incredible warmth of his very beautiful young body. So nearly black, so glowing and healthy, so slim now, next to hers. She loved the warmth, would do anything for it, his gentleness. She was grateful that he was willing to work so hard for their future, while she could not even recognize it.
“One day,” he said over lunch, “we’ll have a house like Mr. Yateson’s. It will have cactus plants around it and sky-blue driveway and painted blue trim. In the dining room there’ll be a chandelier like the ones in Joan Crawford movies. And there’ll be carpeting wall to wall and all the rooms will be different colors.”
Mr. Yateson was the principal of their school. His brand-new house, floating on the bright-blue driveway and concrete walks that encircled it, sat back from a dirt road that was impassable when it rained and made Meridian think of a fancy-dressed lady without shoes standing in a puddle of mud.
“Um hum,” she would nod vaguely at Eddie’s dream.
At the restaurant he worked as a waiter and sometimes short-order cook—hard work, little pay. And yet he was always patient and gentle with her, protective. If he worried he kept it from her, justifying his silence by her “condition.” The worries he was unable to hide were about small things that bothered him: the ironing of his clothes, and even her own, which she did not do nearly as well as his mother (who, finally, in the last stages of her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, began to collect their dirty clothes each Wednesday to bring them back on Friday stainless and pale from bleach); the cooking, which she was too queasy to do at all; and the sex, which she did not seem (he said) interested in.
One night as he climbed over her—because he could only make love to her by beginning his assault from her left side—he said:
“And tonight, please, open your legs all the way.”
“What do you mean, open my legs?” she asked.
“I have to fight to get your legs open; you know that as well as I do. They’re like somebody starched them shut.”
She had not been aware that she locked her legs. Now that he had pointed it out to her, however, she found she closed them tighter than ever.
“You just don’t care about it any more,” he moaned, burying his head in the pillow next to hers.
In fact, this last worry surprised her. She did not see how he could feel she was less interested in sex, for she felt she had never shown anything approaching interest. Nor could she imagine why any woman should. She loved the warmth, the lying together, the peace. She endured the sex because it gave her these things. She would have been just as happy, happier, without it. But he did not understand this and would sometimes seem hurt and complain. She did not know what to do, so of course she put the blame on any handy thing: her big stomach, the queasiness, the coming baby, old wives’ tales that forbade intercourse until three months after the baby was born (a fact she learned from his mother: that intercourse any earlier weakened one’s brain).
By that time—and it did not surprise her—he had a woman who loved sex, and was able to get as much of it as he wanted every night.
But he was “good” to her, even then. He did not “cheat” and “beat” her both, which meant he was “good” to her, according to her mother, his mother, the other women in the neighborhood and in fact just about everyone she knew, who seemed always to expect the two occurrences together, like the twin faces of a single plague.
But had she lost interest in sex completely? She didn’t know. It was simply that sex was now something that she knew and thought she understood. Before it had been curiosity about her body’s power. Nor was her response to Eddie’s lovemaking as uncomplicated as he appeared to think.
She had not been wandering exactly on those afternoons she had found herself in front of Daxter’s funeral home—that huge, snowy, two-storied building that stood on a
“One day,” he said over lunch, “we’ll have a house like Mr. Yateson’s. It will have cactus plants around it and sky-blue driveway and painted blue trim. In the dining room there’ll be a chandelier like the ones in Joan Crawford movies. And there’ll be carpeting wall to wall and all the rooms will be different colors.”
Mr. Yateson was the principal of their school. His brand-new house, floating on the bright-blue driveway and concrete walks that encircled it, sat back from a dirt road that was impassable when it rained and made Meridian think of a fancy-dressed lady without shoes standing in a puddle of mud.
“Um hum,” she would nod vaguely at Eddie’s dream.
At the restaurant he worked as a waiter and sometimes short-order cook—hard work, little pay. And yet he was always patient and gentle with her, protective. If he worried he kept it from her, justifying his silence by her “condition.” The worries he was unable to hide were about small things that bothered him: the ironing of his clothes, and even her own, which she did not do nearly as well as his mother (who, finally, in the last stages of her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, began to collect their dirty clothes each Wednesday to bring them back on Friday stainless and pale from bleach); the cooking, which she was too queasy to do at all; and the sex, which she did not seem (he said) interested in.
One night as he climbed over her—because he could only make love to her by beginning his assault from her left side—he said:
“And tonight, please, open your legs all the way.”
“What do you mean, open my legs?” she asked.
“I have to fight to get your legs open; you know that as well as I do. They’re like somebody starched them shut.”
She had not been aware that she locked her legs. Now that he had pointed it out to her, however, she found she closed them tighter than ever.
“You just don’t care about it any more,” he moaned, burying his head in the pillow next to hers.
In fact, this last worry surprised her. She did not see how he could feel she was less interested in sex, for she felt she had never shown anything approaching interest. Nor could she imagine why any woman should. She loved the warmth, the lying together, the peace. She endured the sex because it gave her these things. She would have been just as happy, happier, without it. But he did not understand this and would sometimes seem hurt and complain. She did not know what to do, so of course she put the blame on any handy thing: her big stomach, the queasiness, the coming baby, old wives’ tales that forbade intercourse until three months after the baby was born (a fact she learned from his mother: that intercourse any earlier weakened one’s brain).
By that time—and it did not surprise her—he had a woman who loved sex, and was able to get as much of it as he wanted every night.
But he was “good” to her, even then. He did not “cheat” and “beat” her both, which meant he was “good” to her, according to her mother, his mother, the other women in the neighborhood and in fact just about everyone she knew, who seemed always to expect the two occurrences together, like the twin faces of a single plague.
But had she lost interest in sex completely? She didn’t know. It was simply that sex was now something that she knew and thought she understood. Before it had been curiosity about her body’s power. Nor was her response to Eddie’s lovemaking as uncomplicated as he appeared to think.
She had not been wandering exactly on those afternoons she had found herself in front of Daxter’s funeral home—that huge, snowy, two-storied building that stood on a
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