corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?
I was content with Sylvie, so it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore. She pulledall the sequins off the toes of the blue velveteen ballet slippers Sylvie bought us for school shoes the second spring after her arrival. Though the mud in the road still stood inches high and gleamed like aspic on either side where tires passed through the ruts, I had liked the slippers well enough. The tingling seep of water through the seams was pleasant on a spring day, when even in broad sun the slightest breeze raised the hairs on our arms.
If one pried up earth with a stick on those days, one found massed shafts of ice, slender as needles and pure as spring water. This delicate infrastructure bore us up so long as we avoided roads and puddles, until the decay of winter became general. Such delicate improvisations fail. Soon enough we foundered as often as we stepped. By that time the soles of the shoes were substantially gone. Sylvie never bought things of the best quality, not because she was close with money (although, since the money was ours, she spent it timidly, even stealthily), but because only the five-and-dime catered to her taste for the fanciful. Lucille ground her teeth when Sylvie set out shopping.
So did I, because I found, as Lucille changed, advantage in conforming my attitudes to hers. She was of the common persuasion. Time that had not come yet—an anomaly in itself—had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change. She wanted worsted mittens, brown oxfords, red rubber boots. Ruffles wilted, sequins fell, satin was impossible to clean.None of the little elegances that Sylvie brought home for us was to be allowed its season. Sylvie, on her side, inhabited a millennial present. To her the deteriorations of things were always a fresh surprise, a disappointment not to be dwelt on. However a day’s or a week’s use might have maimed the velvet bows and plastic belts, the atomizers and gilt dresser sets, the scalloped nylon gloves and angora-trimmed anklets, Sylvie always brought us treasures.
6
The summer that followed was summer indeed. In spring I had begun to sense that Lucille’s loyalties were with the other world. With fall began her tense and passionate campaign to naturalize herself to it. The months that intervened were certainly the last and perhaps the first true summer of my life.
It was very long. Lucille and I stopped going to school at the end of March, as soon as the weather relented enough to make truancy possible. As a courtesy to Sylvie we put on our school clothes every morning and walked a block in the direction of school. Where the train tracks intersected the road we followed the tracks, which led to the lake and the railroad bridge. The hoboes built on the shore in the bridge’s very shadows. Our grandmother, to instill caution in us, had told us that a child who came too near a train was liable to be scalded to death where she stood by a sudden blast of steam, and that hoboes made a practice of whisking children under their coatsand carrying them off. So we simply looked at the hoboes, who rarely looked at us.
We in our plaid dresses and orlon sweaters and velveteen shoes and they in their suit coats with the vestigial collars turned up and the lapels closed might have been marooned survivors of some lost pleasure craft. We and they alone might have escaped the destruction of some
I was content with Sylvie, so it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore. She pulledall the sequins off the toes of the blue velveteen ballet slippers Sylvie bought us for school shoes the second spring after her arrival. Though the mud in the road still stood inches high and gleamed like aspic on either side where tires passed through the ruts, I had liked the slippers well enough. The tingling seep of water through the seams was pleasant on a spring day, when even in broad sun the slightest breeze raised the hairs on our arms.
If one pried up earth with a stick on those days, one found massed shafts of ice, slender as needles and pure as spring water. This delicate infrastructure bore us up so long as we avoided roads and puddles, until the decay of winter became general. Such delicate improvisations fail. Soon enough we foundered as often as we stepped. By that time the soles of the shoes were substantially gone. Sylvie never bought things of the best quality, not because she was close with money (although, since the money was ours, she spent it timidly, even stealthily), but because only the five-and-dime catered to her taste for the fanciful. Lucille ground her teeth when Sylvie set out shopping.
So did I, because I found, as Lucille changed, advantage in conforming my attitudes to hers. She was of the common persuasion. Time that had not come yet—an anomaly in itself—had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change. She wanted worsted mittens, brown oxfords, red rubber boots. Ruffles wilted, sequins fell, satin was impossible to clean.None of the little elegances that Sylvie brought home for us was to be allowed its season. Sylvie, on her side, inhabited a millennial present. To her the deteriorations of things were always a fresh surprise, a disappointment not to be dwelt on. However a day’s or a week’s use might have maimed the velvet bows and plastic belts, the atomizers and gilt dresser sets, the scalloped nylon gloves and angora-trimmed anklets, Sylvie always brought us treasures.
6
The summer that followed was summer indeed. In spring I had begun to sense that Lucille’s loyalties were with the other world. With fall began her tense and passionate campaign to naturalize herself to it. The months that intervened were certainly the last and perhaps the first true summer of my life.
It was very long. Lucille and I stopped going to school at the end of March, as soon as the weather relented enough to make truancy possible. As a courtesy to Sylvie we put on our school clothes every morning and walked a block in the direction of school. Where the train tracks intersected the road we followed the tracks, which led to the lake and the railroad bridge. The hoboes built on the shore in the bridge’s very shadows. Our grandmother, to instill caution in us, had told us that a child who came too near a train was liable to be scalded to death where she stood by a sudden blast of steam, and that hoboes made a practice of whisking children under their coatsand carrying them off. So we simply looked at the hoboes, who rarely looked at us.
We in our plaid dresses and orlon sweaters and velveteen shoes and they in their suit coats with the vestigial collars turned up and the lapels closed might have been marooned survivors of some lost pleasure craft. We and they alone might have escaped the destruction of some
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