Roadwalkers
Page 26
The absences involved other women. I knew that, had expected that, though I could not tell you why. Perhaps, as he often said, I just knew him very well. The existence of other women, their presence or absence, their comings and goings, made no difference. I was not interested in those other beds.
Mike was very discreet. Only once did his other life brush against mine.
She was the receptionist at one of the clinics. I had talked to her many times on the phone and recognized her voice. She was light brown-skinned, small and plump, and dressed, nurse-like, all in white. Standing there at my door—she would not come inside, refused my invitation with a firm shake of the head—she told me that she loved Mike and wanted to marry him.
Did she now? Well, I had no objections. None at all.
She looked shocked.
“Did you think I would scream or faint? How silly of you.”
Now she looked disbelieving.
“I’ll give him a divorce anytime he wants. You can tell him that for me.”
And that was exactly what the foolish woman did: rushed back to the clinic and waited breathlessly for Mike to finish his morning rounds.
I went about my usual duties at the workrooms and the shops. At noon two dozen pink roses came for me. No card.
“How beautiful.” My mother flicked a finger at the soft petals. “That would be a good color in cotton.”
“Yes,” I said.
Mike brought me a present that evening, a heavy gold link bracelet in a blue-and-white Tiffany box. “How beautiful,” I said, echoing my mother.
“I’m embarrassed.” Mike shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I didn’t ever mean for this to happen.”
“Of course you didn’t.” I twirled the bracelet around my wrist. “Would you mind, no more presents? I’d rather save the money and spend it on one of our trips.”
When I next called him at the clinic, a few days later, a different voice answered.
As for me, my affairs have been quiet, careful, gratifyingly calm. And always of short duration. You see, sex is not a demanding drive for this prostitute’s daughter—the irony of that is not lost on me. Since my marriage I have had exactly five lovers, four men and a woman. I have no one now. The emotional silence is quite pleasant.
We are well suited, Mike and I, comfortable and secure in our understanding of each other.…And completely free. Until last month we did not even own a home. We lived in a series of rented houses and apartments. In a way it was rather like my childhood, though these places were infinitely nicer, even luxurious, with their pools and Jacuzzis and marble foyers and granite-topped kitchen counters.
“I want my own house,” Mike said emphatically every year or so. “I want to scrape paint and put fertilizer on the lawn. I want to hang tools on the garage wall, lots of tools, so that it looks like an ad for Black and Decker. I want to fix leaky pipes and build new shelves.”
“You don’t know how to do any of that,” I reminded him.
“I’ll learn.”
So I looked for a house. Indeed I did. Over the years I called dozens of real estate agents, saw hundreds of properties. Nothing. I could not even find a rental house I liked enough to live in for more than a few years.
For a long time Mike found my restlessness very amusing. He told our friends: “My wife loves to move. She changes houses the way other people change cars. We move so often that sometimes I have trouble remembering the way home.”
But I didn’t like to move. No. I hated the change, the confusion. It was just that after a short while I knew everything about a house. The shapes of the door handles, the folds of the curtains, the neat lines of dishes in the cupboards. I could imitate the sounds the dishwasher made as it went through its cycles. I had memorized the washing machine’s hisses and whines. I had timed the dryer’s thumps. I could predict the pattern of leaf shadows on the windows at night.
And so we moved.
Eventually Mike grew tired of such eccentricity. Without consulting me, he bought a house—found it, inspected it, bargained over the price, talked to the bankers, and handed me the keys on a large brass key ring.
“We now have a permanent abode, my love. We are no longer nomads. This is our home and our castle.”
A low white-painted brick house.
“I hope you will be happy here,” he said formally. “I want you to be happy.”
Behind the house a lawn sloped sharply down to a small slow-moving creek.
“What’s that?” There seemed to be something swimming, something moving the water.
“Where?” Mike was testing the lawn carefully with his finger. “Sod webworms, we need to spray,” he said knowledgeably. “What’s where?”
“There.” As I pointed, a small round shape climbed into clear view on a muddy log. “Now I can see. It’s a turtle.”
“Yes. Of course. Turtles. Specially for you, my love. I trust you still like them. I mean, they aren’t something you’ve outgrown, I hope?”
“Turtles?”
“Back in college you were always talking about watching snapping turtles in the campus lakes.…These aren’t snappers, of course, just plain old red sliders, but they’ll have to do.”
“I didn’t know you’d remember,” I said uncertainly. “I didn’t expect you to. It was a long time ago.”
“I remember everything you said. Word for word, mostly.”
We both hesitated, silent, embarrassed by this sudden unexpected acknowledgment of love.
There was, at that moment, something between us, something that hovered in the air between us. A thread, frail, thin, to be measured in millimeters, but there nonetheless. For that one instant, it seemed I could see it—fine as a spider’s web, shimmering with all the colors of crystal.
Then it was gone. We smiled at each other cautiously, warily, as we walked back across the worm-infested lawn.
This time I did not bring with me my carefully preserved basket of toys. I unwrapped it gently, considered seriously, and threw it away. The faint childhood odors now reminded me of graves and cemeteries.
And so alone I came into my kingdom. My portion, neither more nor less.
A Biography of Shirley Ann Grau
A Biography of Shirley Ann Grau
Shirley Ann Grau is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose novels are celebrated for their beautifully drawn portraits of the American South and its turbulent recent past.
Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. Grau returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950. She initially planned to continue into graduate school, but soon found she was far more interested in writing than in scholarship.
Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly The New Mexico Review. Soon another was printed in The New Yorker. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection, The Black Prince, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention.
That same year, Grau married James Fiebleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane. For many years, they split time between New Orleans in winter and Martha’s Vineyard in summer. While starting a family (Grau and Fiebleman had four children), the author completed her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), a story of feuding families on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The House on Coliseum Street (1961) followed, with an unflinching depiction of a young woman’s life in New Orleans. Her next novel, Keepers of the House (1964), directly confronted one of the most urgent social issues of the time. Considered Grau’s masterpiece, it chronicles a family of Alabama landowners over the course of more than a century. Its sophisticated, unsparing look at race relations in the Deep South garnered Grau a Pulitzer Prize.
Though she taught occasionally—including creative writing courses at the University of New Orleans—Grau focused on
her writing career. Her novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history. The Condor Passes (1971) celebrates New Orleans even as it reveals some of the city’s worst sides, as experienced by one of its wealthiest families. Roadwalkers (1994), Grau’s last published novel, follows a group of orphaned African-American children as they scrape by during the Great Depression.
In addition to writing, Grau enthusiastically pursues her loves of travel, sailing, dogs, books, and music. She continues to split her time between New Orleans and Massachusetts, and maintains an active presence in the New Orleans literary community.
Grau’s lilac-covered cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, where she has worked on all of her books “while the field mice played in the walls and scuttled across the floors, while occasional deer scratched themselves on the outside corners,” as she describes it.
A 1955 announcement for The Black Prince featuring glowing reviews of Grau’s short story collection. “No book is ever as exciting as the first. I found this in my flood-wrecked house in New Orleans, dried it out with a hair dryer,” says Grau.
Grau and her daughter in Alaska, while on a cruise in 1992.
Grau at work in a fishing camp on the northern coast of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, in 1997. She finds the marshes and swamps on the Gulf Coast “endlessly interesting, with their own terrible beauty.”
Grau’s German Shepherd, Yoshi, the last of a line that have been in Grau’s family since her childhood. He acts as her writing companion, sitting beside her while she works—“a kind of silent supervisor,” notes Grau.
Grau’s view of the beach on Martha’s Vineyard. She describes the experience of sitting on the sand while watching the sunrise as “a comforting feeling of belonging, of cosmic happiness if you will.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A portion of this novel was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. as the short story “The Beginning” from Nine Women, copyright © 1985 by Shirley Ann Grau.
copyright © by 1994 by Shirley Ann Grau
cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-4532-4725-9
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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