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.She and Will had talked about attempting the latter but never made it.As she drove down the muddy, rutted road to the stream, the Whale’s muffler scraping dirt and rocks, Nora wondered if they would make it.Jens, barely five feet, Anka, over six, and their pale, blue-veined daughters had been there for over an hour.The Dutch contingent had built a fire, rounded it with river rocks, and laid out blankets.His wife knitted as their twin girls solemnly played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a pair of midget violins.Jens was trying to teach their poodle, who could already sit, lie down, roll over, and play dead, to walk on a beach ball.What was their secret? Being Dutch? Communists? Did getting bombed in World War II make it easier for this mismatched couple to make peace with the disappointments of life? Nora didn’t knit, her children couldn’t play musical instruments, they didn’t have a dog, and her husband’s only hobby was ambition.Being an only child, Nora had an ideal of family life that only seemed to be realized in other families.Nora watched her children tumble out of the Whale and wreak havoc with the sylvan setting.Willy kicked the beach ball out from under the poodle, Fiona bullied away one of the violins and promptly broke a string, Lucy hooked her foot in Anka’s yarn as she skipped toward the river, making a snarl of a morning’s worth of knitting.And Jack was naked.“I’m sorry.Willy, stop it! Fiona, don’t.Lucy, say you’re sorry.Oh, Jack.” Her youngest had just thrown his diaper into the campfire.“What happened to your husband?” Jens nibbled on one of the dog biscuits he had brought to train the poodle.“Work.”“Your husband is such an American.”“That’s one word for him.”Jens, in his short shorts, sandals, and socks, wife and daughters with their clogs and long, blond braids, Dutch beer cooled by the river.their foreignness made Nora think of the unused steamship ticket in her underwear drawer and all the steamships that had set sail without her.At that moment she felt like a prisoner to her husband and her children and, most of all, to love.The thought made her feel guilty, less than maternal.Jack reached up to her, “Uppeee!” Nora pulled the youngest up into her arms and began to cry.“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” It was the eighth time she’d apologized since arriving.“Being loved is exhausting.Go for a walk, you’ll feel better, we’ll look after the children.”Nora wiped away her tears.As she headed up the path that ran along the brook she heard Jens call out, “Which ungrateful child wants to catch the first fish?”When she looked back and saw her children clambering around the beer-bellied Dutchman shouting, “Me.me.me,” Nora started to cry again, for just the opposite reason she had burst into tears in the first place.To have life pull on her was maddening.But not to feel that pull was worse.She wondered if it was the same for a man, specifically for her husband.A half mile later she was feeling better.She’d crossed the stream on moss-covered rocks without falling in.A trout rose and swallowed a dragonfly whole, and a monarch butterfly up from Mexico mistook the red rose on the hem of her skirt for the real thing.As she turned to go back to the life she had made for herself, Nora looked up at Sleeping Giant.Its feet pointed east, head west, its chin reached for the sky.She hadn’t realized she had wandered so close to the slumbering Spirit Monster—that’s what her husband had told the children the Mattabeseck Indians believed the sandstone and green traprock to hold.She had been sure Will would give them nightmares with the stories he told them about Sleeping Giant.But Will had a gift for casting a gentle light on scary things.“According to the Indians, the first thing that Giant’s going to do when he wakes up and shakes off his dirt blanket is drink up all the java in the world.Then he’s going to eat all the ice cream.And then.” She missed her husband when she thought of him like that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]