Marry or Burn
Page 27
“That made her laugh.” Diana was talking to Shelley, who at a careful walk had crossed the room to the little sink. “And oh my God you should see her arm.”
“She showed you.”
“Her shoulder and arm. Like a fork went down a cucumber.”
Shelley had turned on the tap in the little sink. The pipes gurgled and the tap spat until she turned it off.
“I should go,” I said. I wanted to tell Diana to be careful what she said to Shelley. Shelley was not just anybody, a person you could tease and torment.
“Anyway,” Diana said, “after what she went through describing the whole thing, it would have been like trying to hug somebody who had just come out of an operation.”
“People do that with their dogs,” Shelley said.
In the end Gerda said, “But don’t worry, I won’t do this, you won’t have to say, ‘Quick, hide, here she comes, don’t let her get started.’” They began to laugh, both of them drunk, and laughed and stumbled as they walked back. Gerda asked Diana to forgive her for spilling out the whole thing like that, every bit of it. Diana said she was honored.
Diana said, “Shelley, I just happen to have been the right person for Gerda on this particular night. When she’s leaving her old life behind. People tell me things,” she added with a look at me.
“They do,” Shelley agreed.
“It’s not like I pump them.”
“No,” Shelley said.
I started to say something like maybe it was easier for Gerda to talk now that she had our father, now that the padlock was off the story, but Diana went on. “OK, so how come I bring that out in people?” She was throwing things out of her suitcase into the little rattling drawers, and it was true, tears shone in her eyes. “Maybe because I talk to them. Maybe because I don’t just sit there staring into space. It’s not like I go looking for these people.”
“No evidence for that,” said Shelley. Diana stopped unpacking and they faced each other.
“God damn it,” Diana said.
“Well, goodnight,” I said. “See you in the morning.”
“’Night,” Shelley said.
I climbed into the tall bed. I wished Eddie were there. I thought about what the chances were that he would find some transportation and get there. The room was hot and I threw off the fat comforter that he would have rolled himself up in, not caring that it was August.
How weak love was, dying of the weight of the covers if you let it. How weak it was at its birth. Eyelashes, hands on a piano. Could these become my father’s mourning, Gerda’s ax?
The wind had come up again, pine cones were banging on the tin roof and rolling off. I sat and looked out the window, which was so close I could have leaned my head on the glass. I could see Shelley and Diana’s cabin. The light was already out. I could see the tree house. I had imagined Shelley climbing up there drunk and desperate. But I was wrong, she had not done that. It could be Diana had not meant, after all, to dare her to do it. Mr. and Mrs. Burney were out there. She was winding greenery onto the arch, he was shoveling ashes into a bucket. She still had on the apron and it was flying up. She hunched over, and I thought she was sinking her face in her hands because of his day of drunken gallantries and the harsh way he had spoken to her, when she was guilty only of trying to extract a kind of perfection from the given materials, for our sakes. For the sake of a wedding, of all things. But she was only pushing the hair out of her eyes and calling some question to him, while he leaned on the spade a little distance away, facing the trees.
About the Author
VALERIE TRUEBLOOD grew up in Virginia, in then-rural Loudoun County. Before moving to the Northwest, she worked as a caseworker in Chicago and at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She has published essays, short stories and poems, as well as articles about nuclear weapons, and has worked for many years in the peace movement. She is a contributing editor to The American Poetry Review, and a co-trustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Trust. Her novel Seven Loves was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program. She lives with her husband Richard Rapport in Seattle and the Methow Valley. They have one son and have been married for thirty-eight years.
Copyright © 2010 by Valerie Trueblood. All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The passage about trees read aloud by Diana in “Beloved, You Looked into Space” is from Donald Culross Peattie’s A Natural History of North American Trees, Vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Trueblood, Valerie.
Marry or burn : stories / by Valerie Trueblood.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-582-43858-0
1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Love-hate relationships—Fiction. 4. Desire—Fiction. 5. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 6. Love stories, American. 7. Domestic fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3620.R84M37 2010
813’.6—dc22
2010017803
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