by Laura Furman
“I didn’t want to startle you,” she says, “so I called out to you as softly as I could. You seemed so absorbed in your book. Am I disturbing you?”
“Not at all.”
“Nice place to read, I’d say. Quiet. Surrounded by all these lovely flowers the church has planted. Best time of day too.”
“Yeah, it’s a great place. I come here almost every day around this time after a long walk. And I’m thinking, I don’t know if I should admit this, and it’s kind of laughable, but you’re the first person I’ve spoken to all day.”
“Oh, that’s so sad,” she says. “You know what? Why don’t you come by our house tomorrow for a drink? Jim and I have been meaning to have you over for I don’t know how long. We’ve talked about it several times, but as you can see, we’re great procrastinators.”
“I don’t know. Maybe another time. I’ve become such a hermit, which I know isn’t good, although it helps my work, but—”
“Nonsense. Tomorrow. Say around six? Bring your cat. I’m only kidding. What’s her name?”
“His. Rufus.”
“Rufus. I see him running all around. Once up a tree. He never seems to just walk. And hiding in bushes. But it’ll be wonderful talking to you over an extended period of time instead of only these quick chats or when I run into you at the market. By the way, what’s that you’re reading?”
“Gilgamesh.”
“Oh, I remember it from college. You’ll have to tell us tomorrow why you’re reading it. I mean, what made you, I’m sure, take it up again. Tomorrow then? Sixish?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
She smiles and goes. He reopens the book. What page was I on again? He thinks. Eighty-four, I think. He turns to it. I’m right. So, today won’t be a day where I can say I didn’t talk to a single person, and tomorrow won’t be one either. Well, it wouldn’t have turned out that way today anyway. He probably would have reached one of his daughters on the phone later. Maybe both.
Tessa Hadley
Valentine
MADELEINE AND I ARE waiting at the bus stop at the bottom of Beech Grove in our school uniforms: green print dresses, short white socks and sandals, blazers. In the summer, we are allowed to leave off our hated green felt hats. It’s June, and summer is thick everywhere, a sleepy, viscous, sensuous emanation; hot blasts of air, opaque with pollen from the overblown suburban gardens, are ripe with smells from bins and dog mess. We are mad with summer, chafing and irritable with sex. We are fifteen, studying for our O levels; we have breasts (small in my case, luscious in Madeleine’s) and pubic hair and periods. A breeze, stirring the dust in the gutter, tickles up around our thighs, floats our dresses—we can hardly bear it.
Our talk is rococo with insincerity, drawling, lascivious. Everything seems to have an obscene double meaning, even though it’s only quarter past eight in the morning and, behind us in our homes, our mothers are still clearing the breakfast tables, scraping soggy Rice Krispies and burned toast crusts into the bin, wiping the plastic tablecloths. My mother is bending over my little brother, Philip, in his high chair, playing pat-a-cake to trick him into letting her wipe his face and hands, making his mouth spill open with delighted laughter. She lifts up his shirt and kisses his belly; I might be jealous, if I had time to crane that way, back toward home and the cramped circle of old loves. But my attention is all thrusting forward, onward, out of there. I’ve burned my boats, I can’t go back—or, rather, I do go back, dutifully, every evening after school, and do my homework at the same table in the same stale olive-green dining room, and still get the best marks in the class for everything, nearly everything. But it’s provisional, while I wait for my real life to begin. I feel like an overgrown giant in that house, bumping up against the ceiling like Alice in Wonderland after she’s found the cake labeled “Eat Me”: head swollen with knowledge and imagination, body swollen with sensation and longing.