Small Ceremonies Read Online Free Page A

to the top with brand new hanks of wool, still with their little circular bands around them. I reached in and touched them. Blue, red, yellow, green; fat four-ounce bundles in all colors. Eight of them. Lying on their sides in Martin’s drawer. Wool.
    It couldn’t be for me. I hate knitting and detest crocheting. For Meredith perhaps? An early Christmas present? But she hadn’t knitted anything since Brownies, six years ago, and had never expressed any interest in taking it up again.
    Frieda? Frieda who comes to clean out the house on Wednesday? She knits, and it is just possible, I thought, that it was hers. Absurd though. She never goes in Martin’s desk, for one thing. And what reason would she have to stash all this lunatic wool in his drawer anyway? Richard? Out of the question. What would he be doing with wool? It must be Martin’s. For his mother, maybe; she loves knitting. He might have seen it on sale and bought it for her, although it seemed odd he hadn’t mentioned it to me. I’ll ask him tonight, I thought.
    But that night Martin was at a meeting, and I was asleep when he came home. The next day I forgot. And the next. Whenever it pops into my mind, he isn’t around. And when he is, something makes me stumble and hesitate as though I were afraid of the reply. I still haven’t asked him, but this morning I looked in the drawer to see if it was still there. It was all in place, all eight bundles; nothing had been touched. I must ask Martin about it.
    As Meredith grows up I look at her and think, who does she remind me of? A shaded gesture, a position struck, or something curious she might say will touch off a shock of recognition in me, but I can never think who it is she is like.
    I flip through my relatives – like flashcards. My mother. No, no, no. My sister Charleen? No. Charleen, for all her sensitivity, has a core of detachment. Aunt Liddy? Sometimes I am quite sure it is my old aunt. But no. Auntie’s fragility is neurotic, not natural like Meredith’s. Who else?
    She has changed in the last year, is romantic and realistic in violent turns. Now she is reading Furlong Eberhardt’s new book about the prairies. While she reads, her hands grip the cover so hard that the bones of her hands stand up, whey-white. Her eyes float in a concerned sweep over the pages, her forehead puzzled. It’s painful to watch her; she shouldn’t invest so much of herself in anything as ephemeral as a book; it is criminal to care that much.
    Like my family she is dark, but unlike us she has a delicious water-color softness, and if she were braver she would be beautiful. She is as tall as I am but she has been spared the wide, country shoulders; there are some blessings.
    It is an irony, the sort I relish, that I who am a biographer and delight in sorting out personalities, can’t even draw a circle around my own daughter’s. Last night at the table, just as she was cutting into a baked potato, she raised her eyes, exceptionally sober even for her, and answered some trivial question Martin had asked her. The space between the movement of her hand and the upward angle of her eyes opened up, and I almost had it.
    Then it slipped away.
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    Last night Martin and I went to a play. It was one of Shaw’s early ones, written before he turned drama into social propaganda. The slimmest of drawingroom debacles, it was a zany sandwich of socialism and pie-in-the-eye, daft but with brisk touches of irreverence. And the heroes were real heroes, the way they should be, and the heroines were even better. The whole evening was a confection, a joy.
    During the intermission we stood in the foyer chatting with Furlong Eberhardt and his mother, our delight in the play surfacing on our lips like crystals of sugar. Mrs. Eberhardt, as broad-breasted as one of the Shavian heroines, encircled us with her peculiar clove-flavored embrace. A big woman, she is mauve to the bone;