Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [11]
His upper lip, moving quickly, too quickly, grated against her mouth and cheek. And then he spoke: "Shall we marry then?"
His presumptuousness moved her, it was so childlike. She had an urge to laugh, to tease him—she knew how to be merry in those days—but his face was too close.
"What do you say, then?" he pressed her. His features were covered over by darkness, but she felt his warm breath on her neck, and it weakened her terribly. She readied herself for words of tenderness.
"I make a good enough wage," he said, "and I work regular."
This was true. She could not contradict what he said. She never did learn to contradict what he said. He had a particular way of putting a thing that disallowed contravention. The new ice box, for instance. He had written away for it, secretly sent an order in to Eaton’s Mail Order, and now it occupied a corner of the kitchen.
Suddenly it was there. Months earlier, for reasons of economy, he had refused to consult Dr. Spears about the lump behind his ear, and then he had to go and waste eleven dollars on an ice box, eleven dollars plus shipping. The neat metal plate attached to the ice box door said "New Improved Labrador Ice Chest." She had never asked for such a thing. She watched him on that first day run his fingers over the smooth wood and polished hinges, and against her will thought: those same fingers have touched me, my naked body.
Such thoughts are more and more with her. Her brain has been running wild these last months. She is a woman whose desires stand at the bottom of a cracked pitcher, waiting.
Even now, hanging out the wash, she is faint with longing, but for what? Embrace me, she says to the dripping sheets and pillowslips, hold me. But she says it dully, without hope. Her wash tub is empty now, an old wooden vessel sitting there on a piece of outcropping rock. The sky overhead is wide and blue; it makes her dizzy looking up. She feels a tweaking in her nostrils, and reaches in her apron pocket for her handkerchief. The smell of washing soda affects her, makes her want to sneeze. "I am not willing," she says inside her head. "I am no longer willing."
It is three o’clock already, she judges. She will dispense with weeding the garden for today. If anyone asks, her husband or one of her sons, she’ll blame the heat. Why put her health at risk under a strong sun like this? She’ll seek out the coolness of the front room instead, the tapestry chair in the darkened corner. She’s done this before, unable to stand up to this sorrow of hers. Her prized star of Bethlehem sits rooted in its china pot; she likes to study its gray-green leaves for secrets. The wallpaper, too, holds her attention with its rows of flowers, its browns and pinks alternating and repeating. The little beveled mirror in its oak frame sends back her image, her flattened-down hair and her eyes, hot as stones in her head.
"I love you," she heard young Cuyler Goodwill say to his immense, bloated wife, Mercy. "Oh, how I love you and with all my heart."
It was an early evening when she heard this declaration, a Monday like today. She had been standing beside the Goodwills’ kitchen door, a basket of early lilacs in her arms, a neighborly offering. (In truth, she finds it hard to stay away; the houses of the newly married, she senses, are under a kind of enchantment, the air more tender than in other households, the voices softer, the makeshift curtains and cheap rugs brave and bright in their accommodation.)
The Goodwills’ kitchen window was wide open to the fresh spring breezes. They were at table (she could see them clearly enough)—Mercy on one side and Cuyler on the other, the white tablecloth and the supper dishes as yet uncleared.
Light from the doorway fell on my mother’s broad face, giving it a look of luster. My father was leaning toward her, his hand covering hers. The two of them, Clarentine Flett thought, might have been the subject of a parlor picture,