Northwest Corner Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’re true, take root. Nothing for Penny to do but comfort her and pass the Kleenex and say, I know, I know . Because, dammit, she does know. If not these specific lines— My father has forgotten me / in the excitement of dying (no, Penny’s dad, tough nut that he is, is still out there making a nuisance of himself)—then the more communal experience of being knocked flat, your liver ripped out, by a handful of lines on a page.
    On her way home she stops at Vons to buy fresh herbs and arugula, a baguette, for dinner. She’ll make an omelet and a salad, fruit for dessert, and then while Ali works on her report on the Biafran War (bit of a stretch for a twelve-year-old, it seems to Penny), she’ll go into her little study off the kitchen, sit on her Eames lounge chair and ottoman (the set, which she loves with an embarrassing ardor, a fifth-anniversary present from her ex, Darryl, one of the only unselfish acts she’s inclined to credit him with in retrospect),take her original copy of Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles off the shelf and, poem by poem, immerse herself in the pure early work as in a pool of deep, clear water whose underground tributaries, bearing news from distant mountains, she can feel but never accurately source.
    Parking the car, she enters the house through the back door, straight into the kitchen.
    “You’re late.” Ali’s greeting the hooded gaze that appeared on the girl’s face about six months ago and never left. She’s sitting—brown-haired and, in Penny’s opinion, way too put-together for someone still under five feet tall—at the kitchen table with a bottle of Vitamin-water, a bag of Gummi Bears, a metallic pink laptop, and a heavy tome on the Biafran conflict.
    Setting the groceries on the counter, Penny goes to the refrigerator for the eggs. “Sorry, student meltdown.”
    “Over poetry?” The sarcasm implicit, impressive, without a single note of strain.
    “As a matter of fact, yes.” Cracking eggs into a bowl and beginning to chop the herbs.
    Ali sniffs, pops a Gummi Bear into her mouth.
    “You’ll ruin your appetite,” Penny hears herself say automatically, remembering, even as she speaks, a line from another Glück poem: Once we were happy, we had no memories .
    “The Biafrans had to eat their dogs when there weren’t any more goats,” Ali declares. “They ate their parrots.”
    “Please move your things and set the table.”
    “Whole families were brutally murdered with machetes. Some were burned. It was, like, one of the most savage wars in history.”
    And another Glück: I had come to a strange city, without belongings: / in the dream, it was your city, I was looking for you .
    “Would you like your baguette heated?”
    Was it seeing Angela, the tough jock, break down in her office that makes her feel so vulnerable now to these internal waves of words about being freed from the past? Penny thinks about Dwight,how the thing about him, right from that first day, meeting him in the sporting-goods store, getting picked up by him really, is his categorical difference from the rest of the cast of her life. He’s not some hotshot linguistics professor like Darryl, not a blazing preteen sharpshooter like Ali. He couldn’t care less about stupid academic politics or, for that matter, what’s cool or uncool in junior high, wouldn’t know a good poem from a bad one if it hit him on the head. What he is, she senses intuitively (and still can’t say why), is solid, tangible; a man, lived-in, sure of himself, respectful, decent. She doesn’t have to go looking for him with blind hands in the dark to know what she has or whom she can trust. Doesn’t, as in the old days, have to spend precious emotional capital that she isn’t sure she has in trying to one-up him, or outmaneuver him, or, worst of all, lie to him.
    Scraping the eggs onto two plates, adding a piece of baguette for each of them, she splashes olive oil and lemon juice over the arugula.
    “Sit,” she