Various Miracles Read Online Free

tour bus and goes and goes, and that’s all there is to it. She doesn’t know if she’sgoing north or south or east or west. What does it matter? She’s having a grand time. And she’s reassured, always, by the sameness of the world. She’s never heard the word
commonality
, but is nevertheless fused with its sense. In Japan she was made as happy to see carrots and lettuce growing in the fields as she was to see sunlight, years earlier, pouring into the streets of New York City. Everywhere she’s been she’s seen people eating and sleeping and working and making things with their hands and urging things to grow. There have been cats and dogs, fences and bicycles and telephone poles, and objects to buy and take care of; it is amazing, she thinks, that she can understand so much of the world and that it comes to her as easily as bars of music floating out of a radio.
    Her sisters have long forgotten about her wild days. Now the three of them love to sit on tour buses and chatter away about old friends and family members, their stern father and their mother who never once took their part against him. Muriel carries on about her children (a son in California and a daughter in Toronto) and she brings along snaps of her grandchildren to pass round. Em has retired from school teaching and is a volunteer in the Boissevain Local History Museum to which she has donated several family mementos: her father’s old carved pipe and her mother’s wedding veil and, in a separate case, for all the world to see, a white cotton garment labeled “Girlie Fergus’s Underdrawers, handmade, trimmed with lace, circa 1918.” If Mrs. Turner knew the word
irony
she would relish this. Even without knowing the word irony, she relishes it.
    The professor from Massachusetts has won an important international award for his book of poems; translation rights have been sold to a number of foreign publishers; and recently his picture appeared in the
New York Times
, along with alengthy quotation from “A Day At The Golden Pavilion.” How providential, some will think, that Mrs. Turner doesn’t read the
New York Times
or attend poetry readings, for it might injure her deeply to know how she appears in certain people’s eyes, but then there are so many things she doesn’t know.
    In the summer as she cuts the grass, to and fro, to and fro, she waves to everyone she sees. She waves to the high school girls who timidly wave back. She hollers hello to Sally and Roy Sascher and asks them how their garden is coming on. She cannot imagine that anyone would wish her harm. All she’s done is live her life. The green grass flies up in the air, a buoyant cloud swirling about her head. Oh, what a sight is Mrs. Turner cutting her grass and how, like an ornament, she shines.

Accidents

    AT HOME MY WIFE IS MODEST . She dresses herself in the morning with amazing speed. There is a flashing of bath towel across the fast frame of her flesh, and then,
voilà
, she is standing there in her pressed suit, muttering to herself and rummaging in her bag for subway tokens. She never eats breakfast at home.
    But the minute we hit the French coast—we stay in a vacation flat owned by my wife’s brother-in-law—there she is, on the balcony with her bare breasts rising up to the sun. And she has breakfasted, and so have I, on three cups of coffee and a buttered croissant.
    Her breasts have remained younger than the rest of her body. When I see her rub them with oil and point them toward the fierce sunlight, I think of the Zubaran painting in the museum at Montpellier which shows a young and rather daft-looking St. Agatha cheerfully holding out a platter on which her two severed breasts are arranged, ordinary and bloodless as jam pastries.
    One morning something odd happened to my wife. She was sitting on the balcony working on her new translation of Valéry’s early poems and she had a cup of coffee before her. I should explain that the dishes and cutlery and cooking