Free The Inseparables by Stuart Nadler Page A

rearranged her.
    She walked off into the dirt. She felt the word “fraud” ringing in her ears. The land sloped to the water, wild with goldenrod. Moss carpeted the fieldstone. He told her he would plant apple trees for her. She liked this. Birds passed overhead. She turned. “I like this,” she said.
    “You sound surprised.”
    “I am surprised,” she said. “I’m very surprised. But I like this. I do.”
    He smiled. “Remember this,” he said.
    “Remember what?”
    “I want you to remember that you just said that out loud.”
    She laughed.
    “It’s temporary,” he said, reminding her of their plan. “I open the restaurant, it does well, then we get a place in the city in a few years.”
    “But maybe I’ll like being a farmer,” she said, smiling. “Maybe I’ll write a book about farming. A social history of agriculture.”
    “I could definitely see it,” he said. “Overalls. Cucumber harvest. Raspberries on the bush. Sure.”
    “You know I tried to grow tomatoes on my windowsill last year. They died. The ones that didn’t die were covered in this weird, grotesque blue mold. I’m guessing they were practically poisonous. People at the university thought I was actually trying to kill my students.”
    “Fine. Maybe I grow the vegetables and you take care of the farm animals,” he said.
    She laughed. “I’m guessing that if I killed the tomatoes, the farm animals won’t fare much better.”
    They walked from the porch down the steep hill. He caught her closing her eyes against the warm sun and the wind. A cow stood out in the yard, staring at her, at both of them, grass in its mouth.
    Harold stood beside her, laughing. “Remember this,” he said again. “You told me you like it. You actually said the words.”
    “I promise,” she said. “I’ll remember.”
    Over Harold’s shoulder the river was full, and she could hear the rush of the current slamming against the stones on the bed. A true city girl, Henrietta did not have a driver’s license. She would need lessons. She watched him. He had the hands of a cook. Burns on his fingers. Knife scars on his knuckles. She did like this. He picked up a long blade of grass, twirled it between his fingers, and put it in his mouth.
    “It doesn’t taste that bad,” he said. “You want to try?”
      
    Three months later, Henrietta gave birth to Oona in the small aquamarine bedroom on the second floor of the new house. She had not wanted an institutional birth, the antisepsis of a hospital, the divvying up by sex so that the men were in the waiting room with the cigars, and so they did it here, with a midwife, in this small room with music playing and with the windows open to the big field. A hanging pendant light swung in the breeze, and she focused on this as she breathed through the pain. At some point there was the smell of grass through the windows, and dried leaves, and flowers, maybe, all of this, she knew, a hallucinatory sensation caused by pain. Harold pressed a cold wet washcloth to her forehead. “I’m here,” he told her, in a soothing voice, standing off to the side. “You sure as hell better be here,” she told him. Her baby came at noon on the last warm day of fall. Yet another Horowitz woman giving birth at home.
    In the beginning it was good here. They threw parties in the barn. Friends drove up from New York, armed with samizdat and smoked fish and with toys for Oona, all the while regaling Henrietta with stories about their rallies and marches and about their late-night meetings in the basement of the Judson Church. Henrietta did not miss the old life, she said, and when her friends took her for a walk on the river and said out of earshot of Harold that they did not believe her, said that they were in fact worried for her, she said it once again, as convincingly as she could manage. “Life is good here,” she said, picking grass between her fingers and putting it in her mouth. “Really. It’s good.