If You Could See Me Now Read Online Free PDF

Norwegian blue eyes could turn me into a toad if it was a toad she thought I deserved to be.
    She must be imagined as a small hunched thin old woman, her abundant white hair loosely bound by a scarf, wearing nondescript farm dresses—working dresses, often covered by various amazing coats, for she had kept poultry in an immense barnlike structure just down the hill from her house, and she sold eggs to the Co-op. Her land never was much good for farming, being too hilly and forested. If her young man had come, he would have had a hard time of it, and maybe when she talked to him she told him that he was better off wherever he was than trying to plant corn or alfalfa on a heavily wooded hillside.
    To me she had chiefly spoken of Alison, whom she had not liked. (But few adults had liked Alison.)
    Six minutes from the narrow road to Rinn’s old house, set off the main valley road on a little dogleg behind the valley’s only store, was the second of my landmarks. I spun the VW into the dirt parking area before Andy’s and walked aroundin back to have another look at it. As comic and sad as ever, but with all of the windows broken now and its original slight listing become a decided sprawl of the whole structure, it sat in a wilderness of ropy weeds and high grass at the edge of a vacant field. I see now that these first two landmarks have both to do with marriages frustrated, with lives bent and altered by sexual disappointment. And both of them are touched with strangeness, with a definitive peculiarity. I was sure that in the past fifteen years, Duane’s monstrous little house had acquired among the valley children a reputation for being haunted.
    This was the house that Duane built—my father’s apposite joke—the house he had singlehandedly built for his first love, a Polish girl from Arden detested by my grandmother. In those days, the Norwegian farmers and the Polish townsmen mingled very little. “Duane’s Dream House,” my parents had said, though only to one another: his parents pretended that nothing was wrong with the house, and any jocularity about the subject met with insulted incomprehension. Duane had worked to plans in his head, and they had evidently been stunted there, for the house he had lovingly built for his fiancée was about the size of a small granary—or, say, a big dollhouse, a dollhouse you could stand up in if you were under five foot seven. It had two stories, four equal tiny rooms, as if he had forgotten that people had to cook and eat and shit, and all of this weird construction now leaned decidedly to the right, as if the boards were stretching—I suppose it was about as substantial as a house of straw.
    As was his engagement. The Polish girl had fulfilled my grandmother’s worst expectations of those whose parents did not work with their hands, and had run off one winter day with a mechanic at an Arden garage—“another shiftless Pole without the brains God gave him,” my grandmother said to mymother. “When Einar was trading horses—Miles, your grandfather was a great horse trader here in the valley, and there never was a lazy or a stupid man yet who could see what a horse was made of—when he was going off for a few days with a string, he always used to say that the only thing an Arden Pole knew about a horse was he was supposed to look at its teeth.
And
that he didn’t know which end to find them at.
And
that if he found them he didn’t know what he was supposed to see. That girl of Duane’s was just like the rest of them, running off into damnation because a boy had a fancy car.”
    She had not even seen the house he had just finished building for her. As the story gradually came to me, Duane had wanted the girl’s first sight of her house to be as he was carrying her into it after the ceremony. Had she come out with her mechanic one night for a look and run off on the spot? Duane had gone into Arden to see her, the week before Christmas in 1955, and her parents had been