NOVEMBER 20, 2011
She lies in her bed, the radiator ticking near her feet, and watches the leaves, lit by pale moonlight, fall from the maple outside her window. It’s late evening, a cold draft leaking from the cracks around the single-pane windows. She doesn’t know what year it is. Time, impossibly tangled. The house suddenly feels thin-walled: all bone. Stephen has moved out, she thinks, and it is just Bonnie and Hazel here in the old house at the back of the field.
“Bonnie,” she calls out. But there is no answer.
Bonnie: thin dark hair, thin brown limbs. That god-awful music leaking from under the door of her room too many hours of the day. Bonnie asking a day ago, or was it two, where and who her father is, and Hazel saying, “You have no father. Get ready for school.”
The slam of pine door on pinewood frame.
A lifetime spent taking care of others, Hazel thinks. And now this moonlight, and this bed, and this house, too cold even with the radiators on. Hazel pulls the sheets off, restless, and looks down at her threadbare nightgown, her pale legs, her wide feet, in this first-floor bedroom she slept in as a child, and as a married wife, and since then, alone. She should draw the covers up. Close her eyes. Sleep. Instead she stands and undoes the buttons of her gown, slips it off her shoulders. She goes to the wall, feels for the light switch and flicks it on.
There she is. Bathed in light in the mirror above her dresser. Her ninety-year-old face. An apple doll, ravaged and dried, her hair white flames around it. The sagging fruits of her breasts, barely filling the loose polyester of her bra.
The first time Lex loved her it was August. A dance at the town hall. Not the man her father would have chosen for her: a fiddle player, quiet, aloof, magnetic, from a poor family on the edge of town. Not a farmer. Startling green eyes.
It was Hazel who asked him to dance, not the other way around.
He turned, grinned, eyes glinting with curiosity, and said, “Sure.”
Why him? She has wondered for fifty years now. The dance floor was his place, his river, his whole body shifting in and out of light. And then her own body suddenly spinning, head thrown back, hands gripped tightly to his shoulders, his chest against her chest. Why him? She could have chosen so many others.
She reaches behind her back and unclasps the bra. Lets it fall to the floor. A few snowflakes falling outside her window. Her small breasts hanging there.
He loved them in that field. Held them. Kissed them. Treated them like they were some kind of jewel, some unfathomable treasure.
She closes her eyes. Lex Starkweather. Fields. Frost-burnt grapes. Hazel brings her hands to those breasts of hers.
Reaches her left hand lower. And there it is. That old sharp burn.
When was I ever really loved? she thinks. When was I ever really loved.