Three Short Novels by Gina Berriault Page B

known the person she was; and she wanted to know his body as she had known it and claimed it when he was an infant and as it would be in the years to come when he was apart from her, and she wanted this knowledge of each other to put them forever apart from everyone else, as covertly wise persons were apart. She glanced over at him as he leaned against a tree two yards away from her. Gazing at her, he looked stricken and pale in the sun, like someone waiting to be sacrificed. She ground her cigarette into the dirt. There were dry pine needles and rust-colored leaves onthe ground, and as though she were concerned about starting a blaze, she continued to grind the cigarette with the sole of her shoe, sending all the wanting down into the earth.
    They went down the trail to the highway, he following her from afar. On the edge of the highway, as they walked together again, unspeaking, she placed her hand on his shoulder, needing to assure herself that she had meant him no harm.
    In the motel swimming pool, in the midst of countless children, she was kicked by beating feet, water splashed in her eyes and shouts rang in her ears, and she dodged small, sharp elbows. She often lost sight of him; once saw him talking to a girl a year or two older than he, both of them holding to the edge of the pool and with only their heads above water. The girl’s light brown hair in wet strands to the shoulders, the small, delicate profile, the unformed and forming spirit, brought her a moment’s anguish. Surrounded by splashing young bodies, she suspected that if she were to drown she would not be missed, that she would lie at the bottom of the pool, and for hours, for the entire day under the sun, the young bodies would splash above her. Even when her body was discovered she would not be missed. So now, in the time before she was drowned, in the time before the water seeped under her cap and the chlorine turned her bleached hair green and she became a grotesque drowned woman, in the time before she was dead and revealed, she must experience a union with him that was more than with any other person on earth. It was not enough to have given him birth, it was not enough to be his mother, that union was not enough. Mothers were always of the past and never of the future. A boy rose straight up out of the water directly in front of her, bumping against her legs and breasts. For a second he looked at her with bright, unseeing eyes; then he struck away from her and was at once lost among the other shrill and splashing children. Frightened, she climbed from the pool, away from all the quick, contemptuous bodies in the water.
    When she had dressed, she walked down the highway to the cafe. She slipped a morning paper from the rack and was opening it to read at the counter while she drank her coffee when David got onto the stool beside her, his body wet, his bare feet coated with the dust of the highway. Unspeaking, they ate side by side, he with his back humped and his head bent down, and shivering a little. Some water ran down his temple, some dripped from his trunks to the floor. She was pleased with his alarm—it was like an outburst, a confession—and at the same time she was afraid of it and of the pleasure that she took in it.
    While he put on his clothes, she waited for him in the yard, and they walked for miles along the highway, past motels and cabins and streams. Not only the exercise but the immense, vertical, judicial monotony of the forest was tiring. She saw the forest as austere and disinterested, but she knew that, if they were to rest again among the trees, the judicial aspect would dissolve within the heat and the silence.
    On the way back they ate supper at a small restaurant in another motel, sitting at a green Formica table; then they returned to their cabin and lay down on their beds, flat on their backs, with their dusty shoes still on. The air was cool with the onset of evening and the yard light in the trees began to