Read Online Rowing in Eden by Elizabeth Evans - Free Book Online Page B

needs to use the phone down here”—Franny felt quite willing to say goodbye.
    â€œFwanny.” Franny said this aloud as she lay back on the bed. In the dark, the ceiling sparkled with color, but that was just something your eyes did—and not even to please you, just from some sort of confusion of your eyes and mind.
    Maybe she could walk down the beach to the cottage of Susan Thomas.
    Knock, knock.
    Who’s there?
    Des Moines.
    Des Moines who?
    Des Moines just ain’t the same since the milkman stopped making deliveries.
    It had been Susan Thomas who told Franny that Des Moines should, by rights, be pronounced day-mua. Susan Thomas went to a private school in Des Moines, The Bell Academy for Girls. Susan Thomas studied sculpture and oil painting at the Des Moines Art Museum. Maybe she would appreciate a joke built on the now standard mispronunciation of Des Moines.
    However, if Franny visited Susan Thomas, Susan would almost certainly ask Franny to crew for her in Sunday’s sailboat race, and Franny neither wanted to race nor to say no to the request.
    So: Off the bed she rolled. Made her way down the hall to her own bedroom where, beneath the mattress of her lower bunk, lay aslim book of poems. Scarcely larger than a fancy invitation to a wedding, that book. Poems for Lovers.
    She had kept a diary under her mattress until her mother found it, and let Franny know that the entries regarding Franny’s undying love for the Beatles and the kiss she exchanged with a boy from her class were just the sort of thing that could land Franny in the girls’ reformatory, and result in the loss of the Wahl family home, and Brick’s being barred from the law. By the time Peg had finished, Franny felt grateful to be allowed to carry the diary to the ash can and burn it, and several months passed before she was able to look back on the day and realize her mother had been temporarily insane, and, worse, that Franny herself had been infected by the insanity.
    â€œThe sphere of our sorrow.” That was one of Franny’s favorite images in the book Poems for Lovers. It came from a poem by Shelley, which she read, now, by the light coming into her bedroom from the fixture in the hall:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  I can give not what men call love,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  But wilt thou accept not
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The worship the heart lifts above
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  And the Heavens reject not,—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The desire of the moth for the star,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Of the night for the morrow,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The devotion to something afar
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  From the sphere of our sorrow?
    The day that Franny had carried the poem down the shore to show it to Susan Thomas, Susan had said that if a poem made you feel as if the top of your head came off, that meant the poem was good. According to Emily Dickinson. And then Susan’s father—who was a professor during the school year but tromped about in summer with his broad, nut-brown chest absolutely bare—Susan’s father stopped in his thunderous passage across the Thomas cottage’sechoey floor to add, one finger raised in the air, “‘A period in just the right place is an ice pick through the heart.’ Something like that.” His quote came from Isaac Babel, he said, but Susan’s mother corrected him. “No, no”—a kindly, abstracted lady who wore her gray hair in a pudding-bowl cut and walked the Pynch pastures, bent over, hunting for fungi—Mrs. Thomas said, “no, Kafka , dear,” and Franny had made a mental note to look for something by Kafka the next time she went to the library—
    A problem particular to the summer: all those unshod feet that did not provide the click of warning that meant someone headed your way. More than one someone,