Free The Maytrees by Annie Dillard Page A

eighteen years Lou’s junior. Lou missed having her around. Everyone else was so old. Last summer this Jane—with her professor parents and Deary and Reevadare—had cooled with the Maytrees waist-deep in the bay behind their house. Jane complained about The Golden Bowl ; Maytree had put her on it. —You’ll get used to James, he told her. —Not sureI want to. She wore her glasses into the water; a clothespin held back her hair. Off-season she was in Columbia’s graduate program in comp lit.
     
    One July morning, cold stirred Lou. The tide had withdrawn to the Azores. Wind through the windows smelled of mullions’ dust. She knew Maytree had loved her. The perception was correct; only her inference was false. What should Maytree have done? Stayed in harness? She just had not known she was harness. Nor presumably does baitfish consider itself baitfish. Nor did she know how long she had been harness.
    Why surprise? She remembered what the scorpion said to the camel: You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me. To marry me. What was Maytree? A man in love. Who else would a woman marry? Among Maytree’s many early loves, both the rancher and the teacher lasted over two years. Is all fair? Is love blind? There must be some precept she could have heeded. On the beach below, the pram’s red mooring buoy chained to a cement plug lay on mud. All over New England, it rained three days out of nine. She hoped Deary was worth it.
    Downstairs she cracked kindling on her knee and boiled the kettle. Why sadder but wiser? Why not happier and wiser? What else could wisdom be? She drank coffee black. She would not fall apart.
    She enjoyed benefits. Maytree no longer interrupted her to read aloud from his book. He never stopped doing it, though he knew it drove her crazy. And he never stopped talking. Atlast she had time to think. Plus she had his dune shack now, that Maytree’s father built near the coast guard station. And she could eat crackers in bed.
    She sorted and soaked beans; she would bake cornbread at five. What was it she wanted to think about? Here it was, all she ever wanted: a free mind. She wanted to figure out. With which unknown should she begin? Why are we here, we four billion equals who seem significant to ourselves alone? She rejected religion. She knew Christianity stressed the Ten Commandments, Jesus Christ as the only son of God who walked on water and rose up after dying on the cross, the Good Samaritan, and cleanliness is next to godliness. Buddhism and Taoism could handle all those galaxies, but Taoism was self-evident—although it kept slipping her mind—and Buddhism made you just sit there. Judaism wanted her like a hole in the head. And religions all said—early or late—that holiness was within. Either they were crazy or she was. She had looked long ago and learned: not within her. It was fearsome down there, a crusty cast-iron pot. Within she was empty. She would never poke around in those terrors and wastes again, so help her God. Provincetown was better. She witnessed the autarchy of the skies.
    —I have to blame Deary, Reevadare Weaver confided as though it cost her. Reevadare, wearing the first djellaba anyone had seen, held forth in her garden. Hazy air brightened as the sun fell. —But what can you expect? Fourteen years is too long to stay married. (Decades later Lou determined that one of Reevadare’s ambitions had been to define a marital maximum, in years. It switched between seven or eight.)
    —I hate to blame her, she was such a love…
    So don’t. Both Deary and Maytree could be material and final cause without being at fault. On principle Lou avoided blaming. Reevadare’s lipstick smeared her wet corncobs.
    —But she stole Toby Maytree pure and simple. Reevadare laid it out with a nod.
    Lou lifted her chin. —He left freely on his own two legs.
    Lou found no comfort in friends’ disparaging either Deary or Maytree. What about her own loyalty to both? They had a right to