herself for still being alive. That fall, she rode the bus downtown to night school. Sat at desks struck by shafts of dust-filled late-afternoon light, memorized shorthand squiggles, learned to type.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country
. Banged the keys so hard she bruised her fingertips.
When you latch on to learning desperately, as a distraction, it’s easy to rise to the head of the class. Easy afterwards to get a good job, then a better one, then a still better one at a place like Clopton Advertising. On Christmas Eve that year, she came home to find her mother lying on the kitchen floor, dead beside their open refrigerator. An enormous turkey sat defrosting in a dishpan on the bottom shelf, below an array of small brown paper grocery sacks filled with green beans, sweet potatoes, cornmeal for stuffing, oranges and flaked coconut for the ambrosia. The way her dead mother’s hands curled under her chin like a small child’s stayed with her. And how she looked so small lying there, as if her whole life had been of no consequence. A husband who left her for no apparent reason, a career selling cosmetics in a second-best department store. Katherine feared her mother’s circumstances were hereditary; she herself had already known great love and tragedy and there seemed nothing left. When Tim Clopton asked to marry her, she let him.
When she got pregnant, the baby kicked hard early on and she came back to herself in a fierce way, determined to give this child love enough that nothing in the world would ever harm him. Yet somehow she hadn’t, and the harm had been grievous—proof her capacity for a great love was used up.
If her dead son were here now, alive, he’d be four years old and she would give to him the singing grass, the squawking ducks, the leaping trout, the cabin.
S HE GETS UP FROM her sleeping bag, sits at the table gazing at her heaped possessions near her feet. Their presence pleases her, suggests she’ll have a life here in this place, a future even if it’s short. But now they must be put away. On pegs near the door, in storage bins by the fireplace, in the kitchen pie safe with its lovely punched-tin doors. Here’s the hatchet, so comfortable in her hand the day she bought it. If the hatchet is a good man with strong arms in a plaid wool shirt, then the gun’s a twitchy hoodlum talking out the side of his mouth: “Yeah, baby, I’ll take care of you.”
And here’s her brand new notebook, the single thing she is most glad to find. She’s been two days without it, long to go without one’s memory. Because that’s what they’ve become, the notebooks. Of necessity. Until three years ago, she could lie in bed each night and run the whole day she had just lived through her mind like a movie she’d already seen. Then gradually her mind’s projectionist grew sloppy with his splices, prone to walkouts, shutdowns, packing up his reels and leaving town with only a few snippets, single frames, forgotten on the floor. She is still good with far-backs and once-upon-a-times, but yesterday, this morning, even five minutes ago, can fly away from her just like the little birds out in the meadow. The notebooks fill in the blanks. Sometimes even one or two words written in a notebook can bring back an entire reel of film. Sometimes. But not often.
On the first page of every notebook, she has always written what she fears she will forget in an emergency: name, age, address and phone, place of business, family doctor. At some point she began listing her bizarre array of symptoms, alphabetically to keep up with them: bleeding, confusion, exhaustion, fainting, headaches, inflammation (gastrointestinal, genitourinary, some talk even of her brain swelling), nausea, seizures, and the last one, pain—in expository writing, as in the Rule of Three, the point of greatest emphasis is always last. Thus pain is permitted to defy alphabetizing. There were new symptoms with each
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country
. Banged the keys so hard she bruised her fingertips.
When you latch on to learning desperately, as a distraction, it’s easy to rise to the head of the class. Easy afterwards to get a good job, then a better one, then a still better one at a place like Clopton Advertising. On Christmas Eve that year, she came home to find her mother lying on the kitchen floor, dead beside their open refrigerator. An enormous turkey sat defrosting in a dishpan on the bottom shelf, below an array of small brown paper grocery sacks filled with green beans, sweet potatoes, cornmeal for stuffing, oranges and flaked coconut for the ambrosia. The way her dead mother’s hands curled under her chin like a small child’s stayed with her. And how she looked so small lying there, as if her whole life had been of no consequence. A husband who left her for no apparent reason, a career selling cosmetics in a second-best department store. Katherine feared her mother’s circumstances were hereditary; she herself had already known great love and tragedy and there seemed nothing left. When Tim Clopton asked to marry her, she let him.
When she got pregnant, the baby kicked hard early on and she came back to herself in a fierce way, determined to give this child love enough that nothing in the world would ever harm him. Yet somehow she hadn’t, and the harm had been grievous—proof her capacity for a great love was used up.
If her dead son were here now, alive, he’d be four years old and she would give to him the singing grass, the squawking ducks, the leaping trout, the cabin.
S HE GETS UP FROM her sleeping bag, sits at the table gazing at her heaped possessions near her feet. Their presence pleases her, suggests she’ll have a life here in this place, a future even if it’s short. But now they must be put away. On pegs near the door, in storage bins by the fireplace, in the kitchen pie safe with its lovely punched-tin doors. Here’s the hatchet, so comfortable in her hand the day she bought it. If the hatchet is a good man with strong arms in a plaid wool shirt, then the gun’s a twitchy hoodlum talking out the side of his mouth: “Yeah, baby, I’ll take care of you.”
And here’s her brand new notebook, the single thing she is most glad to find. She’s been two days without it, long to go without one’s memory. Because that’s what they’ve become, the notebooks. Of necessity. Until three years ago, she could lie in bed each night and run the whole day she had just lived through her mind like a movie she’d already seen. Then gradually her mind’s projectionist grew sloppy with his splices, prone to walkouts, shutdowns, packing up his reels and leaving town with only a few snippets, single frames, forgotten on the floor. She is still good with far-backs and once-upon-a-times, but yesterday, this morning, even five minutes ago, can fly away from her just like the little birds out in the meadow. The notebooks fill in the blanks. Sometimes even one or two words written in a notebook can bring back an entire reel of film. Sometimes. But not often.
On the first page of every notebook, she has always written what she fears she will forget in an emergency: name, age, address and phone, place of business, family doctor. At some point she began listing her bizarre array of symptoms, alphabetically to keep up with them: bleeding, confusion, exhaustion, fainting, headaches, inflammation (gastrointestinal, genitourinary, some talk even of her brain swelling), nausea, seizures, and the last one, pain—in expository writing, as in the Rule of Three, the point of greatest emphasis is always last. Thus pain is permitted to defy alphabetizing. There were new symptoms with each
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