The Oregon Experiment Read Online Free PDF Page B

baby. After you’re done nursing. You know. In life.”
    “Good plan,” she said, popping the band of packing tape on another box.
    When he finished all the drawers and cabinets, as Naomi stacked plates and nested bowls, he drifted into the living room. Touching the mantel, he thought about having a corner for kids’ stuff—a toy sink and stove set, a Playskool tool bench—and where to hang his oversized photo of the Yucca Mountains, golden under a glorious sun, a thin line of protesters blocking the road, himself among them.
    Hefting one end of their mattress, the anarchist wobbled backward through the front door.
A quick publication
, Scanlon thought, falling to the couch. Out the window he could see the blueberry bushes at the far end of the yard. The fog was lifting. He closed his eyes.
    In the kitchen Naomi set steel canisters of flour and brown sugar at one end of the counter, then pulled the toaster from a box and plugged it in beside them. She chose a cabinet for spices, and one to keep empty for now—reserved for bottles, nipples, sippy cups, and tiny plastic dishes with bunny ears. As she clanked dinner plates and cookie sheets, the movers lumbered from room to room—smells of cardboard, coffee, and sweat. With each trip they anchored the house a little more solidly, weighing it down with books and bureaus, Scanlon’s boxes of research, her leather chair. Each trip into the house made moving out more difficult.
    Suddenly exhausted, she filled a glass with tap water and sat back in a kitchen chair, a hand on her belly. She fished in her pocket for the snip of woolly apple mint, then dropped the leaves in her glass, closing her eyes and breathing in the smell as she took a long drink, and when she opened her eyes, the young one was standing in the doorway, his arms around abox marked COOKBOOKS , staring at her. She slowly sipped her drink, sucking at the mint, then rested the glass on her belly, watching him slide the box on the counter and leave the room without looking back.
    Mint. As a girl, she made long summer trips to her grandparents’ in Vermont, where she and her summer boyfriend Clair, a French Canadian, would slip easily back into their heated romance. When she was nineteen—one of the last times she saw him—as the morning’s first truck of raw milk arrived, she’d left her grandparents’ house, passing through their small creamery, the routine she’d been repeating most summers of her life. The cement floor and three stainless steel pasteurizing drums were hosed down and shiny, but the smell of sour milk stayed with her as she walked the half-mile toward town, crossed the tracks (creosote and biting rust), cut behind a home-heating-oil depot, then caught the first whiffs of auto-body putty wafting from the body shop Clair’s father owned.
    She’d intended to give Clair a muffin and continue on to the drugstore for her grandmother’s prescriptions, but he was on his coffee break, his coveralls unzipped and peeled down to his waist, and within minutes they snuck up the back stairs to the vacant apartment over the shop, crashing onto the bare mattress and making love to the whirr of grinding wheels and the rumble of compressors.
    Afterward, downstairs in the office, she lifted the lid from the cut-glass candy dish and clicked a sugary Canadian mint against her teeth with her tongue.
    Smells were all that remained of that day: strong sharp base notes married with tender top notes. This is what she seemed bound to re-create over and over, the combination of smells that revived that moment. It was the fragrance the industry had pegged her for.
    She should tell Scanlon she had her nose back. Not yet, though. It was still too close. This new olfactory life took her into herself, not out to the world. She wouldn’t even be able to say it.
    When he opened his eyes, the house was quiet. Sun flooded through the picture window. The living room was a maze of cardboard towers. How could they have so