Small Change Read Online Free PDF Page B

the words
dropped
or
dumped
or
rejected
. She said only that she didn’t understand, that once there had been steady contactand then there was none, that whenever they saw each other they all enjoyed themselves, but afterwards there was nothing.
    The peach was from the market, carried in a knapsack, a little bruised and one of eight. She peeled another, her fingers curving around the fruit, picking at the peel with her fingernail, then pulling it back. We sat on a blanket on the grass and ate tomatoes, bread, cheese, the peaches, a sausage. We ate with our hands and shared a napkin.
    My friend dealt with being rejected by understanding and not understanding, stating and understating, avoiding certain things but staying true to the general picture. Her husband was impatient. He couldn’t be bothered, he said, worrying about such things.
    This is the refreshing thing about men. They don’t brood so luxuriously about friendships gone wrong. They think about them very little, it seems, and talk about them less. Cézanne, for instance.
    Ted said, “It’s hard when one person wants the friendship and another doesn’t. People change.”
    But that only rubbed salt in the wound. Our friend wasn’t saying they didn’t want her, she was saying they seemed to enjoy her company and this was the source of her confusion. She was unable to give up the hope that she was liked.
    I was thinking about her again this morning when I peeled a peach. I used the fingers of my left hand, picking the skin loose at the top as you pick one page free from the page below.
    I was thinking about a conversation with Maureen. We were in a park and it was warm, it might have been late springor early fall. We were sitting on a stone wall and she was distributing food to the kids. (She was always much more prepared than I, never leaving the house without a variety of snacks and drinks.) She could not believe, she said, that certain friends with whom she had been incredibly close had faded away – she mentioned a roommate in university – yet she admitted it was so with tight lips, and I knew she foresaw our own end.
    My sympathies are with Cézanne even though I am like Zola – the realistic writer using the people he knows. What defence can Zola offer? When accused of using the life of a friend to further his artful ends, what can he say? That it was his life too? It was my life too.

The Kiss

    M y children are asleep in the car. The last of the sun comes over the trees and falls on the porch where I sit. Maybe it’s the sight of the car with kids inside or my thoughts about Johnny, but I remember and dwell upon an early moment of almost exalted excitement. I was five, a child on the lawn waiting for a friend to arrive. The lawn was rough, poorly tended, and the house ramshackle. Its front porch concealed a treasure trove of lost objects under the steps: lipsticks in brass tubes, combs, broken bits of crockery half embedded in damp soil. I would be on my knees in that dark little place reaching through the horror of spider webs on my wrists for something shiny. A strip of grass separated the porch from the driveway. I waited there. Every so often I ran inside to look at the clock and to ask my mother the time, aching at the delay.
    What happened between then and now? Between the child who felt nothing but delight at the prospect of seeingan old friend, and the woman who cannot bear to be visited?
    Sound of tires on gravel, illumination of leaves long before the headlights appear. People are arriving home from the city, they leave early and arrive now.
    This is Johnny and Lee’s house, and I am here while they are away.
    When I was a child, my father used to stare off into space while his lips moved and his fingers worked a napkin. He preferred to communicate with the stone walls he made and the flowers he grew. In his dressing gown and with boyish eagerness, he would clip several lilies, put them in a vase and bring them to the breakfast table.
    I