Authors: Robert Stallman
Dearest Vaire:
In answer to your last question, I'm afraid it's going to seem strange out here for a long time, even though we've been here three months now and in the house almost two. It's a lovely old house as houses go in this part of the desert, even tho it is made of mud, adobe it's called. We're all still feeling like immigrants to an unknown country, probably Mexico. I think it would be better if it were Mexico, really. The people who live around us here in the north Valley are all Spanish descent, names like Ochoa, Gutierrez, Jaramillo (and remember to say the
J
like an
H
and the double
L
like a
Y
or you will be snickered at). But they pretend to be living in America, and let us keep hoping that it really will be America some morning when we wake up and people will stop talking their wretched mongrel Spanish behind our backs and stealing our garden tools and Mina's toys if we leave them in the yard - in broad daylight too. Well, you asked, and that's what I feel like saying. No, I'm not in much of a mood except bad right now. Mina's in the play cave she and the little boy down the street dug in the ditch bank. I can see her from the window where I sit writing. She is such a perfect joy to us, and to me always. I sometimes think she sustains me beyond what I should ask of any person, much less a child. But I try not to let it show.
Dear Vaire, here I go again, your little sister complaining time out of mind, just like old days in school when I couldn't get along with Miss Bush and you did my compositions for me out of sheer pity. We are really fine, and I think Barry may at last have a line on something big. He's been sending out fiction, doing some reviewing, and has a small-time editing job at the local morning paper. It's driving him frantic because he wants so much to get into the big time. And the money he gets at the
Journal
isn't what he thinks he ought to have, altho his boss is very sympathetic, and we went on a lovely picnic with them last week to Sandia crest. You wouldn't believe how beautiful and awesome it is up there l0,640 feet high, standing on the edge of really nothing where the last big shelf of rock juts up into a perfectly gorgeous purple sky and the wind is always cool and blowing. It blows all the time up there so that the little dwarf trees are all standing crooked, bent back by the wind with their branches streaming stiff out behind them like little streamlined ornaments. I took a picture of Barry sitting on one branch that stuck out into space over a drop of hundreds of feet with what looks like the whole western United States spread out behind him. We had a wonderful time, saw deer in the aspens and hiked along the crest, altho at the altitudes it doesn't take long to get tired. Frank and Judy Rossi are great people to have for friends. Our little Model-A would never have made it up that mountain.
I do get off on tangents, don't I? I keep wanting to say that I'm really getting settled here. Things are cheap, except for food you can't grow with irrigation - irritation, Mina called it the other day. "We're going out to play by the irritation ditch." I wonder what would happen if the water started through a leak somewhere, since the ditch banks are almost as high as our flat roof. We'd have to all run out and put our fingers in the dike like the little Dutch boy so we wouldn't be swept away. But there probably isn't that much water in the Rio. What they call a river out here is laughable, a dry crack in the desert, full of tumbleweeds and sticker plants that would grow on solid pavement.
My usual day consists of getting Barry off to work, finding something for Mina to do that will not involve mayhem, washing up breakfast and the usual house chores and then planning whether I will sew on the curtains I'm making for these lovely old casement windows or work on the paint that those morons who lived here before us put all over the stone fireplace, or maybe figure out shopping for the week. Sometimes Barry writes in the back room when there's no work at the paper, and then we go visiting as much as possible or be very quiet so he can think. As long as we can hear him pecking away on the typewriter, we know it's going well. But when it stops, then we are very still, like mice in a belfry. And then in the evening when the heat is dying down and the wind (and sometimes the dust) has stopped, I make supper and wait for Barry. It's pleasant, even though I do think about home often. I am homesick, dear Vaire, more than I thought I would be for green growing things everywhere and rivers full of clear water and rain storms. But I'm glad we're out here too, because I still have nightmares about Bill. He would have to travel across half the continent to get here, and I don't think he has the energy for that. I do feel sorry for him, but I can't excuse him trying to ruin himself and take us along with him. I'm not a pushy woman. I don't push Barry to work so hard, and he does, poor sweet man. But I don't understand a human being tossing away a life like Bill did just because a couple of things haven't gone to suit him. Mina never talks about her daddy now. Barry is filling the job beautifully, playing with her and planning weekend excursions, just being a fine father in every way. He has been working too hard lately tho.
But this is running on terribly! I guess I'm going to get like those farm women Mother used to laugh about who see no one for weeks on end and then talk the arm and leg off of any peddler or unfortunate relative they can catch. I've got to get out and meet more people. You know that was always my failing, waiting for things to happen and people to come to me instead of going out and making my world. I do so badly want to know what is happening to everyone there and if you can possibly at any time come out to visit. I understan the train ride out here on the Santa Fe is spectacular and not all that expensive, and we have lots of room for you to stay here. Just tell Walter that your little sister is languishing in terra incognita (did I spell that right?) and needs your helping hand, in fact, arms, body, mind and all. We do miss you and Anne and Walter so much. Tell Mother we are fine, and don't tell her my pitiful complaining. Give her and Walter and Anne my best love and hugs and kisses all around. I love all of you and think about you much of the time.
Love from Mina and Barry and Me, and from Minals prize new pet, a ghastly creature called a horny toad,
Your Loving Sister,
Renee
She could feel his heart beating, slowing down from their wild love making, and she pressed her ear to his chest just below the dark nipple, listening to the double thuds getting more even, strong, and seeming to retreat back into his body as he relaxed. His hand lay in the hollow of her back where she could feel the fingers moving just a bit as his hands did when he was going to sleep, as if he were playing an invisible piano only he could hear and the music was taking his mind away, bringing the dreams out onto a vast dance floor where they danced and watched their upside down reflections as they seemed to sail across the polished surface, two birds, two dragonflies, over the warm perfect surface. Her body jerked. She realized she had been slipping into a dream, and she didn't want to sleep yet, but to savor the love, the completeness they had at these times: the reason - was it a reason? - for her decision finally to leave Bill. How could she be so coarse? Sex wasn't a reason. It was something people had or they didn't, and she and Barry had it, but it wasn't a reason. She put her face on the pillow beside his shoulder, listened for a moment to his even breathing and decided he was truly asleep. His hand had stopped moving on her back and lay like a sleeping animal, open and unaware on her body. And she felt inside herself, I love him, I love him, I love this man truly, deeply, and that's all. And suddenly she felt tears in her eyes, springing like flowers from the loved, happy-sad earth and blooming in an instant so that she felt both eyes overflow, the tears making a tiny sound on the pillow. Don't be asleep, Barry, she thought, wanting him to be with her and not sailing away in his dark body to some dream she was not a part of. Be with me, sweetheart. That's what he had said long ago, how long? A year? Was it a year? But then there had been so much, such terrible scenes with Bill. And Barry mysteriously appearing that night when it had all seemed bleak and forever so that she knew she would have to be a terrible, tight, held-together woman the rest of her life, and she had decided nothing would change, so she had taken to wearing high collars and expensive lounging suits that she couldn't afford because there was nothing else except Bill, morose and accusing each time she looked at him. Why was she thinking about that now when she was happy and loved and secure at last? She held her breath, hearing the ghost of a noise. Mina? She listened, lifting her head from the pillow, even pushing the hair back from her ears. Nothing. Wait, yes, someone was walking on the kitchen floor. She could hear the little bare smacks when the feet stepped on the linoleum. She disengaged herself from Barry, lifting his arm and putting it on his chest. It would be Mina, but what in the world was she doing up at this time of night? She picked up the alarm clock and held it near the moonlit window: almost one-thirty in the morning. She gathered her nightgown from the floor where it had ended up and slipped it on, moving toward the hallway.
At first Renee could not imagine where the little girl could be, for she was not in the kitchen or dining room, and the dark cavern of the living room was empty. But the front door was open. What a family, she thought, everyone wandering around in the night outside. Maybe it's the influence of the desert song or something. She moved through the gloom toward the door and caught a flicker of movement through the window that opened onto the porch. Mina was crawling into the porch swing, her white nightgown seeming a little ghost all on its own in the dusky porch. Renee stepped to the window, watching her daughter in the swing, wondering if she did this all the time, and what might be wrong that her seven year old daughter would get up and not wake her, get up and wander through the house and curl up on the porch swing in her nightgown. Mina was looking along her arm toward the back door, or was she just generally looking out into the moonlit yard toward the earth wall of the irrigation ditch? The dike, as Renee had called it in her letter to Vaire, the dike we may all have to put our fingers in before the summer is over. Renee stood with her arms folded, watching her daughter. She shivered. Desert nights. What was that from, a movie? Probably a Valentino. Stupid fop, she had never liked him even when she was a silly girl. Mina was watching for something. She kept turning her head to look in particular places. Her mother tried to note what places she was looking: the ditch bank and the big cottonwood this side of it, the side of the house where the patio doors were. Well, that was enough of that. She walked to the front door, pushing it farther open, and stepped out onto the porch in the moonlight.
"Mina, sweetie, what are you doing out here?"
"I'm just resting, Mommy."
"Restlng? Well you've got a perfectly good little bed to rest in, and that's where you should be."
"I thought it might come out, but I guess - well I'm getting cold, Mommy."
Renee had caught the "it" and recognized a cover up. "Mina, what were you thinking you might see out here in the middle of the night?"
"Nothing."
"A little animal that comes out at night?"
"Just a little animal, Mommy. He comes over the ditch bank and I like to watch him. He's my friend."
"Well, you have to come to bed now. All the little animals are going to stay in their holes tonight. So now, come on."
Renee could see the set of resignation in her daughter's shoulders and for just a flash, she remembered her own nighttime exploits on the farm, the time she had been found in the barn with the mother cat and her new kittens after they had looked all over for her and had even called the sheriff. She hugged Mina to her as the little girl went in the door, and then, in an excess of love, picked her daughter up and carried her back to bed, hugging the slender, vital little body, kissing her neck and making her squirm. And she lay for a while on Mina's bed until she was sure her daughter was asleep, and then staggered back to her own bed, where Barry was sprawled across the whole thing and she had to creep into one corner and double her legs up. But she was soon asleep.
***
Barry closed the big fairytale book and held it on his knees while he listened to Mina's last conversation, what she called her "jabbering to sleep."
"Is that why you like the story of 'The Littlest Mermaid,' because she's a girl?" Barry said, his mind elsewhere.
"Yes, because all the knights and heroes are always dumb boys," Mina said from the nest of covers and pillows she made each night to sleep in. Her lovely oval face, framed in its perfectly black, straight hair, looked like a cameo of her mother.
"When can we go on another picnic to the top of the mountain?" she asked, one slender little hand reaching out of her sleep nest to take Barry's hand.
"Well I think we might manage a small picnic this weekend, maybe not all the way to the top, but in the big trees anyway," Barry said, thinking ahead to the day he had coming up. "That's two days from now on Saturday, OK?"
"When is the Big Pussy Cat coming out again?" she said, her voice so muffled he could hardly hear it.
"You should forget about that now, sweetie," Barry said. He turned his head uncomfortably. It was like having some secret disease or being a crook on the side. He leaned over for his goodnight kiss.
She kissed him and then looked at him, her eyes sparkling. "Do you like running at night as much as I do?" she said.
Barry managed to hold his temper. A seven year old child putting him on the spot. "Mina, now stop talking about dreams and go to sleep. Maybe you'll have a good one. I don't want to talk about such things." He realized he was sounding more fierce than he intended to and felt instantly sorry. Mina's head had disappeared under the covers. He turned the light off and walked to the door.
"Daddy?"
"Yes, sweetie?"
"Just one more kiss?"