chairs, while stable, tore at your stockings with their seats, or had flyaway backs which gestured towards the ceiling with all the authority of a divaâs final note: so rhetorical that while the air was still vibrating you hesitated to resume your conversation.
For money she took jobs where she could find them, scrubbing, mowing, ironing for women who went to work in shoulder pads. Alone in their cavernous kitchens Maxine ate standing up at the stove, out of a greed that was almost spiritual: she ravened in a saucepan with butter running down her chin. Her terrible bush of frizzy hair she attacked with combs, clamps and clips, all of them helpless against the vehemency of what sprang from her head.
Vehemently, too, each night in her crowded shed with its line of tomatoes ripening on the sill, she dreamed of digging and discovering, of vegetables loose in the soil, of a bush covered in red flowers that bloomed on the very edge of a whistling chasm; and over and over she dreamed of a baby, a male child which, giddy withgladness, she took upon her knee and dandled, stroking his limbs, his plumpness, rubbing her face against his delicious temples; he permitted it; but nothing she did could lift him out of his mood of discontent. He sat on her lap by the high window, this tiny, anxious monarch with his crown and sceptre, and looked out over a landscape of hazy fields, of orchards, towns and forests; a mighty, polluted river wound across his prospect, and up and down its breast long barge-like vessels toiled in silence, laden down with cargo and trailing wakes of oil.
For dream sadness there is only art; and so the next thing that Maxine constructed, using the curliest and strongest twigs stripped under cover of night from the trunk of a neighbourâs tortured willow, was a trembling cradle, smaller than a shoebox, lighter by far than any human babe could be; so light that the lightest puff of wind could set it in motion, lilting it on its dainty rockers. She placed it in her doorway and stood gazing at it. The same movement of air that shifted it lifted one corner of a curtain; as fleeting as the skirt of a running child it caught the edge of her eye in the darkening shed, and her heart was suddenly growing too high in her ribcage for her to catch a breath. Was it already too late?
But suddenly, in autumn, that season when the angle of the light changes and without warning one thinks of the past, when at mid-afternoon even the most carefully groomed garden is chilled by the meditative scraping of a cricket, Maxine lost her shed.
A fortnightâs notice was all she got, but though news of the property sale chagrined her she held no grudge against her landlord, for she believed that everything was meant, that she was responsible for and had in fact initiated all the events and conditions of her life; and she had no idea that her landlord, with whom she was on nodding terms as she passed his windows on her way home to the bottom of his yard, was in the habit of taking his friends on visits to her shed while she was out working for the rent. They stood at the door, the last group he would usher, with their hands over their mouths or in their pockets, watching him pick his way nimbly to the bedside. He beckoned them to follow. âAnd look, lookâthese are her little slippers,â said the landlord, but his mockery held a note of fondness, even of respect, though he scarcely knew it; and when he held up for their amusement the fantastically titled tracts she kept beside her bed they hung back, reluctant to disturb the demeanour of the furniture, its silent, dignified postures, the shivering of the tiny cradle. Like a shrine in honour of a god whose name they had forgotten, the dim shed quietened them: it made their own city seem foreign.
Maxine, thinking of leases, bonds, and the hiring of a truck, increased her hours of labour by taking on a new employer, and waited for her next lodging, or the path towards it,
For money she took jobs where she could find them, scrubbing, mowing, ironing for women who went to work in shoulder pads. Alone in their cavernous kitchens Maxine ate standing up at the stove, out of a greed that was almost spiritual: she ravened in a saucepan with butter running down her chin. Her terrible bush of frizzy hair she attacked with combs, clamps and clips, all of them helpless against the vehemency of what sprang from her head.
Vehemently, too, each night in her crowded shed with its line of tomatoes ripening on the sill, she dreamed of digging and discovering, of vegetables loose in the soil, of a bush covered in red flowers that bloomed on the very edge of a whistling chasm; and over and over she dreamed of a baby, a male child which, giddy withgladness, she took upon her knee and dandled, stroking his limbs, his plumpness, rubbing her face against his delicious temples; he permitted it; but nothing she did could lift him out of his mood of discontent. He sat on her lap by the high window, this tiny, anxious monarch with his crown and sceptre, and looked out over a landscape of hazy fields, of orchards, towns and forests; a mighty, polluted river wound across his prospect, and up and down its breast long barge-like vessels toiled in silence, laden down with cargo and trailing wakes of oil.
For dream sadness there is only art; and so the next thing that Maxine constructed, using the curliest and strongest twigs stripped under cover of night from the trunk of a neighbourâs tortured willow, was a trembling cradle, smaller than a shoebox, lighter by far than any human babe could be; so light that the lightest puff of wind could set it in motion, lilting it on its dainty rockers. She placed it in her doorway and stood gazing at it. The same movement of air that shifted it lifted one corner of a curtain; as fleeting as the skirt of a running child it caught the edge of her eye in the darkening shed, and her heart was suddenly growing too high in her ribcage for her to catch a breath. Was it already too late?
But suddenly, in autumn, that season when the angle of the light changes and without warning one thinks of the past, when at mid-afternoon even the most carefully groomed garden is chilled by the meditative scraping of a cricket, Maxine lost her shed.
A fortnightâs notice was all she got, but though news of the property sale chagrined her she held no grudge against her landlord, for she believed that everything was meant, that she was responsible for and had in fact initiated all the events and conditions of her life; and she had no idea that her landlord, with whom she was on nodding terms as she passed his windows on her way home to the bottom of his yard, was in the habit of taking his friends on visits to her shed while she was out working for the rent. They stood at the door, the last group he would usher, with their hands over their mouths or in their pockets, watching him pick his way nimbly to the bedside. He beckoned them to follow. âAnd look, lookâthese are her little slippers,â said the landlord, but his mockery held a note of fondness, even of respect, though he scarcely knew it; and when he held up for their amusement the fantastically titled tracts she kept beside her bed they hung back, reluctant to disturb the demeanour of the furniture, its silent, dignified postures, the shivering of the tiny cradle. Like a shrine in honour of a god whose name they had forgotten, the dim shed quietened them: it made their own city seem foreign.
Maxine, thinking of leases, bonds, and the hiring of a truck, increased her hours of labour by taking on a new employer, and waited for her next lodging, or the path towards it,