Lucy: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

of the room when she turned and said, “I was looking forward to telling you that I have Indian blood, that the reason I’m so good at catching fish and hunting birds and roasting corn and doing all sorts of things is that I have Indian blood. But now, I don’t know why, I feel I shouldn’t tell you that. I feel you will take it the wrong way.”
    This really surprised me. What way should I take this? Wrong way? Right way? What could she mean? To look at her, there was nothing remotely like an Indian about her. Why claim a thing like that? I myself had Indian blood in me. My grandmother is a Carib Indian. That makes me one-quarter Carib Indian. But I don’t go around saying that I have some Indian blood in me. The Carib Indians were good sailors, but I don’t like to be on the sea; I only like to look at it. To me my grandmother is my grandmother, not an Indian. My grandmother is alive; the Indians she came from are all dead. If someone could get away with it, I am sure they would put my grandmother in a museum, as an example of something now extinct in nature, one of a handful still alive. In fact, one of the museums to which Mariah had taken me devoted a whole section to people, all dead, who were more or less related to my grandmother.
    Mariah says, “I have Indian blood in me,” and underneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?
    I now heard Mariah say, “Well,” and she let out a long breath, full of sadness, resignation, even dread. I looked at her; her face was miserable, tormented, ill-looking. She looked at me in a pleading way, as if asking for relief, and I looked back, my face and my eyes hard; no matter what, I would not give it.
    I said, “All along I have been wondering how you got to be the way you are. Just how it was that you got to be the way you are.”
    Even now she couldn’t let go, and she reached out, her arms open wide, to give me one of her great hugs. But I stepped out of its path quickly, and she was left holding nothing. I said it again. I said, “How do you get to be that way?” The anguish on her face almost broke my heart, but I would not bend. It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.

THE TONGUE
    AT FOURTEEN I had discovered that a tongue had no real taste. I was sucking the tongue of a boy named Tanner, and I was sucking his tongue because I had liked the way his fingers looked on the keys of the piano as he played it, and I had liked the way he looked from the back as he walked across the pasture, and also, when I was close to him, I liked the way behind his ears smelled. Those three things had led to my standing in his sister’s room (she was my best friend), my back pressed against the closed door, sucking his tongue. Someone should have told me that there were other things to seek out in a tongue than the flavor of it, for then I would not have been standing there sucking on poor Tanner’s tongue as if it were an old Frozen Joy with all its flavor run out and nothing left but the ice. As I was sucking away, I was thinking, Taste is not the thing to seek out in a tongue; how it makes you feel—that is the thing. I used to like to eat boiled cow’s tongue served in a sauce of lemon juice, onions, cucumber, and pepper; but cow’s tongue has no real taste either. It was the sauce that made the cow’s tongue so delicious to eat.
    At the time I was thinking of Tanner’s tongue, I was sitting at the dining table with Miriam, the youngest of Lewis and Mariah’s four children, feeding her a bowl of stewed plums and yogurt specially prepared for her by her mother. She did not like this, and so to make her eat I told her that she was not really eating stewed fruit and yogurt but a special food that grew in wildflowers and was very much sought after by fairies. I told her that if she ate enough of it,