Winter Birds Read Online Free PDF Page B

returning in the warmth of spring.
    I think of my husband. For thirteen years I marked the box for “married” when filling out forms. He sought me out, pursued me, won me, though with no appreciable resistance on my part. At forty-two I was not miserable with my unmarried state, for my sisters’ husbands had not impressed upon me that marriage was an altogether fulfilling way to live one’s life. Still, the prospect of marriage interested me.
    I first found in Eliot a companion, an employer, and a teacher, and I was content with the arrangement. Later I found in him a husband, and I was more content—or I thought I was. Still later I discovered his fondness for flight, for the wide-open spaces of his imagination. I observed his sense of confinement in a nest, yet his habit of returning seasonally to the small comfortable pleasures of his domestic life.
    When he was accessible, I was the one who flew. I fluttered about attending him. I ranged far and wide to bring home the things he requested. I plumped his pillows, brought his slippers, fetched his meals, typed his essays. I would have done anything he wanted. I came eagerly when he called. As in The Tempest , I was Ariel to his Prospero, ready “to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curled clouds” for him.
    I close my eyes and drift off into a confusion of squares and circles bumping against one another. I am in the air, and the shapes are soft and changeable as I fly through them. I have often flown in my dreams, an object of wonder to those on the ground. “Look, isn’t that Sophie up there? How does she do that?”
    ----
    “Suppertime, Aunt Sophie!” I hear a knock at the door. Looking at the clock, I am surprised to see that almost two hours have passed. Rachel enters with a tray. She sets it on the small round table next to the sofa. She removes the items one by one, first the napkin, then the silverware, which she places one utensil at a time on top of the napkin. Then the glass of water, then a saucer on which sits a muffin, and finally the plate of food. From my seat by the window I see brown, orange, green. I can tell it is too much food on one plate, but I say nothing. Rachel rearranges the silverware, moving the knife and spoon to the right side, then looks at me as she turns to leave with the empty tray.
    “It’ll taste better hot,” she says. She doesn’t raise her voice the way Patrick does when he talks to me. She seems to have realized already that the reports of my deafness have been greatly exaggerated.
    She nods toward the table, as if to encourage me to leave my chair. Her eyes have the look of one who wants to say more but won’t. No doubt she is thinking of yesterday, when I sat across the room looking at my plate of supper until it got cold. It was not from obstinacy nor lack of hunger. I was merely contemplating the fact that so much of daily life was measured by food, that each day had now reduced itself to three meals delivered on a tray. When Rachel came back an hour later, I was nibbling at the edges of the spaghetti. She halted by the door, looking embarrassed. “Is it too spicy?” she asked, and I shook my head no.
    After she leaves, I get up and walk to the table. It would be easier for Rachel simply to set the tray down and let me eat from it. It would take me back to my years of eating in the cafeterias of various elementary schools. The fact that she takes care to set the table and remove the dishes from the tray should make an old woman grateful. Perhaps it is calculated to do so. And perhaps at some level it does. Or perhaps an old woman could see it as another useless expenditure of effort.
    On the plate are a mound of lima beans, another of carrots, and another of beef and gravy over yellow noodles. I feel no hunger, yet I sit down and pick up the fork. I think of robots programmed to perform manual tasks. I read once of a factory with hundreds of the little metallic men moving about in perfect