The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [108]
Miranda has taken her last step out of childhood. Her skin is no longer a girl’s, no longer untouched. Her residency in the country of the sick has guaranteed that she will never be the child she was. Harriet’s child, untouched. No longer what Harriet understands as an American girl.
She is ashamed at how happy she is that, sick, her daughter is more beautiful to her than ever, more lovable than she has been in all the years since she has ceased, literally, being a child. She is thinner, and so the bones in her face are sharper, the lines clearer. She has always looked charming, Harriet thought. Now she is heartbreakingly beautiful. She has gone from being Vermeer’s sensible housewife to a Filippo Lippi Madonna. The darkness of the world has wiped its brush across her face, and the effect, Harriet thinks, ashamed, is beautiful. How can it be good that her daughter has suffered. It has made her kinder, Harriet could see; it has also made her lovelier.
Harriet stays with her daughter and Adam for two weeks; she sleeps on the foldout sofa in the living room, shy at the idea of Miranda and Adam in the marital bed. And she knows, though she says nothing, that they are slipping away from each other and at night she weeps quietly because she sees too clearly the end of it. Was Bill right all along? These beautiful young people who loved each other, had loved each other, are perhaps not the people they were. Who are they, then? Adam with his beard. Miranda with the shadows underneath her eyes.
Her mother leaves, but Miranda can’t go back to work; she barely has the energy to shower and dress herself. She forces herself to shop and cook, but her only appetite is for bland food. Omelets. Potatoes slathered in butter. Occasionally, a hamburger. A vegetable overcooked and unadorned. She finds it difficult to make love to Adam. Her body seems an unhealthy thing; she has been, she thinks, literally diseased. She doesn’t want to expose Adam to this disease, its traces, and its history. His forceful health seems more than she can bear, as if she’d been living in a cave and could only experience the noonday sun as an assault. When she wakes from fitful daytime sleep, she often dislikes the unfresh smell of her body, and the idea of another shower exhausts her. He body feels heavy to her; it is making her move with difficulty, and she focuses on her hair, hanging down her back four inches above her waist or in a heavy braid; but the labor of braiding often strikes her as impossible. One day—it is cold and gray and at four the sun has stopped making even false gestures of illumination—she gets a scissors and standing in front of the bathroom mirror chops her hair off till it is nothing but a boyish cap.
The shushshush of the scissors, the hill of hair building around her feet, dry but soft, a delightful texture to walk in or through, give her the first energized pleasure she has known since she’s been sick, or perhaps since the tornado and the people it struck replaced her energy with despair. Then she looks at her face. She likes the bare look of it, the light look. She sweeps the hair up and puts it in a paper sack.
She is proud; she sees herself a heroine.
She never thought of what it might mean to Adam. He comes home at ten. She anticipates the delight of putting her hot face up against the coldness of his beard; he is bringing her the outside, January, the liveliness of winter and its clarity. But she sees in his eyes, seeing her new hair, a look of horror. “What have you done,” he says,