Marry or Burn (37 page)

“No evidence for that,” said Shelley. Diana stopped unpacking and they faced each other.

“God damn it,” Diana said.

“Well, goodnight,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

“'Night,” Shelley said.

I climbed into the tall bed. I wished Eddie were there. I thought about what the chances were that he would find some transportation and get there. The room was hot and I threw off the fat comforter that he would have rolled himself up in, not caring that it was August.

How weak love was, dying of the weight of the covers if you let it. How weak it was at its birth. Eyelashes, hands on a piano. Could these become my father's mourning, Gerda's ax?

The wind had come up again, pine cones were banging on the tin roof and rolling off. I sat and looked out the window, which was so close I could have leaned my head on the glass. I could
see Shelley and Diana's cabin. The light was already out. I could see the tree house. I had imagined Shelley climbing up there drunk and desperate. But I was wrong, she had not done that. It could be Diana had not meant, after all, to dare her to do it. Mr. and Mrs. Burney were out there. She was winding greenery onto the arch, he was shoveling ashes into a bucket. She still had on the apron and it was flying up. She hunched over, and I thought she was sinking her face in her hands because of his day of drunken gallantries and the harsh way he had spoken to her, when she was guilty only of trying to extract a kind of perfection from the given materials, for our sakes. For the sake of a wedding, of all things. But she was only pushing the hair out of her eyes and calling some question to him, while he leaned on the spade a little distance away, facing the trees.

VALERIE TRUEBLOOD grew up in Virginia, in then-rural Loudoun County. Before moving to the Northwest, she worked as a caseworker in Chicago and at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She has published essays, short stories and poems, as well as articles about nuclear weapons, and has worked for many years in the peace movement. She is a contributing editor to
The American Poetry Review
, and a co-trustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Trust. Her novel
Seven Loves
was selected for Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program. She lives with her husband Richard Rapport in Seattle and the Methow Valley. They have one son and have been married for thirty-eight years.

Copyright © 2010 by Valerie Trueblood. All rights reserved under International and

Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

The passage about trees read aloud by Diana in “Beloved, You Looked into Space” is from Donald Culross Peattie's
A Natural History of North American Trees
, Vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953).

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Trueblood, Valerie.
Marry or burn : stories / by Valerie Trueblood.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-582-43858-0

1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Love-hate relationships—Fiction. 4. Desire—Fiction. 5. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 6. Love stories, American. 7. Domestic fiction, American. I. Title.

 

PS3620.R84M37 2010
813'.6—dc22
2010017803

 

 

 

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