Seven Loves
Page 21
“Why did they have us in that little place? Why didn’t you just talk in the open, where the sawhorses were?”
“Because it rained all day. Because of the cold. They did it for us.”
When they finally stopped walking May shook out her arms from the shoulder and pressed the fingers of her gloves tight. “Ugh!” She was thinking of the kiss.
She met her mother’s eyes, each with its one deep line under it like a chair rocker. They were the same height, but May was still growing. Soon she would look down on her mother. Her mother began to smile as if she were thinking the same thing. She got one of her brown lozenges out of its paper and she took May’s hand in her own cold ones as if she were going to ask a favor that would be hard to grant, as if she were already comforting a daughter who could not grant it.
“That’s not the way I would choose to give or get a kiss, my darling, but it was no different than if—oh, Dr. Thorp did it. Poor man, he’s going to get my cold.” Her forehead had purple ridges under the streetlight, her beautiful mouth shrank to two dark, irregular marks as she coughed.
May was suddenly weak and tired, and she wanted, as she almost never did anymore, to lean on her mother or be held in her arms, but the streetcar was coming. And then in the streetcar when they sat down her mother reached for her gloved hand, but May did not want the touch by then, and she took her hand back. Her mother held the bar in front of them. For a long time her thumb plied it as if she might bring a spark out of it.
May put her head back on the seat and let her eyes roll against her half-closed lids. It was getting dark. Before she slept she saw her mother as she always would, a thin woman blanched by the bulbs in the ceiling of the car, who looked like a tired student on the University Line, biting her lips and making notes on the back of a leaflet pressed on her bag where the ghosts of words from her pencil point were swarming on the leather, with the battery of her hair winking on and off in the dim light. She looked up each time someone got on, and the expression on her face smoothed into the one the man in the camp had taken for something that would let him kiss her, something lenient and unexacting. Something—despite her endless hunt for the lair of justice, despite all she lived to overthrow—that said, should life be otherwise? It seemed to May to be the very look on the face of the seal that had come up and gazed at them, a long look of curiosity almost tender, before it slipped from the rock into water that ran together and hid it from the ones looking back.
About the Author
Valerie Trueblood grew up in Virginia. Her writing has been published in The Iowa Review, One Story, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review and serves as cotrustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Trust. She and her family live in Seattle.