Free A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton Page B

June and his face was tanned to a deep brown. His teeth were blindingly white, dangerous to look at, like an eclipse. It was impossible not to admire him, hard not to want to do something to contain that kind of beauty—drink him, ingest him, sneak into his shirt and hide for the rest of one’s natural life. After six years of marriage he had the power to occasionally render me weak in the knees.
    “Did you see the forehead on that seamstress?” I cried, outside on the pavement. “I’ve never seen such a cranium—”
    He grabbed my arm and we both stopped. “Alice,” he said, “why do you always notice the strangest things? Why can’t you ever pick out one good quality about someone?”
    It wasn’t his habit to criticize openly, and his judgments always rattled me. I saw the good in people, I was sure I did. Didn’t I? I opened my mouth to defend myself, but he said, “Just don’t talk about it.” He went around to his side of the car, muttering to himself as he opened the door. I heard him say, “I’d like this to be over and done.”
    The suit escapade had temporarily distracted me from the purpose of the evening, it was true, and now I remembered, with what felt like the force of a lead pipe coming straight down on my skull. He was right. How could I be so much of this world, to think of someone’s forehead when we had a hurdle before us that was going to require our best social skills, our firmest fortitude.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m very sorry.”
    There was a line halfway around the church when we pulled over tothe side of the road. The lot was overflowing and the somber deacons were directing the cars to double park. It was seven o’clock in the evening and the sun bore down with the intensity of noon. I remember how frightened I was, seeing all of the bright cars, the hot metal and glass catching the light like water. No one in the line had the strength to fan themselves or flick the gnats away. Everything was blistering, stale, as if we were being held inside a balloon. Most of the women near us were wearing nylon stockings and their dresses were sticking to their legs. I felt faint, just being next to them, and I whispered to Howard, “These people are going to have heatstrokes.”
    “Don’t say anything,” Howard snapped. “Just don’t talk.”
    I looked down the hill into the straight rows of knee-high corn, corn that had been irrigated every day for the last month. I’m fine, I said to myself. I would think about the deep well, the aquifer below, the elements that would nourish the corn. I would imagine the green fronds of corn being as high as an elephant’s eye. Howard and I hadn’t spoken very much in the last few days. Together we had told Emma and Claire about Lizzy. For as much as ten minutes they asked us about her whereabouts, and did it hurt, and why didn’t she try to swim out? They couldn’t grasp the fact that we would never see her again, but they tried, for a moment, chewing on their fingers, looking up at the ceiling. “Will it ever happen to us?” they wondered. “No,” we assured them. “Not until you’re very old.” Lizzy, for them, was suddenly a different sort of creature, not like them in any way. Before she died she had been invulnerable, just as they were. Something had changed, something had turned her into this—other. When they understood that they were all right, that they could not be harmed, they went merrily on their way.
    Howard and I had moved around each other with exaggerated care, unsure of what lay beyond politeness. He went out in the morning, and that’s when I put my head in my pillow and stared into the blank white cotton. In the last two days, when he had come in from chores, he had found me sputtering apologies. He had told me to please be quiet more than once. There was no arguing, no shouting in indignation, because he’d told me to stop talking. He knew what was proper: It was stupid to invoke the spirit of the dead