Free The Maytrees by Annie Dillard Page B

live as best they could. Did Reevadare think Lou would hate them—once she got her bearings—as if either had changed?
    —He wasn’t a paperweight. No one can steal a man.
    —I could, Reevadare said, in my day.
     
    —Everybody’s sweetheart not so sweet after all, is it? Jane’s professor father had named her after his own father, Jeremy. Now he was bugging Lou about Deary. Everyone gets carried away sometimes, she thought. Hers was a private matter, weightless in any possible world scheme. She dreaded her own friends. She could persuade no one she was not heartbroken. She had seen her own mother heartbroken, and knew she could do better.
    When Marblehead school let out the year her father left, Lou’s mother moved them to Provincetown’s West End on the water. Child Lou had no inkling at Marblehead breakfast, say, if it was indeed at breakfast, that this was her final glimpse of her wonderful father. She could not remember what he ate, said, or read. She began to suspect that many moments werepossibly last ones. She strove to impress what she could on her memory, which she imagined as a clay cylinder. Her mother’s fingers around a Pink Lady, the Cape’s fish flakes and laundry drying in yards, foghorn, seasmoke, school roll-down maps. In bed at night she inventoried that day’s catch: her yellow-toothed teacher’s deploring her penmanship, gulls in full cry above their dodgeball game, her friends’ high voices, and mostly her mother’s smell of talc, her smooth dress, her retreating as if kicked.
    Why not drop all this saying hello and good-bye to everything, this effort both grateful and scared? That was an eventful year. Girl Lou liked her easy Provincetown friends—hardworking, laughing girls, half of them Portuguese, who directly stuck her like spat to their clump. Aware how keenly she would miss any who vanished, she never considered loving less. Presently she forgot about memorizing. New Provincetown and then boarding-school friends caught her up. Still, she attended the smallest college she could find. There she learned to skate and sing.
     
    Now Petie went back to school, and streets and air replaced crowds. Cairos and Lou’s other summer friends would bear her abandonment tale to Boston and New York. She eased her guard and got sucker-punched. I am not going to fall apart, she had told herself, but this was an edge from which she could only slip.
    Do not drive in breakdown lane, said the Route 6 signs. Do not break down in driving lane. The sea poured over the stone lip at Gibraltar and emptied.
    In late September, when Lou could stir at all she moved like a glacier, the queer sort at which dogs bark. Reading Hardy always distracted her in rough patches, as when her father vamoosed. Now she might enjoy the company of solid Farmer Gabriel Oak. She read, “It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.”
    Lou (and Maytree, too) shunned drama, inside and out, as, at least, bad taste.
    Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
    O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
    Why ever had she neglected to become a Buddhist? Low blood pressure. Anyone could see how fat the Buddha was.
    She had no force to fight what held her as wind pins paper to a fence. She was a wood horse, a rock cairn, a jerry can of pitch. She found herself holding one end of a love. She reeled out love’s long line alone; it did not catch.
    She fell apart. She should have lashed her elbows and knees, like Aleuts.

 
    A BLAZE, SHE SCRAPED THE pot. She boxed her paints. She scoured the sink till the sponge reverted to spicules. Petie gave her wide berth.
    One cold June morning Cornelius appeared. —Say, Lou, I wish you’d stop poisoning yourself. She did not whine or voice any grief or anger. Did it show?
    After Cornelius left she climbed the steep street to Pilgrim Monument. She mounted the monument stairs in her camel’s hair coat and red earmuffs. From the top