Free The Inseparables by Stuart Nadler

of shock or maybe out of disgust. She’d shut off the phone.
    Again, she reached out for Lydia, clutching her by the arms, not letting go.

6.
    The first thing Henrietta ever saw of the house was the big field, with the grass long and uncut and heavy in the summer humidity. This was August 1975. They had come up together from the city in a borrowed green Volkswagen, leaving after her morning lecture. Acres of fence line, white and chipped, gave way to fieldstone and the stumps of chopped birch. Harold was thrilled, and because this was how it went when she was with him, Henrietta felt thrilled as well. From the road, the house looked better than she had thought. She had seen pictures, and in the pictures everything looked old. Out in the grass, a tractor rusted. They parked and there were butterflies in the oaks and there were deer out grazing. She had never seen a live deer before. Just Teddy Roosevelt’s deer, stuffed and behind glass on 81st and Columbus. Harold got out first and bent down to rub his hands in the dirt, and then turned with a boyish smile to show her his covered black palms. He knew things about soil and nitrogen levels and about how to change things to make vegetables sweeter. She had grown up Henrietta Horowitz, on the fourth floor of a tenement flat on Orchard Street. Her father collected junk for money. Her mother worked a steam press in a garment factory. She had shared a bedroom with her sister and her aunt until she was sixteen years old. The idea of personal space always seemed theoretical to her. She turned in a full circle, taking everything in—all the good acres and the wind in the trees.
    They were moving because Harold was set to open a restaurant in Boston. Before this, she had always planned to keep teaching after the baby. She had a detailed ten-year plan that included scholarly research, academic appointments in Rome, social agitation. This was the town where he had grown up. It would be good for the baby, he told her. Inexplicably, she felt something close to excitement at the idea.
    The house sat perched at the top of a steep hill. Spreading out, west to east, there were nearly two hundred acres. On the front porch, flowerpots hung from wooden stanchions, and rubber boots caked in mud were lined up near the steps. On the roof, wind spun the weathervane to a blur. It was true that a part of her cried out treason! at the notion of doing this. Or acquiescence. At the prospect of planting watercress and wax beans in the earth, she felt the sting of conformity. It came, deafening and endless, like an invisible chorus. Not you! A woman like her, a professor, almost a scholar, with dirt beneath her fingernails, assuming the retrograde position, a baby on her back, planting and digging and running a wet mop across the hardwood, or a vacuum up the runner on the big staircase. Farming? Gardening? This was not the same Henrietta lecturing most Tuesday afternoons on the political history of reproduction. Or on embedded structural oppression. Before this, she had never considered leaving her life in the city, or following any man anywhere, but here, all of a sudden, was Harold Olyphant, talking about the country, talking about babies running around in the high grass, talking about Henrietta transforming from an urban Poindexter into Laura Ingalls Wilder. This was where they would milk the cows. This was where they would let the chickens run. At any other moment in her life, his asking her to come here would have wrought such a simple answer. In the car up through New England, though, she knew already something elemental had changed. She wanted this because she wanted to make him happy and because, privately, secretly, half shamefully, she thought he was right: that being here, with a life like this, with some goddamned fresh wax beans, might be better for the baby. A month ago, a week ago, twelve hours ago, even, a sentence like this would have bordered on political heresy. Love had unexpectedly