Notable American Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

someone making an exciting mistake. The steps were exaggerated, heavy and sarcastic, by someone who must have thought that walking itself was a joke, to be parodied if done at all. Thundering toward me now, the little man. I knew that I would not be fainting for some time. This would be a good deal better than that. My door trembled with his approach. I turned and waited, trying my best to relax my face.
    There’s probably no other way to describe what Pal did than to say that he found me out with his mouth, that he needed to know something, and the answer was somewhere on my person.
    He ran upstairs that first day, free of Dark’s arms, and he was yelling in some other language as he jumped up on my bed, a planet of fur and squished eyes, speaking his funny one-syllables, barking the names of people I didn’t know, as if he were only a dog.
    I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I wanted to do something just as impossible, to show him I wasn’t content with anything I could actually be capable of doing—walk the ceiling and speak a new language to my friend, or set fire to my own hands and run circles in the room, but my mouth was built only to apologize and complain. I swayed on my feet as he darted around me. I was afraid I would fall over and go to sleep and then wake up to find him gone, which would mean I’d have to run hard into a wall until I forgot about him. My head would need considerable battering to leak out the sense of this new, amazing man. The helmet would be required, and great gulps of the forgetting water, and a mouth packed with seeds while I slept. His energy was big and I had no part of it. I felt threatened by his happiness. I was too tired, and he was too fast to look at. Being with him was like being alone underwater—everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced. No matter what was happening as his body blurred around me, I worried I might forget it all and have to be myself again, without ever having seen him. There was nothing for me to do but notice him as hard as I could, to notice him, to notice him, to notice him until I did not know what it was to even try to look at somebody without collapsing with exhaustion.
    My pajamas were on the hook because I had the window closed and the wind was turned on high out in the world, making my room feel under attack, a bunker keeping the hard sound out. I kept twisting and the wind only got louder, until it was like getting breathed on so hard, it would make me older, with fast air that would turn me into my father. When Pal climbed on and found me with his mouth, I just couldn’t stop laughing, but it was a laugh like an allergy, coming out too hard and strong and choking me, until I lost my breath and went down into the twisted sheets. Pal was part of my body now, but I felt even lighter. I had taken on a passenger, or he had taken on me. Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while. I did not know where the rest of me had gone. We could creep from the room without sound. We could casually go to our graves. He would be my camouflage. I rolled over and silently laughed into the pillow, and Pal just sat on my bed on his hands and knees and he drove his mouth into me all day, telling a joke without words, one that tickled and hurt and never quite finished. He kept finding me out until he had solved me, and I was no more than a spill of water on my bed, a leak, soaking the sheets. I was only a bit of math for him to do, and then he had done me, and I was over, solved, finished. I had been answered.
    I didn’t start mouthing back until I was older. Jane Dark had moved in and set up her program—a great gymnasium of ladies laboring to be silent—so Pal came to live with us full-time. Father turned scarce, restricted to a shouting position some distance into the field. He raised a fist and yelled,