Compass Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

still warm enough to wear the summer-issue shorts and shirt. The shorts were so tight in the waist she cut off the button and resewed it an inch looser. The shirt was tight, too. She unbuttoned the two topbuttons. Wouldn’t do for facing the public. She put on a sports bra, but while that flattened some things it also squeezed some up and out. She borrowed one of Mary’s bras and lengthened the thread on the second button of her shirt. She loosened her web holster belt so that it slanted across the bulge of her lower belly. She blamed herself; she blamed Mary’s cooking. She swore she’d eat nothing but fish and salad for the next month.
    She volunteered for the longest route, on foot, an unpleasant thrash through bullbriars and low-limbed rhododendron along the Usquepaug and the Queens River. Some exercise, and in all likelihood no people. She tucked a pair of rain pants into her fanny pack for pushing through thorns or poison ivy. For lunch she packed an apple and a carrot. All she deserved.
    There was a path into the river, but upstream and downstream, both banks were overgrown. She stuck her hand in the water—too warm for trout? She saw a bird, a dull speck flitting in the tree shade. When it crossed the stream and caught the light it turned electric blue. It wheeled away from her and vanished into the woods. The blue persisted in her. Her eyes were so astonished that her other senses went numb. She wasn’t sure if she’d made a noise. An indigo bunting. Not indigo at all—blue, bluer than a jay or a bluebird, absolute blue.
    She was alone, blissfully alone, for the first time in months.
    She put on her long pants, rebuckled her web belt, and began to pick her way through the bushes, gracelessly at first. After a mile or so she was sweating. Good. Sweat it off. She cut over to the stream and filled the first of her three test tubes. On the far bank there was a stand of cardinal flowers. The blossoms were half hidden by mourning cloaks, some hovering, some attached to the flowers while slowly flapping their wings, velvet black with violet and ivory edging. On the moving surface of the water the reflected red, black, and violet wavered in and out of focus. At first glance it seemed that the colors were being swept away. Then they seemed to be swimming against the current. She looked away to stop feeling giddy. She’d been fooled before—seeing and unseeing. She looked at the butterflies, the real ones, knew what they were up to with the cardinalflowers—their coiled proboscises, grotesquely long fusions of nose and mouth parts, were uncoiling deep into the flowers’ cups. She wondered what they felt. Was it just taste, or was there touch? Was that slow flapping just to keep their balance, or was it a sign of pleasure?
    A year without sex. More than a year. She hadn’t gone that long since she was a schoolgirl. She breezed through her memory of a few fumbling schoolboys, then surprised herself thinking of dresses. Dresses she’d put on to be taken off. Unbuttoned slowly. Unzipped and stepped out of. A few frenzied times hoisted waist-high. Once in Sally’s garden. The only red dress at the party. She went into the garden first. He didn’t see her until she stepped into a bit of light between the boxwoods. Then back into the dark. A tall man. She clung to him as he sank to his knees, her face in his chest, her right knee jangling the keys in his trousers pocket. He slid his trousers down, her skirt up, the crotch of her underpants sideways. It was close enough to what she’d had in mind. He worked in downtown Providence—she got off by thinking of walking into his office …
    Then she heard the sound of the party, the blur of voices from the front rooms, the clinking of plates from the kitchen. She heard them suddenly, as if snapping out of a daze on a train.
    The knees of his trousers were so obviously grass-stained that he went straight to his car and left. She’d laughed. How far she was now from that