A Map of the World Read Online Free
clothes were separating from my body and flapping off in the wind.
When June came each year I hung my uniform in the back of the closet. Every Monday in the summer my neighbor Theresa and I tookturns caring for all of our children. Theresa also had two daughters, each a year younger than Emma and Claire. When it was Theresa’s turn to baby-sit I dropped the girls up at the subdivision and ran home as fast as I could. I refused to see the ruins of my housekeeping: the ruptured, the overripe, the filthy. I did not hear Howard’s call for assistance. I used to take the tape player out on the upstairs porch and pull down the shades, and then I’d dance to the Hungarian, Bulgarian, Scandinavian, and Rumanian music I had recorded in high school. I would bow to myself and curtsey, and put my hands on my imaginary partner’s shoulders. I could dance for hours and not notice that any time had passed, feeling the happiness all the way up my throat, and afterward I could go and so peacefully drive tractor or pull weeds or hand the appropriate tool to Howard as he lay prostrate under some great broken machine.
Out of the twenty families in the subdivision on the hill, Dan and Theresa Collins were my only friends. I had an intimacy with Theresa that I had never expected to have with anyone. I could walk in the door at her house and call, “Yoo-hoo,” just the way Laura Petrie and her popeyed Millie used to do back in the Golden Age. I always took care to wipe my feet and check my hands and fingernails. When I was sure I was clean I put the copper kettle on for coffee and sat down at the oiled butcher-block table to wait. There were equal measures of comfort and amusement in our communications; I think it is safe to say that we delighted in one another. She used to laugh at my stories until she wept, and I tried to take her sound advice to heart. The quality of our friendship seemed to me to be heaven-sent, something that I had received not in direct relation to any deed performed. At first I thought it a windfall, free of charge. “Make yourself at home,” Theresa always used to sing out from upstairs. Like a nervous suitor her saying so every time made me wonder if the instruction on some day might suddenly change.
On that Monday morning last summer it was my turn to watch the children. Just as Theresa arrived in the driveway with her girls, Audrey and Lizzy, Emma ran into the bathroom and slammed the door. “Don’t let anyone come in here while I’m on the toilet,” she called.
I didn’t answer.
“DON’T YOU DARE LET ANYONE COME IN. DO YOU HEAR?”
Theresa opened the screen door with her foot and came into the kitchen with her arms full of clothes, and the diaper bag, and her two-year-old Lizzy, and a box of pea pods. “Can you use any of this?” she asked. “I’m under here, I really am.”
Theresa had a round face framed by black curls, octagonal tortoise-shell glasses, and blue eyes with lashes so long and dense and curly they looked as if they scraped against her lenses when she blinked. Her glasses were often halfway down her nose, pushed by the sheer force of her eyelashes. Her unadulterated Irish Catholic skin was faintly freckled and almost translucent across her cheeks. She had dimples and native sweetness which miraculously had not been tempered by her work for social service agencies. She grew up in Prairie Junction when there were seven working dairy farms surrounding the village, went off to seek her fortune as a therapist in Chicago, and then came home to the subdivision called Vermont Acres. Howard and I used to be privately scornful of their development that has a creaking, rough-hewn covered bridge at the main entrance and streets that are all named after New England states.
“Here are the diapers and the swimming suits, and a change of clothes, and Lizzy’s blanket and Audrey’s doll. These clothes are just some odds and ends my mother got at a rummage sale. You can use the peas, can’t
When June came each year I hung my uniform in the back of the closet. Every Monday in the summer my neighbor Theresa and I tookturns caring for all of our children. Theresa also had two daughters, each a year younger than Emma and Claire. When it was Theresa’s turn to baby-sit I dropped the girls up at the subdivision and ran home as fast as I could. I refused to see the ruins of my housekeeping: the ruptured, the overripe, the filthy. I did not hear Howard’s call for assistance. I used to take the tape player out on the upstairs porch and pull down the shades, and then I’d dance to the Hungarian, Bulgarian, Scandinavian, and Rumanian music I had recorded in high school. I would bow to myself and curtsey, and put my hands on my imaginary partner’s shoulders. I could dance for hours and not notice that any time had passed, feeling the happiness all the way up my throat, and afterward I could go and so peacefully drive tractor or pull weeds or hand the appropriate tool to Howard as he lay prostrate under some great broken machine.
Out of the twenty families in the subdivision on the hill, Dan and Theresa Collins were my only friends. I had an intimacy with Theresa that I had never expected to have with anyone. I could walk in the door at her house and call, “Yoo-hoo,” just the way Laura Petrie and her popeyed Millie used to do back in the Golden Age. I always took care to wipe my feet and check my hands and fingernails. When I was sure I was clean I put the copper kettle on for coffee and sat down at the oiled butcher-block table to wait. There were equal measures of comfort and amusement in our communications; I think it is safe to say that we delighted in one another. She used to laugh at my stories until she wept, and I tried to take her sound advice to heart. The quality of our friendship seemed to me to be heaven-sent, something that I had received not in direct relation to any deed performed. At first I thought it a windfall, free of charge. “Make yourself at home,” Theresa always used to sing out from upstairs. Like a nervous suitor her saying so every time made me wonder if the instruction on some day might suddenly change.
On that Monday morning last summer it was my turn to watch the children. Just as Theresa arrived in the driveway with her girls, Audrey and Lizzy, Emma ran into the bathroom and slammed the door. “Don’t let anyone come in here while I’m on the toilet,” she called.
I didn’t answer.
“DON’T YOU DARE LET ANYONE COME IN. DO YOU HEAR?”
Theresa opened the screen door with her foot and came into the kitchen with her arms full of clothes, and the diaper bag, and her two-year-old Lizzy, and a box of pea pods. “Can you use any of this?” she asked. “I’m under here, I really am.”
Theresa had a round face framed by black curls, octagonal tortoise-shell glasses, and blue eyes with lashes so long and dense and curly they looked as if they scraped against her lenses when she blinked. Her glasses were often halfway down her nose, pushed by the sheer force of her eyelashes. Her unadulterated Irish Catholic skin was faintly freckled and almost translucent across her cheeks. She had dimples and native sweetness which miraculously had not been tempered by her work for social service agencies. She grew up in Prairie Junction when there were seven working dairy farms surrounding the village, went off to seek her fortune as a therapist in Chicago, and then came home to the subdivision called Vermont Acres. Howard and I used to be privately scornful of their development that has a creaking, rough-hewn covered bridge at the main entrance and streets that are all named after New England states.
“Here are the diapers and the swimming suits, and a change of clothes, and Lizzy’s blanket and Audrey’s doll. These clothes are just some odds and ends my mother got at a rummage sale. You can use the peas, can’t
Readers choose
Marie Houzelle
Thomas Greanias
C. Dulaney
Dulcinea Norton-Smith
Joann Swanson
Cheyenne McCray
Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Jade Lee
Leta Serafim
Kelsey Charisma