Raw Silk (9781480463318) Read Online Free Page A

were Westerners; we were Law-Abiding; we had Ideas. If there was any class-consciousness in my consciousness then, I’d have to say we considered ourselves the elite: morally, because we drank no alcohol; physically, because we lived in seasonless sun; mentally, because my mother liked pictures and went on purpose to museums to look at them. I felt none of the gulf that I should have felt in England, as the daughter of a laborer, between myself and the great universities, the great careers. It was common enough to drive two hundred miles to a square dance. I saw no reason I shouldn’t travel at the same offhand speed over the social highways of America. I was ambitious, I suppose, but I didn’t know it was ambition. Ambition was as usual in our town as bread.
    Half the reason, Oliver said, that I wouldn’t send my daughter to an expensive school, was that I could recognize it as an ambition my mother might have had. I lost that round.
    In fact, I lost. The arguments wore me down; they tired me essentially; they aged me. When Oliver started to attack through Jill, tempting her with visions of St. Margaret’s horseback rides, I was scared. Oliver’s fairer than that. I saw that he wasn’t going to give in, and if I didn’t either, this quarrel was going to lurch right on through Jill’s adolescence. I considered the alternative, of taking Jill and leaving him. When I did that, I came up against the blunt probability that I love my husband. It came to me, after eleven years, as a nasty shock.
    Like every child of the forties brought up on Barbara Stanwyck and Tyrone Power, my parents’ marriage had seemed a shabby affair to me. I could have sat out the bickering and the periods of pointless martyrdom, but when my mother smiled up seraphically out of that bramble patch and assured me that my father was the dearest thing on earth to her, I was choked with hot derision. I discovered now, her dead and me at thirty-two, that I owed her a profound apology. If I once wanted emotion as apocalypse, what I have is as gnarled and stunted as a tree in chalk, but it isn’t dead. I’m not suited to Oliver. I don’t agree with him and I don’t forgive him. He enters things, he takes them at the value they take themselves, and I pull against it, arrogant and didactic. He uses words like “finalize” that make me squirm in my chair, and I use words like “codswallop” that make him squirm in his. I’m clumsy too—cats leap on windowsills to avoid me—whereas Oliver can lounge convincingly in French Provincial. So we grate each other, our corners get rubbed off. But when he goes away for the weekend I go, at least once, to the medicine cabinet, to smell his shaving things.
    It’s harassing, but it’s organic; it’s a peculiar place, it’s home. I discovered that for eleven years I’d been living as if it were temporary. I’m not so naïve that I haven’t noticed how much, like everybody else, we concern ourselves with things and taxes. I don’t run everywhere as I used to, and Oliver’s humor is not so fresh. But I thought that was age, and age doesn’t trouble me overmuch. I know that we’ve chosen compromises, but no choice has seemed to lead inevitably to another. I thought we could go this direction but keep our essential selves intact, and turn off any side road that took our fancy. There are two thousand people the work of whose hands depends on Oliver’s decisions, there are women in Stuttgart and Carmarthenshire out shopping in my cherry blossoms, we have textile stock and two cars and two careers and a daughter—we’ve even planted asparagus—and all this time I’ve believed we would some day slough the lot of it to discover ourselves in peace and passion. Doing what, I don’t know: weaving grass mats in the Caribbean. And now we stand facing each other and I see we have discovered ourselves. We’re right about each other. Oliver does want his daughter finished, and I do want to sneer at a life I