Read Online Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman - Free Book Online

minerals transformed into active participants. They induced love, they captured memories, they murdered ogres, they arranged themselves on the path so that Hansel could find his way home.
    Some evenings, when Chris put his feet up on a particularly ugly brocaded ottoman and closed his eyes, Ingrid and Chloe and Lynne busied themselves in the kitchen making a pot of soup that would last a week. Lynne’s garden supplied herbs. Chloe threw in the chromite. Ingrid muttered some syllables. “That’s an incantation,” she invented.
    “Are you a witch?” Chloe giggled.
    “No, just a crone.”
    “A glamour crone,” said Lynne. “Always New York beautiful.”
    “Oh…it’s the eyeglasses,” said Ingrid hurriedly. “Here’s a Chinese proverb that will make the soup even better. Cutting stalks at noontime, perspiration drips to the earth. Know you that your bowl of rice, each grain from hardship comes? I learned that from a healer on Mott Street.” It was only a slight exaggeration. She had found the proverb in a fortune cookie; in Chinatown what she’d learned was that there were elderly men whose impassivity seemed like friendship. In narrow store after narrow store, she’d heard Allegra recite her symptoms. The men pulled out little drawers and scooped up powders and leaves and poured the stuff into sacks and handed the sacks to her friend. Allegra boiled them into a tea.
    “How does it taste?” Ingrid asked.
    “Rank. Nauseating, like the chemo.”
    Tonight’s soup, unadulterated except for the stone, was perfect. Ingrid put the stone on the windowsill, ready for the next meal.
    When Lynne came home exhausted from teaching fourth-graders, Ingrid ordered her into the guest-room daybed and tucked the quilt around her. Mostly, though, it was Chloe who needed time off, time off from being an only child, time off from the helpless scrutiny of her parents. Then Ingrid spirited her away into the woods.
    They walked along various paths. Just yesterday they had followed a trail to a little pond. Ingrid pointed to the knobs on the willows. Each was a tightly curled leaf, saving itself for next spring. “What goes round comes round,” Ingrid heard herself saying. “Death is the gate of life.”
    “Don’t you ever die, Queen Giraffe,” ordered Chloe.
    “I’ll die in my time, darling. Like everyone else.”
    The child shook her head. “You belong to us, ” she said, as if that conferred immortality.
      
    And then in January the pellet plant was built and running, and Chris was free to return to the little office off the shop, and Ingrid was free to go back to her real life.
    On one of their walks home together, they stopped to rest beside the Falls. “You’ll be glad to return to New York—theater, friends, fabrics, museums.”
    “Fabrics?”
    “I meant clothing. The walks in the neighborhoods, I know you love to do that, you’ve told me. Parties…”
    She listened to him telling her what she was presumably feeling.
    He said: “I spent a year in New York once, studying wood sculpture…”
    “I remember. Your uncle was still alive.”
    He nodded. “I liked the fresh mornings, the sound of the garbage trucks. But there is so much more that you like. Maybe we’ve kept you here too long.”
    “Not at all,” she said politely, telling the truth and not seeming to. Let him think she wanted to leave. Let him never know what she really wanted.
    Let him never know that she—with the wisdom of crones, of Mott Street medicine men, of memory-laden stones—knew what he wanted. He did not look at her breasts, her abundant hair, her eyes kept safe these days behind newly broken glasses. They had been born thirty years apart, he was thinking, she was thinking; and they had known each other all his life. They stared at a tree which would outlive them both. He wanted to bury his nose in the cleavage she had learned to hide. He wanted to say sweet words.
    Instead he pressed his lips together to let no words escape.