A Garden of Earthly Delights (36 page)

She drove quickly away, not even glancing back to see the cloud of dust she made and to wonder what they thought of her— frowning, disapproving eyes, waiting for her to get punished the way Sonya had. As she drove she cried silently, feeling the tears run hot down her face. She was thinking of Lowry. Her heart churned inside her at the memory of him. She pictured him, she tried to remember how he talked; her head jerked a little as if in silent conversation with him. Outside, the land flowed by without her noticing it. She did not know which direction she had taken. Whatever road it was, it wasn't the right road; it was some dusty country road that led nowhere. She drove for quite a while, faster and faster, with the tears now burning her eyes and her mouth set sullenly against the pressure that would make her turn the car around and drive back home.

About an hour later she approached a town: FAIRFAX POP. 2500. She had never seen Fairfax before. It looked like Tintern except it was on a hill, jumbled and awkward. She let the car slow down to drift through the town, and she noticed a gas station. It was an old, small building painted green some time ago. There were just two gas pumps, giant ugly things, and the drive was all dirt, bleached pale by the sun. Clara turned into the station.

She sat breathing hard, her heart still pounding. An attendant came out of the little building, hurrying toward her with his head bowed, or with his body shaped in the pretense of hurry. Behind him she caught sight of another man standing in the doorway. Something rushed in her, a sensation of drowning, choking; but the man was a stranger. His height and his slouched shoulders had made her think of Lowry and she hated herself for that.… The attendant hurried around to her and she said sullenly, not caring what he thought of her reddened eyes or windblown hair, “Give me some gas, some expensive gas.” She picked up her purse as if to indicate she had money, then let it fall back on the seat. The attendant was a skinny man in his forties with a dull, freckled face. Clara got out of the car. She let the door swing open. Her heart was still pounding, everything seemed about to tilt around her, and yet she
did not know why—it could not still be on account of Sonya, who was gone forever now, and why should it be because of Lowry? She hated him. She did not give a damn about him.

The sun was hot and bright about her. She walked around the car as if testing her legs. She looked at her bare arms, at her wrists and hands, at the ring that gleamed so darkly in this rich light, and only after a moment did it occur to her that she was doing all this for the man inside the building. She looked over at him. He was just lowering a soft drink bottle from his mouth. She saw him wipe at his mouth with his sleeve, and a smile began to itch at her mouth. He stepped down onto the packed dirt and tapped to check his cigarettes in his pocket, some little ceremonious gesture that meant he was conscious of her, and Clara let her head fall back as if to dry her eyes in the sun or to show off her face. He walked right up to her car and put one foot out against the fender, as if appraising it; then he looked sideways at Clara.

“Somebody's been drivin fast,” he said.

Clara brushed her hair back from her face with both hands. She felt cunning and lazy; what had been wild inside her a few minutes before was now waiting quietly. She said, “You work here or something?”

“Hell, no.”

He finished the bottle of lime pop and turned to toss it back against the building. It struck the side and left a white streak. “What are you doin?” the other man said, up front by the car hood. The man just laughed. Clara smiled and saw him watching her and as he watched she let her lips move slowly back to show her teeth, the way a cat would smile if it could smile. He had dark, damp hair and he wore a pullover shirt with something faded on its front, and blue jeans old and faded with grease; Clara saw that his face was young and impatient. He took hold of the radio antenna of her car and bent it toward him slightly, then let it go. He looked at her. Clara kept on smiling. He wiped his forehead, then his mouth, and his fingers closed into a loose fist while he watched her.

“You ain't from around here, that's for sure. Where're you from?”

“Driving through,” Clara said.

“Where're you goin?”

She lifted one shoulder vaguely and then let it fall. “Somethin happened, maybe?” he said. “You been cryin?”

Clara turned away and said to the gas attendant, “How much is it?” He told her and she reached inside the open window to get her purse, one leg raised from the ground to balance herself, and then she took the dollar bill out and handed it to the man; the other man, the one who had been talking to her, had come up close so that she could see a small white scar almost lost in his eyebrow. She said to him, “If you live outside town and want a ride home, I can drive you.”

She said this so dreamily, staring right at him, that he had no time to let his gaze drop somewhere so that he could think— instead, he said at once, “Fine with me,” and nodded once or twice. Clara ran around the car and got in and he was already beside her, his long legs awkward, smelling of perspiration, glancing sideways at her with the same kind of taut calculated smile she herself had.

She drove down through the town and out from it, out into the country again. “You like living here?” she said to him.

“I'm goin in the Army next month,” he said.

“What if they go in with all them people fighting?” Clara said. She knew only what she overheard from Revere and Judd: fighting in Europe. The young man made a sound that expressed contempt for the war and for her question. “You maybe could get killed,” she said.

She glanced over at him and saw that he was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, and that if he was going to die shortly he would need her now. He was watching her as she drove. His face was damp again, though he'd just wiped it and his shirt was soaked through; on his hard muscular upper arms the sweat looked oil-slick. “I thought you were somebody else, the first sight I had of you,” she said. She spoke softly and coaxingly. He said, stirring as if he were uncomfortable, “Sorry I ain't that man.” “There's no need,” Clara said. “Yes, I am real sorry,” he said. She stopped the car and they sat for a moment, not looking at each other, then they got out of the car and seemed almost to be testing the ground with their feet. He came around to her side, dragging one hand across the hot hood of the car. Right next to the road was a thick woods that was posted.
Clara said, “You think they're going to get the state troopers out if anybody walks in there?” He took her arm and helped her across the ditch. He lifted the barbed wire for her to go under, holding it up as high as he could. Clara ran through and into the woods with her hair loose behind her, feeling something pushed up to suffocate her, almost, in her chest and throat. It kept pushing at her, goading her into a wild feverish smile she turned toward the woods but not toward the man.

He caught up with her and took hold of her as if he had been waiting for this for hours. Clara heard his breath come brokenly. They lay down and he was ready for her so fast that it seemed this must just be another dream, Lowry's face obscured from her while she gripped him around the neck, tensing herself, the cords in her throat getting taut and anxious. “Come deep. Deeper,” Clara said. Then she stopped thinking and abandoned herself to this man, sinking down to that great dark ocean bed where there were no faces or names but only shadowy bodies you reached out to in order to calm yourself; nothing came before and nothing came afterward. She shut her eyes tight and had no need to think of Lowry, who was with her in this stranger's body, and at the end she moved her teeth hard against the bone of his jaw to keep from crying out. Afterward he didn't roll off her but stayed where he was, holding her down as if she were a prize he had won by force, and he kissed her to make up for what they had not done before. His chest was heaving, his body drenched with sweat. Clara brushed his wet hair back off his forehead and framed his face with her hands while she kissed him. She felt as if she were drowning in the heat of his body, in the heat of everything wet and drugged that she could not control or get clear in her mind, and that she loved whoever had come to her like that, she was lost in love and would never get out of it.

When she got back to the house it was early evening. Revere's cousin Judd was playing with the baby in the front yard. Clara saw that he had a weak, vulnerable face and that something in the urgency of his look meant that he had been worried about her. She got out of the car and looked down at her wrinkled dusty dress and
her dirty bare feet, and for no reason at all she set the black hat on her head and came over to meet them. She picked the baby up and kissed him, closing her eyes with gratitude. The very earth before her feet seemed to her solid and transformed; the baby's happiness was her own happiness; her body had not been like this since those days with Lowry. Seeing Judd's look she said, “I got lost somewhere,” and pressed her face against the baby so that she would not have to look at Judd.

“Honey where are you? Swan?”

Clara was working in the side garden and it occurred to her that the boy had been gone for a while. She let the hoe fall. “Swan? Where are you?”

Revere said she fussed over the boy too much and she knew it, but it was partly just loneliness; anyway, she liked to talk, and if Swan wasn't with her she couldn't talk without thinking herself a little crazy, like a few women in the vicinity she could name. She looked around the garden and out toward the orchard, letting her eyes move easily from thing to thing, all her possessions. She had been living here for four years now; she was twenty-one. If she thought of the time behind her, she felt no regret, no doubts at all. All those years when Revere came to visit her and occasionally stay the night were kept here in the look of the land he had gifted her with, the slightly shabby farm with its tilted and moss-specked barns, the wild grass that to Clara was so beautiful, the wildflowers and weeds and bushes sprung out of other bushes like magic—all this was hers.

She tilted her head back to let her hair fall loose. Her hair was warm and thick, too thick for August. Sometimes she wore it pulled back and up, in a great clumsy knot that fell loose all the time and made her feel childish; most of the time she let it fall wild. It was bleached by the summer sun, like her boy's, almost white, a pale gleaming moon-colored blond that seemed to be kin to the burnished tips of certain weeds and the way the sun could slant its light off the tin roof of the old barns. Clara said, “Swan?” without bothering
to raise her voice and went through the garden toward the back of the house. It was a large garden for just a woman to handle, though Revere and Swan could help her. But it was her garden and it bothered her to have someone else working in it. A year ago, before his marriage, Revere's cousin Judd had put in some large-petaled roses for Clara, and in a way she had minded even that—though she had not let on. Now, since his marriage, Judd never came to see her. His wife would not allow it. So it was Clara's garden and no one else's, and when her eyes moved from plant to plant, pausing at each dusty familiar flower and occasional insects she'd flick off with an angry snap of her fingers, a feeling of accomplishment rose up in her. The garden was as much of the world as she wanted because it was all that she could handle, being just Clara, and it was beautiful. She did not want anything else.

Her mother had never had a garden, Clara thought. If her mother were still alive she'd maybe like to sit on the back porch and look at this garden, and be pleased at what her daughter had done.

To Clara it was all transformed by the sunlight that bathed the land every day, changing those old rotting barrels out back and the dilapidated chicken coop and everything her eye might come across into things of beauty. Even the most dwarfed of the pear trees could be beautiful: she only had to look at it with that fierceness of satisfaction that had now become part of her. And if Swan should run back there with the dog, jumping and playing in the grass, she would stand transfixed, as if she were at the threshold of a magic world.

Clara came through the backyard. Revere had bought a few chairs for it from a store in the city—tubed metal, painted bright red (the color Clara had thought she wanted) and glaring like splotches of paint dashed right on the land itself. She paused to look through the back screen door, thinking he might be in the kitchen somewhere. “Swan?” she said. On either side of the back stoop were great lilac bushes banked up close, not in bloom now but heavy with leaves. Over the house elms seemed to be leaning, like people watching Clara, and she thought of how quiet everything would be except for Swan's dog and how the world had
moved back from her—the worry and bother of which old person was sick now in Tintern or what Ginny would do with that boy of hers whose teeth had to be pulled, all of them—all rotted—and who would win the war over in Europe, so far away from her on this land and impressing itself upon her only through the few signs she saw nailed on trees and in town: JOIN NAVY, RED CROSS, WORK AT GARY, WORK AT DETROIT, WORK AT WILLOW RUN, GIVE BLOOD. “Give Blood” made Clara think hard; it was the only sign that got to her. She went into town as much as she wanted now, no one bothered her—most of the men were gone and quite a few of the families, following their men down out of the mountains to work in the defense factories, disappearing. Many old people were left and the mail now was everything to them; they were jealous over one another's letters. The world had suddenly opened up the horizons falling back far beyond the ridge of mountains that had seemed at one time to be the limit of their world. And so nobody cared about Clara now; after four years, she was almost as good as Revere's wife, and so they did not bother her.