Amity & Sorrow Read Online Free PDF Page B

strong, wet hands, making the world smell of marzipan. She picks apart Amity’s greasy plaits and scrubs her scalp clean as a sheet on washing day. Mother smiles down at her and Amity basks in it, shutting her eyes to hold the picture, and she is suddenly glad to have left home and come here, glad to be held and seen.
    ‘You look like a little seal,’ Mother says with a laugh. She rinses Amity’s head, then pushes her away. ‘Come, Sorrow,’ she calls.
    Amity runs, wet hair streaming, back to fill the bucket, but when she gets there, the boy is waiting for her, cap turned backward. She grips the bucket, thinking she should pop it over her capless head, and cowers from him in sodden shame. ‘Shut your eyes,’ she says.
    ‘This some game?’ He shuts his eyes as she hurries to the spigot to refill the bucket. ‘Keep your eyes shut,’ she tells him.
    ‘What you gonna do?’
    She creeps toward him and his face follows her, eyes shut so she can study him, the curl of his dark lashes, the whorl of hair at the hinges of his jaw. She moves close enough to smell him, close enough to breathe him in. And then he opens his eyes. ‘Gotcha!’
    She shrieks and grabs his cap, flapping it at his face then jamming it over her bare head. It smells of him, like ten of him, like engine oil and dry grass and hot, wet skin. ‘No, I got you!’ she says.
    ‘What you gonna swap me?’ The bucket fills and spills over, flooding the concrete. They both run for the spigot, to turn it off, his hand on her hand.
    ‘Swap you?’ she stutters.
    ‘For my hat? What you got?’
    ‘What do you want?’
    He looks her up and down, from the drips her hair makes under his hat to the drops down her dress and her clogs. She sees him take in the rough weave of her fabric, shoulder to elbow, neck to calf, lined and creased as each garment is, taken in, let down, worn by Sorrow before herself.
    He smiles at her. ‘When you got something I want, I’ll let you know.’ And he whips his hat back. She shrieks and crouches into a ball, arms over her head. Then she gathers the bottom of her skirts and pulls them up, to cover her head. There may be no rule about showing pantaloons, but hair must be covered at all times. ‘Girls,’ he says. ‘Sheesh.’
    ‘You can’t see me,’ Amity tells him.
    ‘I see London, I see France,’ he tells her.
    ‘Who are they?’ And at his laughing, she runs back to the house and to Mother, blind in cotton, bucket abandoned, kicking and tripping over sawhorses and pitchforks on the path from the gas station. She runs straight to her cap and slaps it on her wet head.
    ‘Where is that bucket?’ Mother demands.
    When the water is boiled, Mother calls again to Sorrow, but Sorrow won’t be washed. She wraps her arms around the porch post and revels in her dirty skirts. Amity thinks of the berry vines at home and the mothers who picked them, the mothers who worked the presses, all splotched red and purple in the making of their jams and pastes and leathers. She knows something worse than berries has been picked in Sorrow and harvested.
    Mother tugs at Sorrow’s apron strings and Sorrow slaps away her hands, losing her purchase on the post. She scrabbles to regain it as Mother pulls open her overskirt. Sorrow twists away and Mother shouts at her, ‘Take them off!’
    ‘No! Will you take everything from me?’
    Mother calls for Amity to help her, while Sorrow yells for her to keep away. And then all Amity can do is take hold of her sister’s hands and bend her head toward her as Mother grabs hold of Sorrow’s skirts and pulls them down hard. Amity can see the blood caked on her linens, hard as scabs. Mother strips Sorrow, layer by layer, her overskirts and underskirts, her stockings and her bloomers, down to the stains on her skin. She doesn’t stop until Sorrow is bare, her chest bound flat like any woman’s, but naked below, whippet-thin with a thatch of red-stained hair. Sorrow folds her hands over her crotch and