Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [91]
He hung from her breast like a ripe fruit ready to fall. His eyes were closed, then open, then closed again. When she detached him, milk bubbled over his chin, and she wiped him off, scolding him for a piggy. He threw up so easily, not like an adult retching and covered with cold sweat. His wasn’t sickness at all, things came up as easily as they went down. It was as if he were still used to the forward and backward flow of his mother’s blood washing his food into him the way the sea washed food into an anemone on a rock. And her blood still remembered him: Was it perhaps his hunger that had awakened her this morning, and not his cry? She hated the thought that he must become a separate, uncomfortable metabolism cursed with effort and choice.
As she spread a dry diaper on her shoulder and hoisted him up, she sent toward Oliver, still watching her, a look that she meant should express her triumph and encouragement. Excelsior! But his eyes shone at her, his face was full of a not-too-patient waiting. Another hunger to be appeased. She felt a dismayed wonder at how strangely nature has made us. She thought she would prefer to remain posed there before him as the idealized figure of protective motherhood, but her skin was prickly with the touch of his eyes as she walked the baby up and down, she felt the pliancy of the uncorseted body under her nightgown, she fully understood the sensuousness of her barefoot walk.
The baby squirmed, and she leaned back to look into his eyes. Dark blue. Did they know her? Of course they did; he smiled. Or was it a gas pain? He lifted his head on its wobbling neck and tried to focus over her shoulder at where he had just been. (That early, the historical perspective.) A great belch burst out of him, his head wobbled with the recoil. “There!” she laughed softly. “Now we’re comfortable.” She took him to the window to show him the morning, and to delay what awaited her when she turned around.
As usual, the casement opened on fog as white and blind as sleep. Beyond the wet shingles whose edge was overflowed by the ghost of a climbing rose, there were no shapes, solidities, directions, or distances. The world as far as she could see it, which was about fifteen feet, was soaking; she breathed something halfway between water-sodden air and air-thinned water. There was a slow, dignified dripping. A geranium leaf pasted to the raised and weathered grain of the sill had condensed in its cup a tiny lens as bright as mercury, in which, moving, she saw her own face tiny as a grass seed. Another face appeared beside it, an arm came around her waist. She shivered.
“Hello, Old Timer,” Oliver said to the baby. He bent to look out the window. “Thick out there.”
“I love it,” Susan said. “In a way, I love it. It scares me a little. It’s as if every morning the world had to create itself all new. Everything’s still to do, the word isn’t yet spoken. It’s like standing in front of a whited block that you have to make into a picture. No matter how many times I watch it happen, I’m never sure it will happen next time. I keep thinking I’m looking into our life, and it’s as vague and unclear as that. And now cement’s going to change everything.”
“I don’t know that cement’s any easier to see through than fog.”
But she was too happy to be teased. They stood, she thought, the quintessential family, looking out from their sanctuary into the vague but hopeful unknown. Undoubtedly she thought of the window they stood at as a magic casement. Couldn’t she hear the perilous seas? It is difficult to imagine Grandmother having to respond to the great moments of her life without all that poetry that she and Augusta had read together.
A drop as heavy as a ball bearing fell on the wet shingles. Beyond the ghostly edge of the roof there were only the faintest, tentative charcoal lines of form-suggested roses, vague mounds of shrubs down below, a tall dimness that would become a tree. From right, left, above, below, so pervasive that it seemed to tremble in the sill under her hand, she heard the Santa Cruz sound, at once laboring and indolent, a sound that both threatened and soothed, that could not make up its mind whether to become clearly what it was, or to go on muttering as formlessly as summer thunder too lazy for lightning.