An Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard

shirt-front. June was short and round-headed, thin. Under her green apron she wore a pinch-waisted dress of blotchy dark linsey-woolsey, ribboned in rows and creased at random. She had grown up in Baltimore; her father was a senator.
    Clare’s mother, Ada, was clearing the table. Ada was no taller standing than Clare sitting. On top of her head was a small white roll of hair, the size of a corn dodger. Her bow-shaped mouth and expressive, keen eyes had made her striking in her youth. Now age had pulled down her round face and narrowed it, taken half her teeth, and thinned the brows on her clear forehead, so her eyes looked even bigger and blacker than they had when she was young, when they blazed out from a bonnet deep as a bucket.
    â€œCome sit down,” Clare told her. “You look baked.”
    â€œIf there are any more lodge initiations to tell,” Ada said, “you will spill not only the pudding, but the child as well.”
    Mabel slid lower on Clare’s lap. She was an India-rubbery-looking person even when awake. Her moist child’s face shifted from one half-formed expression to another; even while she climbed things, even while she marched boisterously about the house, she retained a limp, sleepy look. She had fine, reddish hair and skin pale as putty; her round limbs looked jointless and unmuscled. She was a jot shy of four years old—born on Christmas. If she heard her father’s exalted voice at all, it was through a bright fog of sleep.
    On the back porch the door banged, and banged again: old Ada was throwing salmon scraps to the dog, the dog that had been crying pitiably since sunset, as though it had never in the length of its life so much as seen a morsel of food, yet knew, with its dying breath, that there was such a thing, inexplicably denied to it of all creatures alone.
    Clare met June’s ironic gaze. Her high brows outlined the rim of bone under which her eyes were deep as wells. He loved to know her opinion of things. There was not a bill in the House of Representatives or a bulb in the garden of which he did not consider his wife’s probable opinion before he framed his own, if any. Now she was looking at him in the precise way she had; he did not know why. He gave Mabel a squeeze and shifted his legs.
    They were running late. Clare himself had begun fixing the pudding long after dark. He peeled the newspapers from the apples in their carton and chopped them—red-and-white Kings, green-and-white Gravensteins—into a yellow bowl. He shunted the stove’s heat into its oven, where eventually the king salmon baked, split by its stuffing, and five brown potatoes baked, and the dark pudding frothed down the sides of the yellow bowl. Now it was after eleven. Old Ada was shuffling her feet; he and June were starting to stare, and the child was asleep, her loose mouth tidily shut. His must be a slatted sort of lap, Clare thought, but Mabel had a way of softening to fit any occasion, as though she had no bones. The skin on her hands was hot; her hair gave off a sour steam as she slept.
    Clare scraped hardened brown sugar and butter from the yellow bowl’s side; he offered it to June, who smiled her ironic smile, and ate it himself. He meant to pick up some sherry; he wished they had a boat. They could get a rowboat, at least, for Mabel. Tomorrow he would surprise June with an electric sewing machine. He made only sixty dollars a month teaching shop and science at the high school, but he recently sold some building lots he had bought with June’s legacy two years ago, and realized a 400 percent return. The way business was swelling and his investments were boiling up, he fancied getting a horse and carriage—a high-seated victoria, and a certain beautiful, freckled mare with a high, long action, which Jim O’Shippy might sell. They could build a carriage house by the cowshed.
    Clare grew up with the boisterous new country and boasted of its youth;