where we had made a life. Moving back up home to Prince George County on this lake was the wrong pill. I’m not inclined to work at making Dashnell see how foolish he was, not on top of the hurt he already feels about Carmen. Dashnell has hypnotized himself into believing Carmen’s death was all to some eternal good. That’s how he bears it. I have no alternative for him. I can’t look at him and tell him at our age we’ll have another boy. I can’t turn back the years and start over. I can’t manufacture the amount of love it would take to offset his anguish. So I leave him to it.
He’s taken up with the men who live around here. They run around like they all did back in high school. They all drink too much and they gamble too much and to my way of thinking they don’t have much tolerance for anything or anybody including each other. They’re the kind who bear watching. Dashnell once planned to take an early retirement so we could travel. He wanted to go out west. He used to talk about San Diego, California, which he visited on a 4-H trip in the eighth grade. I spent a lot of years reading everything I could find about San Diego. I used to doodle a house plan. It was a little two story place built into the side of a hill. It was all screen porch across the front. That was so we could sit out there and watch the sun on the Pacific Ocean. The downstairs was all one room, a big dormitory for Carmen’s children when they came for long summer visits. Carmen took one of my doodles to an architect and had it drawn up proper. He gave it to me the Christmas before he died.
Of course I don’t hear a word about San Diego, California, anymore. Dashnell’s major preoccupation is sitting around drinking beer with the men talking nigger this and nigger that and what all they’d like to do to the niggers . It’s all for the want of sense, especially since there are no black people here in Prince George County and there haven’t been since my ninety-six-year-old mother was a child.
I garden. I bake. I put up fruits and vegetables. I sip tea and visit with the women on the porches. I read books from that box I keephid because they was Carmen’s books and Dashnell doesn’t want any reminders. My figure is not what it was, but I still rinse my hair brown and I pull a comb through it before I go to the grocery store. I own several tubes of lipstick. But I’m no fool neither. I know when the butcher teases me about running off to Vegas, I know he’s teasing. It doesn’t set my heart fluttering. I don’t keep silly romance books hid in my dresser drawer. I don’t invent a better tomorrow. I can always find something to do and I do a lot of things well.
Mother called Dashnell and his bunch Neanderthals when they were teenagers raising dust in their daddies’ pickup trucks on the road past our house. She said she harked back to a day when Prince George County had young men of good sense. She said the decent people either moved or died off. Dashnell’s crowd was all there was left. I thought Mother was just one more older person saying the youth had gone to the devil. But they aren’t young now and they’re still raising dust. I tried looking the other way as long as I could. You’re going to hear things up here around this lake whether you want to or not. I’ve heard plenty to tell me those men are up to more than talking and drinking. They’re organized and they’re itching for trouble.
Now, I try going along, keeping shut, cleaning my oven and taking my walks around the lake in the late afternoon. I try to hold my place with the other women up here. I try to be tolerant, to take the long view and above all else to embrace the fact that everything always changes.
It may be vanity or pride, but I always suspected that there was a decided difference between me and the rest of the crowd living around this lake. Now an evil business has come to pass. Now my suspicions are confirmed.
It was supposed to be
He’s taken up with the men who live around here. They run around like they all did back in high school. They all drink too much and they gamble too much and to my way of thinking they don’t have much tolerance for anything or anybody including each other. They’re the kind who bear watching. Dashnell once planned to take an early retirement so we could travel. He wanted to go out west. He used to talk about San Diego, California, which he visited on a 4-H trip in the eighth grade. I spent a lot of years reading everything I could find about San Diego. I used to doodle a house plan. It was a little two story place built into the side of a hill. It was all screen porch across the front. That was so we could sit out there and watch the sun on the Pacific Ocean. The downstairs was all one room, a big dormitory for Carmen’s children when they came for long summer visits. Carmen took one of my doodles to an architect and had it drawn up proper. He gave it to me the Christmas before he died.
Of course I don’t hear a word about San Diego, California, anymore. Dashnell’s major preoccupation is sitting around drinking beer with the men talking nigger this and nigger that and what all they’d like to do to the niggers . It’s all for the want of sense, especially since there are no black people here in Prince George County and there haven’t been since my ninety-six-year-old mother was a child.
I garden. I bake. I put up fruits and vegetables. I sip tea and visit with the women on the porches. I read books from that box I keephid because they was Carmen’s books and Dashnell doesn’t want any reminders. My figure is not what it was, but I still rinse my hair brown and I pull a comb through it before I go to the grocery store. I own several tubes of lipstick. But I’m no fool neither. I know when the butcher teases me about running off to Vegas, I know he’s teasing. It doesn’t set my heart fluttering. I don’t keep silly romance books hid in my dresser drawer. I don’t invent a better tomorrow. I can always find something to do and I do a lot of things well.
Mother called Dashnell and his bunch Neanderthals when they were teenagers raising dust in their daddies’ pickup trucks on the road past our house. She said she harked back to a day when Prince George County had young men of good sense. She said the decent people either moved or died off. Dashnell’s crowd was all there was left. I thought Mother was just one more older person saying the youth had gone to the devil. But they aren’t young now and they’re still raising dust. I tried looking the other way as long as I could. You’re going to hear things up here around this lake whether you want to or not. I’ve heard plenty to tell me those men are up to more than talking and drinking. They’re organized and they’re itching for trouble.
Now, I try going along, keeping shut, cleaning my oven and taking my walks around the lake in the late afternoon. I try to hold my place with the other women up here. I try to be tolerant, to take the long view and above all else to embrace the fact that everything always changes.
It may be vanity or pride, but I always suspected that there was a decided difference between me and the rest of the crowd living around this lake. Now an evil business has come to pass. Now my suspicions are confirmed.
It was supposed to be
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