.
But she knew she was better off than her sister. Marjie was still too much the fragile flower for her own good; and though she’d always sensed a hidden toughness in her sister, in all these years she had yet to see it in action.
She opened the grate and threw two more logs on the fire. Time for that shower, she thought. The shower, a cup of coffee, and a meal—that would revive her. She still wanted to do some reading tonight.
She undressed in the bedroom and walked naked into the bathroom. She knew that the water took a while to warm up so she turned on the shower and waited for the steam to rise. In the meantime she had a look at herself. She had to laugh. She looked like two separate people. Her hands were filthy. Her face was streaked with dirt and her hair was filled with dust. It looked as if the hands and head were rubber Halloween gear slipped onto an otherwise neat and clean—and estimable—body. At thirty-two she looked nearly as good as she had at twenty. The ass had a bit more sag to it, yes, but then again her skin was a whole lot better. Another tradeoff. She turned to the side. Her