Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [116]
Eddie had rolled on his side and propped himself up on one elbow, the better to uncover her body and look at it. It had taken some getting used to, this. She fought the persistent urge to cover herself with the sheet.
“How come they never got hitched up?” he asked, tracing her aureoles with his index finger. “Your dad and his lady friend.”
“Nannie never did want to. I’m not sure why. I guess I admired her for it, though, for knowing her mind and wanting to be on her own. The county gossip was always that Dad wouldn’t marry her.”
“You girls always get the losing end of gossip.”
“Oh, you noticed. Yeah. And Nannie was kind of an odd bird. She still is. But he would have married her in a second. He was like that, just a plain honorable guy.”
“Unlike me.”
“Very. I think it turned him sad in the long run, that she wouldn’t marry him. Especially after Rachel turned out so sickly. When she died, it tore everybody up. Dad was losing our farm at the time, and he just fell to pieces drinking. I’m sure it broke Nannie’s heart, too, but she wore it better.”
“And what about you? She was your sister. Half-sister.”
“Yeah, she was. I can’t explain it, but I always knew she was going back to Heaven. She’d just come to be my little sister for a while. Rachel was this angel. We’d play pirate ship and I’d be the captain and she’d be the angel. She was happy all the time. She had this kind of creamy skin you could almost see through. It was a local tragedy when she died.”
Deanna closed her eyes, feeling weirdly hollow inside from this talk. It might be a fever, making her so loose and dreamy. “Nannie’s tough, though; she’s carried on all these years. She lives her life how she wants to, no matter what people say.”
“So that’s where you learned it from.”
Deanna laughed. “Oh, boy. You should see what a mess I made out of life. I went to college and proceeded to go to bed with my professors left and right.”
He moved his body against hers, all of it, hard and warm and impossible to ignore. “You were pursuing higher learning.”
“Low learning. I don’t know what I was doing. I think I had this daddy complex. I listened to my instructors. I married one of my instructors. He thought I was brilliant, so I married him. He said I talked like a hillbilly, so I stopped saying ‘Hit’s purty’ and ‘Oncet in a while.’ He said I should be a teacher, so I got certified and taught school in Knoxville and spent my twenties and half my thirties going out of my gourd.”
“What did you teach?”
“Science and math and Please Shut Up, to seventh graders.”
While they’d been speaking he had moved on top of her, supporting his weight on his elbows, and gently slid inside her without changing the tone of his voice or the conversation. She inhaled sharply, but he touched a finger to her lips and kept talking. “No, I can’t see you with an apple on your desk. I see you throwing chalk.”
She lay perfectly still, catching her breath. As if she’d seen a snake.
“Maybe I threw some chalk, I don’t remember. I liked the kids sometimes, but mostly I felt like I was under siege.” She spoke slowly and calmly, and it all seemed very secret, as if their bodies were hiding from their minds. “I’m an introvert,” she continued carefully. “I like being alone. I like being outside in the woods. And there I was. Living in a little brick house in a big-city suburb, spending my days with hundreds of small, unbelievably loud human beings.”
He had begun to move inside her, unhurriedly. It took some concentration to keep her voice steady. She felt the corners of her mouth drawing back involuntarily, like the copperhead’s smile. “You’d think I could have figured it out, but I was restless for ten years before it dawned on me that I needed to go to graduate school and study wildlife biology and get myself out of there.”
“And here you are.” He held her eyes, smiling, while he slowly, slowly moved his hips. Her pelvis tilted, reaching for him.
“And here I am.”
“And you and the professor never had kids?”
“Oh, that was out of the question. He’d been married