Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [170]
Fifty feet below her was the overlook where she’d nearly ended her life in a fall two years ago, and then, in May, where she’d fallen again. Sweet, he’d said. Did you ever see a prettier sight than that right there? And she’d replied, Never. She was looking at mountains and valleys, all keeping their animal secrets. He was looking at sheep farms.
She touched her breast and took up the mirror again to look closely at the deep auburn color of her aureole. It seemed like a miracle that skin could change like this in color and texture in such a short time, like caterpillar skin taking on the color and texture of moth. Briefly, as if testing the temperature of water, she touched her abdomen just under her navel, where the top button of her jeans no longer conceded to meet its buttonhole. Deanna wondered briefly just how much of a fool she had been, for how long. Ten weeks at the most, probably less, but still. She’d known bodies, her own especially, and she hadn’t known this. Was it something a girl learned from a mother, that secret church of female knowledge that had never let her in? All the things she’d heard women say did not seem right. She had not been sick, had not craved to eat anything strange. (Except for a turkey. Was that strange?) She’d only felt like a bomb had exploded in the part of her mind that kept her on an even keel. She’d mistaken that feeling for love or lust or perimenopause or an acute invasion of privacy, and as it turned out it was all of those, and none. The explosion had frightened her for the way it loosened her grip on the person she’d always presumed herself to be. But maybe that was what this was going to be: a long, long process of coming undone from one’s self.
Deanna tried to imagine the night of her own conception, something she’d never before had the courage to consider. The rumpled Ray Dean Wolfe making love to the mother she’d never known. That woman had been flesh and blood—a person who’d moved like Deanna, maybe, who’d walked too fast, or dreaded thunder, or bitten the ends of her hair when she was too happy or too sad. A woman who’d gripped life in naked embrace and gone on living past any hope of survival.
Deanna had not been a fool, she decided. She’d just lacked guidance in matters of love. Lacking a mother of her own, she’d missed all the signs.
Nannie had done her best, and that wasn’t bad—just a broader education, by far, than most daughters were prepared for. Nannie Rawley, as reliable and generous as her apple trees, standing in her calico skirt in the backyard calling Deanna and Rachel down out of a tree, not for fear of their climbing but because she could occasionally offer them something better, like cider or a pie. Only then. They’d lived in trees, Rachel low to the ground on a branch where Deanna put her for safekeeping while she herself climbed enough for the both of them, mounting the scaffold limbs like the girl on the flying trapeze. If she looked down, there was Rachel, peering up through the leaves with her sweet, sleepy eyes and her lips parted in eternal wonder, permanently in awe of her airborne sister.
“What made Rachel that way?” she’d asked Nannie, only once. The two of them were up on the hill behind the orchard.
Nannie answered, “Her genes. You know about genes.”
Deanna was an adolescent girl who loved science and read more books than anyone she knew, so she said yes, she did.
“I know,” Nannie said quietly, “you want a better answer than that, and so do I. For a long time I blamed the world. The chemicals and stuff in our food. I was reading about that when I was carrying her, and it scared me to death. But there’s other ways of looking at Rachel.”
“I love her how she is,” Deanna said. “I’m not saying I don’t.”
“I know. But we all wish she didn’t have so many things wrong with her, besides her mind.”
Deanna waited until Nannie decided to speak again. They were walking uphill through an old, weedy hayfield. Deanna was taller than Nannie now, had passed her around her twelfth birthday, but by walking ahead