Where or When Read Online Free PDF Page A

the shiny seam of a scar.
    He let me lead him to the car and let me drive him home. He did not speak on the way, and I did not know if his silence was composed of embarrassment or bitterness or worry.
    A fine dust of black dirt almost always covered the house, despite the washings by the rain, and though the house had been painted white, it looked, from a distance, gray. The black dirt got in over the thresholds and through the cracks in the caulkings of the windows. I would find it in my drawers and on sheets that I had hung out to dry. The black dirt was nourishing and fertile, the richest soil in the state, but it seeped in everywhere, blew across the floor, coated sills and mantels. I sometimes scrubbed the woodwork until the paint wore through.
    I went upstairs to see my daughter. I opened the door to Lily’s room, peeked in to see the tiny body in its bed.
    Then there was my study, Stephen’s office, the bedroom that we shared. Stephen went into his office and shut the door.
    When I had paid the baby-sitter and taken her home, I went back into the house and sat at the kitchen table. I had made an effort to give the room warmth, and there was a vase of mauve and brown hydrangeas on the pine table. I took off the jacket I had worn over my dress and laid it along the back of a chair. I took off my shoes, undid the pins from my hair. I sat down.
    It was raining, a light drizzle that had come with the afternoon clouds, and on the windows the droplets lit up in the headlights of a car. Beyond the front yard, I could hear that particular sound of tires on a gravel road.
    I thought then that I should go to Stephen. There are always, in any partnership, balances and debts and payments. But I know I hoped instead that he had fallen asleep on the couch in his office. He often slept there.
    Perhaps, as I sat at the kitchen table, I replayed certain phrases from the party. Perhaps I thought about the morning, about a class I had to prepare for. Possibly I did actually wonder if anyone from my past would see the advertisement in the Sunday paper. Or did I merely peer into the vase, a polished ceramic surface that gave off a rose sheen like a mirror, and study the distorted image of my face?
    When visitors came over the mountain and first saw the valley, the dirt was so astonishingly black and the landscape so unrelievedly flat that the visitors thought what they saw was tar. And sometimes they said that: A parking lot? A landing field?
    I often wonder now: What would have happened if that first letter had not been sent on to me, if it had lain unattended in a folder or on a desk? Or if it had been lost?
    I have your shirt still, but the scent is fading.

    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    H E HAS BEEN back in his study now for twenty minutes, and he cannot find anything suitable. Outside, a cloud bank from the west has begun to cover the sun, letting through only a thin wash of light. His children are in the house somewhere: Hadley, he thinks, is upstairs, finishing her homework; he is not sure where Jack and Anna are. He can still taste the roast from Harriet’s mother’s, a leg of lamb that was, inevitably, too well done. No one in Harriet’s family can cook, he has long decided, and the table invariably looks stingy—even on Thanksgiving. He had forgotten that they were expected at his in-laws’ until Harriet had come to the door of his study to remind him. He was distracted at dinner, focused on a face.
    He has the paper folded to the ad and has arranged it so that it looks casually tossed upon his desk. He has found a box of Audubon bird cards, is not sure that they will do. Harriet, he knows, may have stationery, but he certainly cannot ask her. In any event, it’s unlikely to be appropriate for the occasion; he has an idea that her writing paper will be the color of cotton candy and will have scrollwork down the sides. He sifts through the papers in his top left-hand drawer. There’s a Hopper print,