Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [16]
In many species of moths, Darwin had observed, the males prefer to inhabit more open territory, while the females cling under cover. She and Cole were a biological cliché, was that it? A male and female following their separate natures? She glanced up from her waterfall of cream, wondering how to gentle down this thing between them.
“A city person is only part of who I am,” she said quietly. The lines they drew in argument were always wrong; he put her in a camp she hadn’t chosen. How could he understand that she’d spent her whole sunburnt, freckled childhood trapped on lawn but longing for pasture? Spent it catching butterflies and moths, looking them up in her color-keyed book and touching all the pictures, coveting those that hid in wilder places?
He cracked his knuckles and locked his hands behind his head. “Lusa, honey, you can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl.”
“Shit,” she said aloud, giving in to pure irritation. Did he actually think he was clever? She’d mishandled the skimmer and dropped it too low, right at the end, giving up most of the cream she’d just skimmed. Now it would take another half day to separate again. She tossed the skimmer into the sink. “For this I spent twenty years of my life in school.” She turned to face him. “I’m sorry my education didn’t prepare me to live here where the two classes of animals are food and target practice.”
“You forgot ‘bait,’” he drawled.
“It’s not funny, Cole. I’m so alone here. You have no idea.”
He picked up the paper and folded it back to the beef prices. So that would be that. Her loneliness was her own problem, and she knew it. The only people she ever talked to, besides Cole, were all in Lexington. When he suggested that she make friends here, she could picture only the doe-eyed, aggressively coiffed women she saw in Kroger’s, and then she’d run to the phone to snipe about small-town life with Arlie and Hal, her former lab mates. But lately their support had run out on Lusa, to the tune of embarrassing phone bills: What’s the problem, exactly? You’re not happy, so walk away, you’ve got feet. Get back here while you can still recover your grant money.
She set herself to the task of sterilizing the milk utensils, trying to forget Arlie and Hal. Her former and present lives were so different that she couldn’t even hold one in her mind as she lived the other. It embarrassed her to try. Instead she soothed herself with an ancient litany: Actias luna, Hyalophora cecropia, Automeris io, luna, cecropia, Io, the giant saturniid moths, silken creatures that bore the names of gods into Zebulon’s deep hollows and mountain slopes. Most people never knew what wings beat at their darkened windows while they slept.
It was just one more thing she couldn’t talk about—her education, which far outstripped her husband’s. Cole’s standard joke: “I loved education so much, I repeated every grade I could.” And Lusa had never, ever believed his self-deprecation. From the day they’d first met at the University of Kentucky she’d recognized him as a scholar of his own kind. Cole was there for a workshop on integrated pest management. A group of farmers in this county had raised the tuition and sent him to Lexington knowing Cole would ignore the claptrap and bring back to them anything worth knowing. Their confidence was justified. He’d not been automatically impressed with Lusa’s status as a postdoctoral assistant, but had pressed her with questions when he saw how well she knew the gelechid moths, denizens of a grain crop in storage. His eyes, the blue of a rainless summer sky, had begun to follow her in a way that either alarmed or flattered her, she couldn’t say which. She’d showed him her lab and her father’s larger one in the same building, where he studied the pheromones of codling moths, notorious pests of apple trees. The laboratory moths lived scrutinized lives in glass boxes where scientists learned to fool the males into mating with scent-baited traps so their virgin brides might vainly cover the world’s apples