The Body Of Jonah Boyd Read Online Free PDF Page A

sister and I had taken lessons from Miss Busby, who lived with her own sister in the country
     and was paralyzed from the waist down. Her house was built from heart pine and had what was known as a “dog trot,” a long
     corridor through which a cooling breeze blew even on the hottest summer afternoons. But now it was almost a decade since I’d
     left Miss Busby, and my sister, and our little town. I’d followed a boyfriend to California, where he’d married someone else.
    “Be patient with me,” I said, cracking my fingers. “I may be rusty.”
    “Don’t do that,” Nancy said. “It’ll bring on arthritis.”
    “I know. I shouldn’t. I won’t.”
    “Now—one, two, three—” And we began.
    That day we played for almost an hour. I was dreadful, though not as dreadful as I’d feared I’d be. And Nancy, to her credit,
     was patient with me, offering gentle pointers when I made a mistake, or lost my way. “Trust me, it’ll sound better next week,”
     she said as we finished, then closed the music desk, after which we returned to the kitchen, where Daphne, Mark, and Ben were
     playing Scrabble at the tulip table. This was one Thanksgiving tradition; another, more obscure in origin, was to play Edith
     Piaf records on the Harmon-Kardon stereo.
    It all rather overwhelmed me. Until then, I had only experienced family life from a great remove—on television, or at the
     house of a great aunt in Tallahassee, to which my sister and I were sometimes invited out of pity in the years after our father
     ran away and our mother died. And now here I stood, an old maid in an inappropriately formal suit, while Edith Piaf sang “Je ne regrette rien” and teenagers laughed, and from the upper of the two wall ovens there wafted a smell of meat and onions and sage, and from
     the lower one a smell of nutmeg and pumpkin. Ernest came in, smoking a pipe. Most of the morning he’d been in his office over
     the garage. He was wearing a bow tie. With him was Glenn Turner, who had just finished his Ph.D. He too was smoking a pipe;
     he too was wearing a bow tie.
    “You look like twins,” I said—the first casual remark I’d made all day. It brought a spurt of laughter from Daphne.
    The rest of that day is a blur of yearning and dread: yearning to have had a different life, to have been Daphne, and grown
     up in that house; dread of the moment when politeness would compel me to make my farewells, and retreat to my dreary little
     apartment in Springwell. I volunteered to make the gravy, and to my surprise, my offer was accepted. Nancy complimented me
     on its smoothness. Despite being so skinny, Phil Perry, then already in his third year in the psych department, ate twice
     as much as anyone else, and was congratulated for it. The girl with the bangs in the plaid skirt told a long, boring story
     about her father losing his dog.
    As for Ernest—he got drunk, and while everyone else was gathering in the living room for coffee, he cornered me in the kitchen
     and tried to kiss me. This didn’t surprise me. In those years, men took what opportunities they could get.
    “Such a pretty little thing,” he said, nuzzling my ear.
    “Dr. Wright, please!” I said—more because it was what I thought I should say than because I objected, or even cared particularly.
    “When you typed that article for me last week, what did you think? You know the one I mean—”
    “I just type. I think about typing.”
    “Say the title.”
    “ ‘Female Masturbation and the Electra Complex.’”
    “Do you get excited when you read those words? ‘Female masturbation’? Say it again. Please.”
    Ben came in, and we separated. I don’t know if he saw us. He gave his father a murderous stare.
    Straightening my skirt, I returned to the living room. Ernest and Ben followed. Later, I drove back to my apartment in my
     new Dodge Dart. I had a lot to think about: not merely Ernest’ come-on, but Nancy’ weird avidity to win me as a friend. Why