Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [70]
Beautiful, her mother calls it, but then she’d gone on and on about the naked statues in the art gallery, saying they were beautiful too.
And other people must do it—Mrs. Raabe, Mrs. Hassel, her teacher Mrs. Strong. What about Esther Williams or Deborah Kerr or the king and queen of England? Maybe even Grandma Goodwill in Indiana. She and Grandpa.
"Do ladies," she asks her mother carefully, "still do it even when they don’t want to have any more babies?"
"Well"—there was a swelling pause—"well, some do and some don’t."
Alice feels a shift in the balance of the room. She and her mother have sat down at the table with willingness between them; they were going to get to the bottom of what Billy Raabe was spreading around the neighborhood. But now the discussion seems to be drawing to a close. Her mother is picking at her thumbnail, pulling a sliver of loose skin away, then glancing up at the window where the curtains are blowing inward. Alice senses that only one more question will be permitted.
"And do you—and Daddy—still do it?"
"Well—"
Alice holds her breath and waits.
"Well, yes," she hears, and then her mother adds a brave, tight addendum that seems pulled together like the drawstring of a bag, "Sometimes."
Alice is going to throw up the cream of asparagus soup she had for lunch, she knows it. She wonders if she should go stand by the kitchen sink so as not to make a mess.
"But, Alice, you must promise not to say anything to Warren and Joanie about what we’ve been discussing. Not until they’re old enough to understand."
Warren and Joan are playing kings and queens in the backyard.
Alice can hear Warren through the screen door yelling at Joan to bring him his crown and she hears Joan shouting, "Yes, your royal highness, here it is, your royal highness."
It is Alice’s day to be queen, but she doesn’t feel like going outside this afternoon. Let them play what they want to play.
Oh, she loves them, her brother and sister, she’s never understood before how much she loves them. They are healthy, beautiful, perfect, and unbruised by this terrible knowledge. They will be able to go on looking into the faces of their mother and father, look right into their faces and smile and talk and carry on as if nothing has happened.
Warren "How old are you?" Warren asks his mother.
She is folding sheets and pillowcases and kitchen towels on the dining room table. "That’s for me to know and you to find out."
"Well, what year were you born in?"
She considers, then says, "1905."
"And now it’s 1947."
"Yes."
He thinks about this for a while. "What year was I born in?"
He’s asked this question before, often, but is always forgetting the answer.
"You were born in 1940. In the early days of the war."
Now he remembers why he keeps pestering his mother with the same question. So he can hear that shivery phrase—in the early days of the war. The image of a rising sun swims before his eyes, blood-red in color like the Japanese flag Billy Raabe’s got tacked up on his bedroom wall. He, imagines, too, a tense startled night silence broken by the high pitched rat-a-tat-tat of bullets, and all this fragmented noise is backed by a deeper, thunderous growling of guns. The War. The Second World War.
"Was that when Pearl Harbor was?" He loves the words Pearl Harbor. He loves himself for remembering them, for getting them right.
"This was before Pearl Harbor, a whole year before."
"Why was I born then?" he asks.
"Because you were."
"Alice was born before the war."
"Yes."
"And Joan, what about Joan?"
His mother’s head is shrunk tight today by rows of pincurls.
The bobby pins catch winks of light from the bay window. She is counting pillowcases. He can see her tongue ticking off the numbers at the same time her thumb travels down the neat stack—one, two, three, four, five. "Joan?" she says absentmindedly, "Joan was born in the middle of the war."
The war is like a wide brown tepid river the world’s been swimming along in, only now, ever since Victory, there’s nothing. Peace doesn’t feel