Twin Lakes

The woman at the gate house looked at my license, then at me, then at the license again.

“And who are you visiting today?”

“Nobody. I live here.”

She blinked. “Oh. Are you the new owner on Verbena?”

“I am.”

“Well, welcome home!” And up went the arm.

Nine seconds. That’s all it was, nine seconds and a woman being perfectly nice to me, and I drove through that gate with my hands at ten and two like a girl taking a road test, because I’ve been having those nine seconds my whole entire life and they’ve never once cost anybody a thing except me. My mother wouldn’t have said one word about it. My mother cleaned a bank on Peachtree for eleven years and never walked through the front door of it one time, and she told me that like she was telling me it looked like rain. So nah, I didn’t say nothin’ either. I just drove.

Verbena Court, third house on the left. Two palms out front and a driveway long enough to turn around in. Mine. Not leased. Not half mine. Not sittin’ on some deed next to a man’s name in letters bigger than mine. Mine, mine, all the way mine.

And I sat in that car in my own driveway with the air blowin’ and both hands up off the wheel and hollered it at the windshield like a fool.

“Guurrllll, you finally did it!!!”

Sixty-one years old in a Buick in Florida, poppin’ my shoulders, grinnin’ so hard my face hurt. Whoo! Thirty-eight years and a whole hospital system and two grown children, and the first thing in my entire natural life with nobody’s name on it but mine.

Then I got out in that heat and went to work.

The truck wasn’t even empty before the first one came across the street, foil pan held out in front of her like a badge, talking before she was halfway.

“Now I know you don’t want company and I told them. I said leave that woman be, she has got a truck in her driveway. But there isn’t one thing in that kitchen yet and you’re gonna be hungry around two, and there’s nothing to eat on this side of the gate that isn’t a cheese straw.”

“Is that right.”

“It’s a tragedy. Diane Foster. Four houses down, the yellow door, and yes I picked the yellow and yes the board wrote me a letter about it.”

I took the pan, still warm through the foil, and I had that smell before she finished her sentence. Chicken. Baked. Pale. Naked as the day it was born. Lord have mercy, this woman. Not one thing in there but the bird and whatever this woman thinks is seasonin’. Which isn’t a complaint. A grown woman walked across a street in Florida heat in September carrying hot food to a stranger, and I’ve lived places where nobody would have come out the house. So I smiled at her and said thank you and meant it, and I was already deciding what I was gonna do to that bird when I got in the house.

“Simone.”

“Simone what, honey?”

“Mercer.”

“Mercer.” And she set it up on a shelf to look at later. “And is it Mister Mercer coming behind you with the second truck, or is it just the one truck?”

There it is. Under two minutes. That isn’t nosey, that’s intake. Three hundred some houses behind that gate and nobody can seat a new woman at a table until they know whether she came in a pair, and if she didn’t, which kind of not. Dead, divorced, or never. Three different chairs, and they don’t get mixed up out here.

“Just the one truck.”

She held my eyes a half beat past where the sentence stopped, and I watched her decide not to ask the next one.

“Well. Good.” And the smile was real, there wasn’t one thing in it but welcome. “The two-truck ones take up all the parking.”

I laughed out loud, right there in my own driveway. She got me with that one. “What do you do out here all day, Diane?”

“Honey, I’ve never been so busy in my life. Thirty-one years in the Orange County schools and I was less tired then.”

“Teaching.”

“Assistant principal, the back half of it. Middle school.” She let it sit out there where I could get a good look at it, then pulled it back a half step so I couldn’t say she brought it up. “Not that it means one thing now. Now I’m a woman with a yellow door.”

“Somebody picked that yellow.”

“Somebody did.” Pleased with herself. “And what did you do? Before.”

Second ask in four minutes, and she wanted this one worse.

“I worked in a hospital.”

“Nursing?”

Mm hm. And theeere she go. Cost her nothing to ask it and cost me nothing to answer it, and I’ve been answering it since I was twenty-six years old standing in a lobby in a good suit with a briefcase in my hand, getting asked by somebody’s secretary if I was there about the cafeteria.

“Administration.”

“Oh. Ad-min-i-stration.”

And she waited. I let her wait. A woman who hands you her title in the first two minutes is coming back for yours, and a trade isn’t a trade until both sides put something down. I’ve sat across tables from men who needed that trade so bad they gave up the whole room waiting on it.

“It was a whole lot of meetings,” I said.

“Mm,” Diane said, and filed me under somethin’. No idea what. Suited me fine.

Then she gave me the street, which I didn’t ask for and didn’t get a vote on. “The Pruitts on your corner. His heart. Three times now, and he’s still out there with that blower before eight in the morning.”

“Three times.”

“Three. And they’re the only ones out here from here, so everybody lets him do what he wants. His people had sixty acres east of this gate and that blower is about the size of what’s left of it.” She said that the way you say a thing you have said before and still think is a shame. “Barbara Teague is the brick with the cardinal flag, and don’t get her started on that flag. Kentucky. The board has been after her since before I got here and she won’t take it down and I hope she never does. Ed Mulcahy on the other corner is writing a letter.”

“About what?”

“The mailbox cluster.” She shifted the pan to her other hip. “Ed has been writing that letter a year and a half. The day Ed sends that letter is the day Ed has to find something else to do. Ed knows it. Everybody knows it. Nobody says it.”

“Where is Ed from.”

“The Bronx, and he will tell you before you ask. Ruth Kowalski is the gray one with the six lanes of pavers. Chicago. That woman says four words a week and you remember all four.”

Then the chin, pointed at the house on my right. “And on that side. Ray and Gina. New York, the both of them, and you will know it inside of a sentence. Ray is Queens, Army, did his twenty, he’s retired and he’s staying retired. Gina’s Brooklyn and Gina still works. Insurance, something like that, she’s on calls in that back bedroom from eight in the morning, so if you’re out in your yard don’t get to talking to her before noon. She will be on a headset and too polite to tell you.”

“They’re younger.”

“Fifty-eight and fifty-seven. Babies of this street.” Said it like she had said it a hundred times. “Second marriage, the both of them. Met out here. And I’ll tell you what everybody tells everybody, which is that those two are either the happiest people behind this gate or the loudest, and nobody has worked out which.”

She didn’t wink. Did not have to. “They’re lovely,” she said. “He will cut your grass if your man is gone.”

Then she took her pan back and went on down Verbena. If your man is gone. I stood in my own doorway and turned that over a minute. Six hours in and this street already had me.

Something else came to me standing there with the heat coming up off that driveway. That woman went down one side of Verbena Court and handed me eleven people, and every last one of them came from somewhere else. The Bronx. Chicago. Kentucky. Queens and Brooklyn right there on my fence line. Not one of them talks like Florida and not one of them is fixing to start. A man can live forty years in Osceola County and still stand on line at the pharmacy instead of in it, and still call Manhattan the City like there is only the one, and nobody out here corrects him because the woman behind him in that line is doing the same thing with a different town. The Pruitts on the corner are the only people on this street who were born inside twenty miles of it, and they got sixty acres sold out from under them to make room for the rest of us. I came down 441 thinking I was moving to Florida. I was moving onto a street where everybody kept the mouth they grew up with, and I had mine in the car with me the whole way.

My daughter called a little after dark.

“Mama. Did you get there.”

“I’m sitting in it.”

“Is it hot?”

“It’s Florida. In September.”

“I told you about September.” A cabinet shut on her end, a baby saying something twice. “Hold on. Hold on. Jordan, I said the blue cup. Mama?”

“I’m here.”

“Did they break anything?”

“Nothing that matters.”

“Because if they broke something you have to call them tonight, not Monday. There’s a clause, forty-eight hours, I read it to you in the kitchen.”

“I know you did.”

“Okay.” Long breath going out. “Okay. Are you all right down there by yourself?”

Nobody ever asks that like it’s a real question. It comes down the phone with the answer already loaded in it and all a mother has to do is pick it up and hand it back the way they want it.

“I’m fine, baby.”

“Because you can come up here anytime, you know that. Darius said the room is yours whenever you want it.”

Darius didn’t say that. Darius would say it if somebody asked him, and he’d mean it when he said it, and there’s a whole country between those two things that my daughter has never once had to walk across.

“I’ve got a house,” I said.

“I know you’ve got a house.”

“Then let me go sit in it.”

She laughed. We talked about nothing a few minutes, she told me she loved me, and she was gone. Whole call, and she never asked me one thing about this house. Not what color the walls are, not if there’s a tree. That’s all right. My children call me the way you check that a light is still on in a room nobody is using.

I took a glass of wine out onto that lanai with the lights off and sat down in a chair that still had the tag on it. There was a band playing six streets over, real instruments, a woman singing something that was on the radio when I was at Spelman, and underneath it that big warm roar of a whole lot of people laughing in a room. Tuesday night. That clubhouse full. And not one person in it had to be anywhere in the morning.

I sat there with a paper plate on my knee and I had a picture in my head, and sitting under that band and that laughing I could see the picture was wrong. The picture was a porch. Porch, rocking chair, glass of tea, grandbabies at Christmas, a woman getting smaller and quieter and sweeter every year until the family comes down and clears out the house. I’d never have said that out loud. It was in me anyway, because it’s what I watched. My grandmother on Mayson Avenue sat down one afternoon and didn’t get up again for eleven years, and the whole family told each other she had earned her rest. She had earned her rest. Sixty-three years old.

I’m sixty-one. Divorced since the spring after thirty-eight years, my half of a house in Decatur, nobody else’s name on this deed and I read every page of it myself with a woman at the title company watching me do it, which she didn’t expect and didn’t enjoy. On the realtor tour I counted the faces like mine without deciding to, the way I’ve counted since I was a girl, and found a few, and they were holding a blower or a rake. The realtor didn’t bring it up. Neither did I. Coming down I’d passed the turn for Eatonville, and passed some other places that don’t have signs on them, and I didn’t say a word about any of it out loud because there was nobody in that car but me and a grown woman doesn’t sit in traffic explaining to herself what she has known since she was nine years old.

What I came down here for is peace. Not rest. Them two are not the same thing and everybody gets it wrong. I’ve slept nine hours a night since Gerald left and it hasn’t done one thing for me. Peace is nobody needing a single thing from me, and I’ve been the one who handles it since I was nineteen. My mother dying in the back bedroom. The insurance behind it. Gerald’s daddy’s funeral, because Gerald couldn’t. Two children through school. Usher board, scholarship fund, second collection. A hospital system through a merger that put a whole floor of people out of work, and I’m the one they sent in to say it, because they knew what that room would do to a man and they knew it wouldn’t do it to me. And I was good at it. That’s the trap right there. Bein’ good at handlin’ things means there is no end to the things.

So what I had in my head, sitting out there with that band going six streets away, was that peace is a place. Buy the house, shut the door, there it is on the lanai waiting on you like the furniture.

The Delaneys’ house had been dark all day, Gina’s car in the drive, blinds down in that back bedroom where Diane said she takes her calls. A little before ten the lights came on over there. Not the house. The lanai.

Those cages all run the same along Verbena. Screen on three sides, slider into the kitchen, lot lines close enough a man could hand you a hammer across them, a row of ligustrum between, and the association keeps it at four feet because anything taller blocks the water view everybody paid for. Four feet of hedge. That’s all there is between my chair and theirs.

They have a hot tub in the corner with a light down in it, and the cover came off and that light came up through the water and threw the whole cage pale blue and moving. Ray got in first. Gray comin’ through the chest, thick through the middle the way a man goes when he quits runnin’ and doesn’t quit eatin’, a tattoo high on one arm that the blue light caught the edge of.

And that man was not wearin’ one stitch.

I want you to understand somethin’. I am sixty-one years old. I was married thirty-eight years to one man and I have been with four in my whole entire life, and every single one of them had the decency to be under a sheet. I have never in six decades on this earth watched a naked grown man walk across a lit space and get into water like it was nothin’.

I put my hand over my own mouth. In the dark. By myself. Gina came out the slider behind him in a robe with a glass in each hand, set them both on the ledge, took the robe off and hung it on the back of a chair.

Fifty-seven years old, to my sixty-one. Heavy through the hip, belly soft and low, stretch marks running up the side of it catching that light, breasts that have fed somebody and gone where breasts go, a scar underneath the left one. And that woman stood there in nothin’ at all and shook her hair out and got down in that water without one single solitary thought in her head about any of it.

My own slider was four steps behind me. I didn’t get up.

And they talked. That’s what I wasn’t ready for. Twelve feet and still water will carry a whole conversation, and I sat there in the dark and got every word like a radio somebody left on in another room.

“Did you call him back?”

“I called him back.”

“And?”

“He wants to borrow it for the weekend.”

“Ray.”

“I know.”

“He put a hundred and sixty dollars of diesel in a gasoline truck.”

“That was two years ago.”

“It was nineteen months ago and it was my brother’s truck and I’m the one that had to stand there on the phone with Carl about it. Nineteen months, Ray. Not two years. Nineteen.”

“So I says to him, you want the truck, you put your own gas in it.”

“And what did he say.”

“He said okay.”

“He said okay.” She let that sit about a half second. “What am I, stupid?”

“He is twenty-four.”

“He is twenty-six and that’s worse.”

He laughed, short, down in the chest, and the water moved.

“Tell him yes,” she said after a bit.

“I already told him yes.”

“Then why are we talking about it?”

“Because if I tell you after, you tell me I never tell you nothing.”

“That’s fair.”

“That’s completely fair.”

Somebody’s sprinklers came on two streets back and cut off again.

“Your mother called the house phone.”

“We don’t have a house phone.”

“We have a house phone, Gina, it’s in the laundry room, it’s how she calls you when she’s mad at the cell.”

“What did she want?”

“To tell you the Bianchi girl had the baby.”

“She didn’t.”

“Seven pounds something.”

“She called a landline. To tell you about a baby.”

“She called a landline so you’d have to call her back on it.”

“That woman is going to give me agita in my own hot tub.”

“She’s making gravy Sunday. She wants to know are you coming.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“She didn’t have to say it, Gina, she called the laundry room.”

“That woman.”

“Mm.”

Then Gina set her glass down on the ledge. “Come here.”

“I’m here.”

“Ray.”

And she turned around in that water and put a knee on either side of his hips, and the talking stopped. Water went over the side and slapped the deck. His hands came up out of it wet and shining and he had her by the waist, then by the ass, both hands, spread wide, pulling her down onto him. Then she reached down between them under that water and took hold of him, and she brought him up out of it.

“What the fuuuck.”

Out loud. In my own chair. To nobody.

“Look at the size of his dick!”

I was like, dayuuuuum.

I am not gonna sit here and be dainty about it, because I was not one bit dainty about it at the time. That man is fifty-eight years old, thick through the middle, gray comin’ in on the chest. And what that woman brought up out of that water in the blue light was the biggest thing I have seen in my natural life. Not close. Not the biggest in a while. The biggest, period, at sixty-one years old, in a lawn chair, in the dark, with a paper plate on my knee.

Then I slapped my own hand over my own mouth and I did not take it off.

Because here is the part I was not ready for in any way. She did not do one thing about it. She did not look at it, she did not say a word about it, she did not do the little carryin’ on a woman does. That is a Tuesday to her. That is what she has got at home.

And I thought, in my own head, in my own dark, on the first night in my own house, Simone Mercer, what in the world have you been doin’ for forty years.

She got up on her knees, held him there, put him against her and sat all the way down on him in one long slow push. All of it. Her mouth came open. And the sound she made came through four feet of ligustrum and across six feet of grass and found me sittin’ in my own chair in the dark.

My whole body went off like somebody struck a match on it.

“God. Riiight there.”

“I know.”

“You don’t always know.”

“I know right now.”

“Then shut up and do it.”

He got a mouth on one of her titties and she put her hand on the back of his head and held him right there.

And then that woman started ridin’ him.

Whoo. Not sweet. Not shy. Not one thing about it was polite. She worked her hips down on that man and took exactly what she came out there for, and I sat up in my chair without decidin’ to. Water came up between them and went over the side and kept goin’ over the side. Her thighs slapped his every single time she came down, and I could hear it, twelve feet away, over the frogs. He had both hands on her hips drivin’ her and she was tellin’ him to. Then she came up almost all the way off that man and dropped back down hard enough that the whole tub moved on its slab.

I said, out loud, “Oh, she is not playin’.”

“Like that.”

“Like that?”

“Exactly like that. Do not change it. Do not change one thing, Ray.”

My mouth went dry as paper. Lord. He got an arm across her back and his other hand down in front between her legs and she said something I couldn’t make out and then said it again and by then it wasn’t words. Her head went back, throat blue in that light, mouth open, riding him with her whole body while he drove up into her from underneath, and the two of them got loud enough that I could hear the breath coming out of her in pieces.

Now. Let me not get cute about this. I’m a sixty-one year old woman who has lived by herself since March, and I have a phone like everybody else, and there have been nights, and that’s nobody’s business and nobody got hurt. I was raised in a Baptist church in Decatur by a woman who would have gone to her grave before she said the word sex out loud in her own house, and there was a deacon’s wife watching my hips at fourteen and reporting to my mother about it, and all of that’s in me and not one bit of it ever stopped me having a private life behind my own door.

So it wasn’t the seeing. In person is a whole other animal. Sixty-one years old and nobody had ever put that in front of me. On a screen it’s arranged, somebody decided where the light goes, nobody in it has a scar under her breast from a surgery, and if she does it’s lit so you don’t sit with it, and the whole thing is performed at you and then you put the phone down and go to sleep. That woman was twelve feet away with water coming over the side onto a deck I could hear it hit, and I could smell the chlorine, and her hair was wet and flat to her head and it didn’t look like anything at all. There’s a noise two bodies make in water that nobody has ever put in a movie, because it isn’t a pretty noise, and there was no music under it and the frogs went the entire time. It was real. That’s the difference and it isn’t a small one.

And then the other thing, which took me longer to get to. She was good at it. Not athletic, nothing acrobatic, nothing either one of them did looked hard. She was good the way a woman is good at something she has stopped being scared of. She knew what she wanted out of that man and she took it, and when it wasn’t right she moved until it was, and she didn’t apologize for moving and she didn’t check his face one time to see how she was doing. And she wasn’t running the arithmetic. That’s the part.

At twenty-six I was in a bed in Atlanta with the man I was fixing to marry and I had a column going the entire time. Hold the stomach in. Not that angle, the light is behind me. Is my face doing something strange, is this taking too long, is he comparing me to the one before me, is he going to think less of me tomorrow for how bad I wanted this tonight. I ran that column the better part of twenty years and I would have swore to you it was just how it is. That woman wasn’t running one line of it, and she’s four years younger than me. She didn’t outlive that committee. She fired it.

He knew her too. He wasn’t working at her and he wasn’t hunting around, and twice he did some little thing I couldn’t even see and she came up off him with her mouth open. And then she opened her eyes, and she looked straight at me.

There was no light on me, mine had been off two hours, but a lanai is a lanai and the moon was up over that pond and twelve feet is twelve feet. I didn’t move. There was nothing in me that could have moved. She looked at me about as long as you look at a mailbox, then she put her hand flat on that man’s chest and said something, and he opened his eyes and turned his head and looked over, and the two of them considered me a second the way you consider a cat that came up on the deck.

“That’s the new one,” Gina said. “Verbena.”

“Mm.”

And she put her hand back on his shoulder and went right on. Neither one of them stopped, neither one covered up, neither one changed the rhythm by one beat. She kept riding that man with her eyes half open and her mouth going and the water kept coming over the side, and I sat twelve feet away with my heart coming out of my chest, and the only person in that whole arrangement who thought a thing of it was me.

They didn’t care. Their tub, their lanai, their house that they paid for, new woman next door sitting out there in the dark, and so what. Somewhere along the line those two got to the far side of caring what anybody thinks of them, and they didn’t announce it and they didn’t make a stand about it. And they aren’t old. That’s what I couldn’t get around and still can’t. They’re the young ones out here, barely over the line that lets you buy in, and I have four years on the both of them, and I was the one sitting in the dark in a chair in my own house, forty years deep into being a credit to everybody.

I was wet. Lord, I was wet. Sitting in a chair, in the dark, in my own house, with a glass of wine going warm on the arm of it. Wet like a girl. Like a woman of twenty with her whole entire life still out in front of her. And it didn’t creep up on me either, it came up like somebody threw a switch at the wall. Mouth went dry first, then the heat up my chest and my throat and into my face, then that pull, low and deep and heavy, dragging on me with every sound that woman made, and my knees had closed up without being asked and my thighs were tight.

I had my hand on the inside of my own thigh, and then my fingers moved, and I let them. Not much, not for long, enough that my breath caught and I had to shut my eyes and my hips came up off that cushion about an inch all by themselves. I sat there on the first night in my own house and made myself cum with two people fucking twelve feet away and a hedge between us, and I didn’t make one sound doing it. Not one. Forty years of a church and a mother and a husband asleep down the hall will teach a woman to be quiet even when there isn’t another living soul in the building to hear her. And that is what put the fear in me. Not the doin’ it. The quiet.

And this. I thought that part of me was gone. Not slowed down, not reduced. Gone, finished, packed up and hauled out the house with the rest of it. I decided that some years back and I wasn’t even sad about it, because by then it had been a long time since anything showed up on its own. Whatever I’ve been doing by myself since March doesn’t count and I knew it didn’t count while I was doing it. That’s a routine, that’s a woman getting a thing over with so she can go to sleep, same as the last few years of my marriage were a thing to get over with, and not one minute of it ever came up and took me. This came up and took me, twelve feet away with the frogs going and the water slapping that deck, and I didn’t have a say in any part of it.

And sitting there I worked out that I’ve been blaming the wrong thing for years. I put it on my age. That’s the story, everybody tells it, nobody argues with it. A woman gets to a certain point and that part of her winds down, and that’s nature, and there’s no sense being bitter at nature, and I’ve said a version of that to myself a hundred times and it was a comfort every single time. It wasn’t my age. It was never my age. Not one day of it. It was a marriage dead so long that by the end the two of us were being polite to a corpse, and a dead marriage will take that out of a woman and hand her back a nice reasonable explanation about getting older so she doesn’t go looking at what actually happened to her.

Nobody stops. Not at sixty. Not at seventy. And not in a hot tub on Verbena Court on a Tuesday night in September.

When she went she had her face down in the side of his neck and her hand gripping that rim behind him, and she made a sound I have never in my life made or heard a woman make, and she didn’t hold one bit of it back. Frogs went quiet for a second the way they do. He went right behind her, both hands locked on her hips holding her down on him, head back on that ledge, mouth open, and she stayed on him through the whole thing with her mouth at his ear saying something I couldn’t hear. Then she sat back and pushed her wet hair off her face and her chest was going.

Ray said something I didn’t catch.

“She is right there, Ray.”

“I know she’s right there.”

“Then say hey.”

And that man raised one hand up out of that water in my direction, the way you do at a four way stop, and put it back. Then Gina picked her glass up off the ledge, the one she set down a half hour before, and raised it an inch at me the way a woman does across a room at a party, and called out, perfectly pleasant, like it was four in the afternoon and we were both at the mailbox.

“You settlin’ in all right over there, hon?”

I heard my own voice come out of me sayin’ that I was.

“Good. It’s a nice street.”

Then she got out, put that robe back on, and went in through her slider. Ray got out behind her and put the cover on the tub. Blue light went out, lanai light went out, house went dark. Whole thing took about as much out of those two as carryin’ the trash down.

I sat there a long while after with my hand still where it was. Forty years of rooms, and I’ve spent every single one of them being a credit to somebody. To my mother, to a board, to a husband, to two children, to a church, to a whole city that had an opinion about me before I ever opened my mouth. Being watched isn’t new to me. Being watched is the water I’ve been swimming in since I was fourteen years old and a deacon’s wife told my mother I was developing early. And twelve feet away, a woman got watched doing the most private thing there’s, by a stranger, in her own yard, and her whole response to it was to ask was I settling in all right.

Ain’t nobody out here keepin’ score. Not one soul. That’s what this place is and it isn’t in the brochure. Everybody behind that gate has already been judged by everybody who was ever going to judge them. Careers are over, parents are buried, children are grown and gone and have their own opinions about everything. There isn’t one person out here with anything left to prove and not enough road in front of any of them to spend it pretending, and nobody is waiting on the day they clear out the house. So a woman who sells insurance off a headset in her back bedroom gets on top of her husband in a hot tub on a Tuesday and doesn’t care who sees it.

And that is not shamelessness. That was my first word for it and it is the wrong one, flat wrong. That is freedom. That’s a woman who got all the way to the far side of caring and found out there was nothing over there but her own life waiting on her.

I locked that slider and stood in my own kitchen in the dark with both hands flat on the counter, heart still going, thighs still wet and sticking. Peace. That’s the word I used all the way down 441 and through a stack of signing, and a fifty-seven year old woman with a scar under her breast and a headset in her back bedroom had just showed me that the thing I came down here for isn’t quiet at all, that she got there way ahead of me, and that she didn’t do it by closing a door.

I went up and laid down on a mattress on the floor of a room with no curtains, and the frogs went on out at the pond, and my body wouldn’t come down. It had been given a taste and it wanted the rest of it, and it didn’t care one bit whose house it was in or how old she was or what her mama would have said about her. That’s the part nobody warns a woman about on the back side of a marriage. The wanting doesn’t leave with the man. It stayed in that house with me the whole first night and it had no manners at all, and there wasn’t one living soul in there but me, and not one thing to be done about any of it.

I laid there in the dark with my heart goin’ and thought, God help me. I want what that woman’s got.