The Movement of Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, patting her on the knee. “She’s smarter than all three of them put together, anyway.”
“My mother says that women who read too much—” Tallie began, but Mary broke in.
“Hush, Tallie.” She took Hannah’s hoop from Lilian and handed it back to her. “It wasn’t so bad after all. Go on with the stitch—you’ll get it in time.”
But Hannah had shaken her head and risen from the chair so abruptly that the girls scattered like startled birds. They’d called after her, but she hadn’t gone back, not that evening and not afterward.
It wasn’t true that she never thought of boys; she just had no concept of what to say to one who didn’t happen to be her brother. The other girls seemed steeped in such things; Hannah had often watched them as they giggled and ran after each other, and she even pretended she was speaking to Peter Macy once or twice, addressing her own wavering reflection in the glass windowpane of her bedroom. But she’d felt so foolish and vain that she never bothered to make the attempt in life. Over the years, her sense of ineptitude, along with her injured pride, had only hardened, and she’d shunned most of the attempts the women made to include her in their activities. Eventually, they had stopped trying, all except for Mary.
Whenever she looked at Mary now, though, Hannah saw Edward’s empty chair in the garret, his empty trunk, his empty seat at the table.
Hannah scanned the crowd outside the Meeting House for her father, but all the men looked alike in their wide-brimmed hats.
“Have you had any letters?” Mary asked, swaying slightly to try to meet Hannah’s roving eye. Hannah looked back down at her. Mary’s hand floated up to pat a stray lock of hair into place. Her fingers were white as worms.
“We haven’t had a letter in at least a month,” Hannah answered. That was the excruciating truth. Each day, en route to her job at the Atheneum, she checked their little wooden box at Riddell’s store—an ancient, dilapidated structure right in the center of Town, whose sun-bleached wooden shingles, sagging porch, and squeaky door belied its importance as the housing for all the Island’s correspondence. The enormous canvas sacks stuffed with letters hung from the rafters like fat men on gallows, each labeled with a destination— Pacific grounds , Cape of Good Hope , North Atlantic . Women and girls flowed in and around them like a school of fish, hoping for news or trying to deliver their own. The bags were full of words describing deaths and births, grievances and reprieves. Above all, Hannah knew, they contained oaths of everlasting love. She averted her eyes from the bulging repositories of so many hopes and dreams; staring at them felt like inviting disappointment.
“I’ve had none for a fortnight,” Mary sighed. “More. Let me think. The last one came the day we had Debating. You weren’t there, were you?”
Hannah shook her head. She never went to the Debating Society, though Edward had insisted that she’d be a hundred times more convincing on any subject than most of its participants.
“The necessity of comprehensive education for both Sexes, for example,” he’d said one evening in their kitchen. “Or the importance of proper alignment of one’s furniture in the perpendicular.”
“As far as education goes, I doubt anything I might say at such a gathering would hasten an onslaught of colleges for women,” Hannah answered, sweeping as if the broom were responsible for the pathetic number of baccalaureate programs open to members of her Sex, all of which she could count on one hand.
“Of course, I attend only for amusement,” Edward added, a trail of crumbs from his toast with jam following him across the just-swept kitchen to his seat at the table.
“Is there any other reason you do anything?” she asked. “Pick up your feet.”
He obliged, his knees knocking the underside of the table.
“You’d rather enjoy the spectacle of our local windbags