difficult negotiations. What is any of this to me? Anger bursts like a bud, a sudden inner rupture, a surprise. What, indeed, is any of this to me?
I look out again to the yard where Karla is playing. She looks like a flash of leaves herself, in bright yellows and reds. The leaves rain past her as she deftly leaps from rope to branch and back to swing. She painstakingly twists the tire round and round, lies back and allows herself to spin until her body and the movement of the rope merge to an opaque blur. I watch her with a knowledge, a certainty that she will always be a wonder to me, a mystery of spontaneous joy and selfless happiness. Restless, I leave the blank canvas and go outside. I think about my sister Kristina and her family coming for Christmas. Karla and I both look forward to that. Kristina’s family will help fill the growing spaces.
The week Kristina is to arrive, Karla decides to make hats. With glue and paper and paint she creates jesters’ hats, soldiers’ hats, clowns’ hats, hats that look as if they should be worn by Popes.
The tree is decorated; we are ready for visitors. Karla’s holidays have begun and I feel the relief and joy of the break in routine, of having just the two of us in the house.
Karla tires of the hats and decides to play dress-up. I go through my closets and donate to her dress-up box, two old sundresses, one of which—a bright blue—she holds to her chest.
“Children can have breastuz too,” she says, peering into the top of the dress. And then, as if she has been saving this for days, she eyes me shrewdly and says, “How does a man’s sperm get inside a woman?”
I can never anticipate the questions. They seem to spring from a deep well of curiosity and, for Karla, a deeper well of hilarity. Their timing is a mystery to me. We get out her book, one she has gone through many times, and we read
How Babies Are Made
. But it holds her interest only a few minutes, and off she goes, this time to build with her set of logs.
Miss Ellis arrives, for tea. She brings a bag of knitting and we sit in the living room before the fire, where an ancient and useful rite goes on. I kneel before her, a skein of scarlet strands looped about my hands. My arms sway to Miss Ellis’ rhythm as she winds the wool to a furiously growing round ball. Karla watches this magical performance. Miss Ellis sits back comfortably and begins to knit—a shrug, she says, for her shoulders. A scarlet shrug.
Karla waits and then, testing, remembering the book, says coolly to Miss Ellis, “Did you know that when a man and woman are in bed the sperm eats the egg?”
“Meets
the egg, Karla!” I say. “It
meets
the egg!”
Karla thinks this very funny indeed.
“You seem to know all about it, don’t you, Karla,” says Miss Ellis.
Then she tells us she has received a Christmas card from Alan. “He seems to write happily, Simone.”
Yes, he writes happily to Karla and me, too, but as much as Alan and I have tried to make contact through our letters, he is removed from the fringes of my real life. There are things that I am forgetting. I am living with the new knowledge that my life is somehow changing, almost against my will. In one of my own letters to Alan, sent at the beginning of the week, I found myself scribbling—a postscript: “Do you remember who I am, Alan? Do you remember the things I do?” I have begun to feel anger, anger mixed with sorrow at missing him, and even fear, a new fear that has crept in: that our friendship, our partnership, will somehow be damaged when we meet again.
But these are all of the things that cannot be said, and I stumble over my reply. As Miss Ellis leaves, she pauses at the door. “Isolation can be terrible if you allow it. You’re vulnerable, Simone. Please take care.”
At dinner, Karla is quiet; she makes few demands on me, seems to know something that neither of us can articulate. And for the first time, she leaves Alan out of her bedtime
I look out again to the yard where Karla is playing. She looks like a flash of leaves herself, in bright yellows and reds. The leaves rain past her as she deftly leaps from rope to branch and back to swing. She painstakingly twists the tire round and round, lies back and allows herself to spin until her body and the movement of the rope merge to an opaque blur. I watch her with a knowledge, a certainty that she will always be a wonder to me, a mystery of spontaneous joy and selfless happiness. Restless, I leave the blank canvas and go outside. I think about my sister Kristina and her family coming for Christmas. Karla and I both look forward to that. Kristina’s family will help fill the growing spaces.
The week Kristina is to arrive, Karla decides to make hats. With glue and paper and paint she creates jesters’ hats, soldiers’ hats, clowns’ hats, hats that look as if they should be worn by Popes.
The tree is decorated; we are ready for visitors. Karla’s holidays have begun and I feel the relief and joy of the break in routine, of having just the two of us in the house.
Karla tires of the hats and decides to play dress-up. I go through my closets and donate to her dress-up box, two old sundresses, one of which—a bright blue—she holds to her chest.
“Children can have breastuz too,” she says, peering into the top of the dress. And then, as if she has been saving this for days, she eyes me shrewdly and says, “How does a man’s sperm get inside a woman?”
I can never anticipate the questions. They seem to spring from a deep well of curiosity and, for Karla, a deeper well of hilarity. Their timing is a mystery to me. We get out her book, one she has gone through many times, and we read
How Babies Are Made
. But it holds her interest only a few minutes, and off she goes, this time to build with her set of logs.
Miss Ellis arrives, for tea. She brings a bag of knitting and we sit in the living room before the fire, where an ancient and useful rite goes on. I kneel before her, a skein of scarlet strands looped about my hands. My arms sway to Miss Ellis’ rhythm as she winds the wool to a furiously growing round ball. Karla watches this magical performance. Miss Ellis sits back comfortably and begins to knit—a shrug, she says, for her shoulders. A scarlet shrug.
Karla waits and then, testing, remembering the book, says coolly to Miss Ellis, “Did you know that when a man and woman are in bed the sperm eats the egg?”
“Meets
the egg, Karla!” I say. “It
meets
the egg!”
Karla thinks this very funny indeed.
“You seem to know all about it, don’t you, Karla,” says Miss Ellis.
Then she tells us she has received a Christmas card from Alan. “He seems to write happily, Simone.”
Yes, he writes happily to Karla and me, too, but as much as Alan and I have tried to make contact through our letters, he is removed from the fringes of my real life. There are things that I am forgetting. I am living with the new knowledge that my life is somehow changing, almost against my will. In one of my own letters to Alan, sent at the beginning of the week, I found myself scribbling—a postscript: “Do you remember who I am, Alan? Do you remember the things I do?” I have begun to feel anger, anger mixed with sorrow at missing him, and even fear, a new fear that has crept in: that our friendship, our partnership, will somehow be damaged when we meet again.
But these are all of the things that cannot be said, and I stumble over my reply. As Miss Ellis leaves, she pauses at the door. “Isolation can be terrible if you allow it. You’re vulnerable, Simone. Please take care.”
At dinner, Karla is quiet; she makes few demands on me, seems to know something that neither of us can articulate. And for the first time, she leaves Alan out of her bedtime
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