Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [113]
“What reputation?” she said, hanging her wet clothes on a peg near the stove and getting a clean towel out of the cabinet. “Other than Jerry and the guy who cuts my paycheck, there’s hardly anybody who remembers I’m up here. I’m that far gone.”
As she toweled her hair, she bent over toward the wood stove. Her chilled-to-the-bone body was treating it as a source of warmth, she realized, even though there was no fire there. She also noticed he was watching every move of her naked limbs, taking in the long muscles of her thighs.
“If you don’t care what people think,” he said, “then what’s the problem? Why was I supposed to hide from young Smokey?”
“He’s not that much younger than you are. You’re both just a couple of kids. Button your shirt, my God, it’s freezing in here.”
“Yes, Mother.” He made no move to button his shirt.
She stood up, hugging the towel to her chest. “Why are we playing house here, you and me? Do you know I’m forty-seven years old? The year you were learning to walk, I had my first affair with a married man. Does that not freak you out?”
He shook his head. “Not really.”
“Does me. All of it does. That I spent six years researching an animal you’d like to see purged from the planet. That I’m half a foot taller than you. Nineteen years older. If we walked down the street together in Knoxville, people would gawk.”
“As far as I know, walking down the street together in Knoxville is not in the plans.”
She sat on the bed in her underwear, shivering, feeling suddenly too exhausted even to sit up. She got under the blankets and pulled them up to her chin. She tried that out, looking at him sideways from the pillow. “As far as I know, there are no plans.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No,” she said, miserably.
He put his bare feet flat on the floor and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. When he spoke again he used a new version of his voice, quieter and kinder. “I guess we might seem like a weird pair to anybody who was looking. But if nobody’s looking, there’s no weirdness. I thought it was pretty simple.”
“If pride falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it really fall?”
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re ashamed of me,” she said. “I’m ashamed of me, of us. Otherwise we’d be able to walk down the street anywhere.”
He studied her face, seeming momentarily older—as if he could will himself into moments of maturity, she thought, but normally just didn’t bother. He was twenty-eight, a juvenile male. Like a yearling red-tailed hawk with his dark adult feathers just starting to show through. On the matter of mate choice, she was apparently addled.
“Where I come from, people keep their treasure under the mattress,” he offered finally. “They don’t have to advertise it all over creation.”
“But if they keep it hidden they never get to use it.”
“What is there to use about you and me? Where are we supposed to be spending ourselves besides here?”
“Nowhere. I don’t know what I’m saying. Forget it.”
He sat up against the straight chair back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I know what you’re saying. I’m really not all that stupid. My immaturity notwithstanding.”
She lay still for a long time, looking at him from her prone position. His blue-green eyes, the exposed skin of his chest, the white bone buttons on his corduroy shirt—all of his planes and angles held a clear light whose beauty cut her like a knife.
“Eddie. It’s not like I want to get married and live happily ever after.”
He winced a little, she thought, at the blunt mention of that possibility, even in the negative. “If you did,” he said slowly, “I’d be in Alberta about now.”
“Alberta, Canada?” she asked. “Or Alberta, Kentucky? Just how repellent are we talking about here?”
He stared at her, offering no answer.
She shook her head. “You’re not big enough to break my heart. I’m not some schoolgirl, give me a little credit. But I’m not sure I can be like you, either.”
“What does