Rumors

Rumors by Anna Godbersen Page B

Book: Rumors by Anna Godbersen Read Free Book Online
Authors: Anna Godbersen
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may again be in vogue. The best people are having quiet little dinners and cutting their day dresses from plain muslin. But remember: There is simplicity and there is simplicity, and the elegant variety is not always as easy as it sounds.
    — DRESS MAGAZINE , DECEMBER 1899

T HERE WERE ONLY A FEW THINGS IN THE LITTLE cabin on the Keller lease, but what was there Will had made a point of acquiring for Elizabeth. In the middle of the dirt floor was a square table that Will had built, and over to the side was an old brass frame bed that he had bought off a wildcatter gone broke up in Lancaster, the same one who had sold them the horse. There was the brass-framed oval mirror that was hung over the tin water basin—both of the same provenance—and it was there that Elizabeth still arranged her hair before dinner every night, usually in a little bun high in the back, like the center of a pincushion. Hair done, water brought up from the well, she had now turned to a task she knew very little of. Elizabeth Holland was attempting, once again, to make dinner.
    A clutch of the orange poppies that she had taken from the field yesterday sat in an old mason jar at the center of the table, which was covered with the same canvas they used for everything. Beside them was a little pile of Will’s books— Geological Techniques for Locating Petroleum Beneath the Earth’s Surface and How a Man Digs a Well in the Wild. She had managed to get a fire going in the little iron stove in the corner, but opening the cans of baked beans was proving too difficult for her. The opener was rusted, and she suspected that Will had found it somewhere—a bit of thrift that she would have considered admirable at any other moment, but was currently so distressing to her that she wanted to scream.
    This was in fact what she did next. She let out a cry that might very well have been—it occurred to her even as her throat began to vibrate and her lungs became empty of air—the loudest noise she’d ever personally made. When it was over she was still alone, although she felt better. She put her hand on her abdomen and closed her eyes. Her lips turned upward in a slight smile; it was, after all, amusing to think that she was so far away from all those fine things she’d so worked to be and finding herself unequal to even small tasks. To be incapable was as new to her as vociferous outbursts.
    She put down the can and sat at the table. It was that part of the day when she usually became conscious of having been alone for a long stretch, after Will had stayed out in the field for many hours with Denny, the partner he’d found in Oakland. Those were hours beyond her realm, and she didn’t try to understand what they did out there. The world of labor had always been Will’s world, and a mystery to her, and whilethis had once seemed like a plain fact, it did make her feel a little guilty lately. She knew he had spent time setting up their home—which would have been a natural task for a different kind of girl—that he could have otherwise used to explore the field. Elizabeth wanted nothing more than to be with Will, but she couldn’t help but wish—at moments like these, late in the day, when, in New York, the sun would have already gone down—that she could better keep up with him. It was the perfect society girl in her, and she only longed to prepare a frontier supper with half the aplomb she used to deploy chatting with visitors on Sunday in her family drawing room.
    She sat there for a while thinking of those people she’d left behind and of those several thousand miles that separated them. She wouldn’t miss them so if only she could see into their lives a little more, if only that distance were slightly more conquerable. Every now and then she would read a week-old newspaper that mentioned some New York news, but that mainly stoked her worry, for it was inevitably about how her mother wasn’t her old self or how Diana still was.
    “Lizzy!” Will

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