“I am.” Margaret was hurt by Dulcy’s tone, and it was her turn to stare into space.
They reached Livingston at four in the afternoon, and the thermometer at the station told Dulcy it was still eighty degrees. They’d arrived at the end of the May Day parade, and it looked as if both senses of the holiday had been celebrated: the streets were still full of banners and miners, clerks and laundresses and children wearing flowers, dressed in white.
She faded away with her blue bag while the others sorted out luggage and the wounded man. At home she stripped off every pinching bit of polite lingerie, put on an old dress, and walked down to her garden, willing her mind free from what she’d done and seen in the last two days. She’d put on her muddy moccasins but kicked them free when they kept gathering pebbles. She thinned lettuce and radishes and nibbled on what she pulled; she loosened soil and drew a row for a second planting of peas, emptying the packet into the palm of her left hand, dropping them into the double furrow at two-inch intervals. It was a relief to concentrate, to be away from voices, to be alone.
The wind swirled and caught the seed packet. She turned to reach for it and saw something white on her porch: Lewis, sitting on the steps, watching her. Dulcy scooped soil over the pea seeds, looked around for the moccasins, then gave up and walked toward the house.
“Giving shoes up entirely?”
“A nice idea,” she said. He had already been inside to find glasses and wine and a corkscrew, but was not so patronizing that he patted her own steps as an invitation. She dipped her dirty hands in the rainwater pail, sized up her options, and aimed for a spot on the far side of the bottle, wiping her hands dry on her skirt while he poured a glass. She kept the part of her mind that might jump into the future blank, and as a result the here and now was magnified: the birds in the river bottom, the coin-like fresh poplar leaves across the street, Lewis’s surviving fingers, sunned and practical, working the cork free from the screw and forcing it back into the bottle.
“What were you doing out there?”
“Peas,” said Dulcy, looking at her nails. “Not thinking.”
“Because your thoughts are unhappy?”
She took a long sip of wine.
A pause. “Should I apologize?”
“No,” said Dulcy.
“Would you like to get married?”
She hadn’t expected this. “No. I don’t want to be married. Do you?”
“I didn’t think I did,” he said. “But in this particular situation, I felt I should ask. I want to do all sorts of things.”
He flicked a piece of grass from her ankle, and she didn’t move, even though she felt as if she were about to blow up. “I like you,” he said. “I like seeing you, I like talking to you, I like touching you, and you seem to feel the same way. I’d like more of all of it, and usually, when people want this, they consider marriage.”
“But Lewis, you don’t love me.”
“I don’t know you well enough to know.”
She wrapped her hands around her knees. He reached out and touched her arm. “Please look at me. What do you think?”
“I would like to have everything,” she said.
She watched him put down his glass of wine. Maybe she’d been about to say more; maybe she wouldn’t have thought of anything to say even if he’d waited.
???
This was what people talked about. This was what the books were all about; this was why people did irrational things that had no relation to the violence of Victor. She wasn’t as divorced from the physical as many women: she’d walked in strange places, worked outside on hot days, eaten and drunk to excess, nearly died from a pregnancy. She knew intellectually that one kiss was not like another, and lovers had nothing to do with rapists, but this was not so much a novelistic blur but shock and joy and propulsion. This kind of immersion of touch and mood, skin to skin, using a mouth like a third hand—she felt stupid to not have understood. She went from being someone who hadn’t been naked in front of another human in twenty years to someone who would lie back on a bed in the daylight.
All of it stunned her, but by midnight, looking for something to eat in the kitchen, she only wore a blanket because she was cold, and she sat on his lap while they ate it because he was naked himself, and cold. She had finally peeled off her old life, lost her ability to fret over secrets before this new one. Cheese, sardines, canned peaches, being carried back upstairs, snickering at the effort. Over and over, she was shocked: they were lovers. She hadn’t understood, and now she did; this was what the word meant.
Widows, like ripe fruit, drop easily from their perch.
—Bruyère
chapter 17
The Dark Blue Book of Anomalies
?
Walton hadn’t seen fit to send her to university, but he did shove history down her throat. There were no anomalies, he said, lecturing always. With history, Dulce, you understood that every human, every living thing dies, whether or not it is or has food, whether or not it has a god, whether or not it understands how consistently this happens. He certainly hadn’t carried the no anomalies rule over to his own personality—he was sure that there was no one else like him, and he was probably right—but she hoped he’d found a universal ending comforting as he approached the window.
Nevertheless: if something seemed anomalous, Walton maintained it was simply a matter of missing data, undiscovered or forgotten knowledge. To that end, he kept track of mysteries: at the close of every year after 1872, he picked one oddity that had outlasted others and flouted his theory, and added it to a list on the inside cover of the dark blue book, under the heading of Things Without Explanation :
31 Dec 1879: Huachuca silver seam variations.
31 Dec 1883: The disappearance of Krakatoa: the color of the air.
31 Dec 1885: Praseodymium.
27 Dec 1892: I need not wait for the last day of this year to know that my rarity will remain Isobel’s unimaginable cunny.
31 Dec 1894: The patient in the next room last April. He had a third nipple and a third bollock and had survived our illness since 1863. Perhaps the manner of acquisition, reportedly a Hawaiian octoroon?
31 Dec 1897: The bubbling springs and stones of Assam.
31 Dec 1902: The eruption of Pelée or my daughter’s illness. Is this sort of difficulty really so common?
And the last, two weeks before he died:
31 Dec 1904: The strange gem middleman in Futter’s Wheal, or Victor Maslingen, a rich man who dislikes rich things, be they food or fucking or conversation. May he be troubled by his own mysteries.
???
Three days after the trip to Yellowstone, as Lewis gathered his things for the train, waves of slush dribbled out of the sky. He would be gone a month, visiting his half-sisters and ill father, on a trip that had been planned for weeks. “Will you be all right?”
“Of course I will,” she said. “You’re the one with fevers.”