Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [69]
Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett settle in their big double bed with the Hollywood headboard, he with the latest issue of The Botanical Journal and she flipping through the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. Quietude, propriety. A single moth flits back and forth between his bedside lamp and hers. Half an hour later, as though summoned by a bell, the two of them turn, embrace cordially, and reach for the light switch. Despite the heat they drift easily into sleep, each of them feeling full of trust for the other, but then they would, wouldn’t they?
Their sleep, Barker Flett likes to think, is made up of softer denser stuff than other people’s sleep. There’s something clean about it like scrubbed fleece. Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else—and this is what he more and more believes—just a word trying to remember another word.
He dreams of weeds tangled at the edge of a lake, of the breasts of a young girl, their hard tips, of an immense shaggy-flanked animal chasing him through the streets of an unknown town.
Alice Alice’s mother has explained to her the secrets of procreation.
This is terrible news, shocking in all its parts, a man’s peter poking inside a woman’s peepee place. The explanation, meted out during a long, tense kitchen-table session, is more sickening in its way than the story Alice got from Billy Raabe who lives on the next block, for according to Billy the man goes pee inside the lady.
"No," Alice’s mother says firmly, this—she pauses—this business has nothing to do with urine. The fluid in question contains seeds which are necessary if the mother is going to grow a baby inside her.
The mechanics of the exchange seem impossible to Alice.
"The mother and father lie on a bed," her mother tells her, sighing it out, "with their arms around each other."
"When?" Alice asks. Her own voice feels harsh to her ears.
Mrs. Flett’s expression turns cross at this question, those three little lines between her eyes shooting up like a fan, but she clears her throat and says, "Well, usually at night."
"At night? Right here? In our house?"
"Really, Alice." Now her mother is staring down at her cuticles.
The little teapot clock over the stove says half-past three. A coconut chiffon cake, freshly iced, sits on a pink glass plate.
"Well?" Alice is waiting for an answer. She will not let the issue drop.
"I don’t know what to say, Alice. And I don’t like the way you’re speaking, your attitude, that scowl on your face."
This is becoming worse and worse. But Alice can’t stop herself.
"It’s so icky. Why does anyone have to do such an icky thing?"
"Really, Alice."
"It’s so awful."
"No, it’s not awful. It’s a beautiful thing between a man and woman."
"It makes me sick at my stomach."
"Well, you’ll just have to believe me, it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing."
Alice can feel her insides whimpering but she manages to keep the sound confined. The cloudless summer day is spoiled. Nothing will ever be the same. The house is defiled, especially her parents’ upstairs bedroom with its stale powdery mysterious smell and the big hard-mattressed bed with its tufted headboard. Men and women are unclean, it was all grotesque, her mother who dresses herself each morning in her closet, the door left open a crack to let in the light, pulling on her underpants and girdle with her back turned, and hooking up her nylon stockings. Her mother actually opens her body at night to that dark hairy part of her father—Alice has glimpsed this darkness from time to time—and she allows this unspeakable thing to happen. It’s like a dirty