Sign Languages Read Online Free PDF

but leaves her watch on the window ledge as the excuse for coming back she doesn’t need. He sleeps at the card table a deep, dead sleep. There is no snoring, no movement. He is dead, she thinks, and cannot touch him; not the weak-muscled arm, even the shoulder under the thin shirt. She goes out and home and takes a long, hot shower, smells her skin, and ladles it with balm of peaches and placenta.
    But every night she is there, at the door. Mr. Warrant’s face expressionless. I am a social worker, she thinks. That’s what it’s like to him.
    She moves about the house. It is unsalable. It is huge and amorphous, shifting and dark with those high, narrow windows people sold and bought once which look out into tree-tops and sky sliced by power lines. Add to that the weakness of his small-wattage bulbs. But no, she says, I’ll make do with it all like this. Exactly. Though from room to room she is lost. And turning back around, finds the door to the kitchen or the room with him at the card table. As if there were fifteen kitchens and rooms with card tables. All off a room dreadfully dark, the furniture towering. Like her images of the barren mills. His house a closed factory, without production. Waiting for nothing at all. The odor of the shed, of its newspapers and grease, confined her for a time to the two rooms where every night they worked their way through endless puzzles. “You are bright.” I am also beautiful with perfect hips, she told herself. Not many can say that—perfect hips. Absolutely perfect. Sculpture, one had said. Brown. Delicious. Some foreign fruit. A soufflé. Risen to perfection.
    Often he dozed profoundly. She straightened the kitchen, put her graceful fingers into deep and obscure cabinets. The cups, those mugs, the plates dulled by a century of bacon grease.
    They watched TV, “Wheel of Fortune.” He called her Joyce. “Who?” she’d turned to ask over the card table scattered with puzzle books. “What?” he answered her. “Joyce ‘who’?” His eyes snapped back to the expensive gifts for the winning contestant. As exotic and foreign to him as sapphires and camels—an animal she’d ridden with pleasure in Cairo; a gem she’d been given more than once.
    She read her magazines, her magnificent suit attracting the chenille to it, mixing with Ms. Bojangles’s yellow hair. Even you could never sell this house, she told herself. What did I just say? Joyce, who?
    Then she stayed the night. She planned nothing. Why? What do you plan? Planning was for work. She had slept with Marvin again. He had eaten strawberry jam off her clitoris. She had screamed for the first time some sound that had sent Ms. Bojangles tearing down the hall to sit near the heat vent and had jerked Marvin’s head up. In the dark his eyes like Negroes’ in old movies. Feets do yo stuff. “Nancy, my god, did I hurt you?” But she lay perfectly still, speechless. At first it was because she had no reason to give him, then it was a game, finally she couldn’t bear to talk. He dressed and drove away, the rumble of his Lancia like thunder through frozen February air at three in the morning.
    They had eaten bacon sandwiches and played the puzzles. She was getting worse; he was improving. They watched “Wheel of Fortune” and, after scouring the ancient black iron skillet, she shook him gently, averting her eyes from the thick strand of saliva connecting the corner of his lip to a liver spot on the back of his hand the shape of Chile. Let’s go there, the German lover had pointed at a poster in a window. Santiago de Chile. The street full of assured brown faces.
    She led him through the darkness from the card table to the bedroom she had guessed at but never been in. And inside it was the same dark towering furniture, a room from Dickens, she thought, surprising herself with an image of some woodcut from a high school library