Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [254]
I had only made the sign of the cross. How many times lately has the future perfect been framed in geodesic domes?
“They’ve got chickens that roost in the trees and lay eggs under the porch,” Shelly said. “None of this scientific egg culture that never lets a hen set foot to ground in her whole life. It’s obscene, the way they keep them on chicken wire. They got there too late to plant a garden, but they’re putting in berry bushes, and they’re going to plow a patch for winter wheat. They’ll grind their own wheat and corn. Can you see me with a metate between my knees?”
She laughed her hoarse laugh, rocking back and forth. Ohne Büstenhalter. Her breasts were very live under her thin pullover, her erect nipples made dents and dimples, appeared and disappeared again as flesh met cloth. Every now and then, in her careless unconscious (is it?) way, she makes me aware that I am only fifty-eight years old, not as old as I look, not old enough to have lost everything else when I lost my leg. I felt a hot erection rising from my mutilated lap, and fumbled my sweater over myself, though it was not cool on the porch. Maybe she noticed, maybe she understood. She stretched in her wicker chair and reached her arms over her head, yawning, with her eyes shut. The other eyes looked at me boldly from her expanded chest.
Her arms fell, she flopped back. “I don’t know,” she said almost crossly. “You’re skeptical. But it was sort of good–no poisons, no chemicals, no gadgets. Healthy, sort of. Fun. All the time I was up there I kept thinking it was the way it must have felt to your grandmother in Boise Canyon, when they were doing everything for themselves and making something new.”
“Not new,” I said. “Ancient. But fun, I believe it. ”
Shelly threw the broken rubber band in the wastebasket by the wall. “Well, what do I do? Should I try it up there–I know what you’ll say–or should I tell him no dice and go back and finish my stupid degree and enter a teaching intern program and start grinding wild life through the education machine?”
“There’s another alternative,” I said. “You could go on doing what you’ve been doing. Thousands of letters still to go, years and years of them. Don’t miss tomorrow’s exciting episode.”
At certain times her eyes, wide and gray, get smoky and warm. They went that way then. She said, smiling, “Would you keep me on?”
“I’d like it very much.”
“I’d like it too. I’ve really enjoyed working for you. Only . . .”
“Only,” I said. I had subsided, that fleeting foolish dream was gone. “O.K. You know what you want to do.”
“I wish to hell I did.” She got up and walked, pushing chairs, adjusting things on tables. “I don’t know–I think I’ve got to get out. There’s nothing here, this is only a pause, sort of. The only lively times I have are at work, talking to you. You know–” She stopped, looking at me with her head bent. “Why couldn’t I come down from San Juan–” She looked at me again. “No. You wouldn’t like that.”
“No,” I said, “I guess I wouldn’t.”
She sighed, she looked at me with those wide gray smoky eyes overflowing with female, troubling warmth. “What’ll you do?”
“What I’m doing now. Not so pleasantly, not so fast.”
“Can you manage?”
“Of course.”
“I know you don’t think I should go live with Larry in his commune.”
Live with half a dozen fellows in their commune, I felt like saying. Be on service to the community. No, I don’t think you should. Aloud I said, “You’ll have to excuse me, Shelly. All I said was that I wouldn’t want to. How do I know what you should do? You’ll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you’re very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.”
“Yeah,” she said vaguely. “I suppose.” Her smile erupted, her spread hand clawed back the hanging hair. “Tell me something.”
“If I know the answer.”
“You said this kind of commune will be full of aggressively unfeminine and aggressively female women. Which am I?”
But I evaded that one.