The Buffalo Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page B

things she had never before imagined. She would surprise Terry in the shower and lather his penis with soap till he came, she would be waiting for him in only a slip or a G-string when he'd come home from work. She wouldn't care that he hadn't bathed since that morning, and he'd spent the day in his wool uniform. It didn't matter that he might smell like his cruiser. They'd make love on the couch, and sometimes when he would kneel on the floor and lick her, her orgasms would be so long and intense that she would cry out and fear that she had peed on the cushions.
    She felt (had she heard the term on the radio?) deliciously slutty.
    But then the days grew short once again, and the first anniversary of the girls' deaths began to draw near. And she could no longer sit in the den in only a slip or a chemise, because it was simply too cold. She tried waiting for him in the bedroom but it wasn't the same.
    By Halloween, they were rarely having sex--two and three weeks would pass between couplings--and she considered calling in another prescription for the antidepressant. But she already felt dazed, and she hadn't liked the drug's side effects: She was sure it had been the pills that kept her awake at night, and given her an upset stomach almost daily.
    She was aware that her mood swing had badly confused her poor husband. He'd gone from sleeping with a vital, sensuous woman to living with a zombie. Some nights that winter he tried to seduce her, and she did her best to respond. But it was clear that she was, literally, just going through the motions, and by the middle of January he, too, grew disinterested. He grew tired of trying.
    Once, near Valentine's Day, they fought about her sterilization. She understood they were both being unreasonable, that this was a decision they'd made together, but it had seemed to her at that moment that she'd only done it to please him. Maybe this wasn't true, but she was also confident that she would never have minded a third child or being a family of five, and she told him so. And then after she added how she wished it wouldn't be so difficult--if not impossible--to reverse the procedure, he responded in a way that really set her off, because she realized on some level he was dead-on: He told her she couldn't handle a child right now, she wasn't ready. He added that he wasn't ready either, but that second part didn't matter. She'd barely been listening by then.
    Nevertheless, as the second summer after the girls' deaths approached, her spirits once again lightened. She found herself planting a vegetable garden for the first time in two years, and she began to care for the flower gardens that had been left largely to their own devices the previous summer. She pulled up the grass that had migrated into the beds and ruthlessly yanked from the soil the Johnny-jump-ups that had overrun entire sections. She cut back the phlox that lined the walk from the end of the driveway to the front door, and added a pair by the steps that were a gray-blue that matched her little girls' eyes.
    Then, when she found two ornamental clay tubs at a lawn sale, she brought them home and filled them with pink ageratum. They were, she decided, the rural Vermont equivalent of stone lions, and she placed them at the end of their driveway.
    The house sat just beyond the village, midway up a small ridge that offered magnificent views of Mount Ellen and Abraham to the east, but was so sheltered by the bluff and the high trees behind it that evening always came early. Good sunrises, bad sunsets. They were separated from the rest of the town first by the Cousinos' dairy farm, and then by a wide finger of forest that snaked into the valley and hadn't yet been logged or cleared for another of the small clusters of houses that seemed to be springing up everywhere within thirty-five miles of Burlington. When the Cousinos would spread manure, she was grateful for those trees and the buffer they offered. There was a house across the