Be Mine Read Free

you will be blessed with great happiness?"
    (Only years later did she tell me that at the reception, the plastic bride and groom had slid off the cake and onto the floor, the frosting having grown warm under the lights in the hall, but she'd managed to settle them back at the top by pushing their feet way down into the cake before we noticed.)
    It was hard to read such a thing, the dead sparrow, as a positive omen, but luckily neither of us had ever been superstitious, and now we've been together for two decades—all these years mostly happy years, productive and meaningful and prosperous years.
    The secure jobs. The healthy son. The old farmhouse.
    Even the reliable cars—mine a bright and humming small white Honda, easy on gas, four-wheel drive, and his an enormous barreling white Explorer, moving down the road seriously, masculinely, like the idea of gravity itself on wheels.
    Two decades!
    A long time, but, all along, there's been passion, and there still is—although not like those first months, of course, when we spent all our spare time in bed.
    Then, I had a roommate, but Jon had a one-bedroom apartment to himself, so I spent my nights with him there. It was winter, but we slept with the window open because the radiator was right next to the bed, and all the dry dust that was sent up from it made sleeping,
breathing,
difficult.
    We had sex in the morning, in the afternoon, at night—a layer of arctic air over us, a burning layer of heat and dust under us.
    We made love in the bed, on the floor, in the shower, on the couch. We made love straight through my periods—blood on everything. We made love straight through the winter until it was spring and the green grass was crowded with fat, mechanical robins.
    One morning, on my way out of his apartment to my job at the bookstore, I crushed a pale blue egg beneath my shoe, accidentally, and had to scrape the mucus mess of it off with a stick—and even that seemed sexual.
    Even the smell of humidity rising from the grass seemed sexual.
    The musk of it. The muck.
    Those first weeks of spring I could smell my own body all the time, and Jon's, while I worked behind the counter at Community Books. And men seemed able to smell it, too. They stuck around to chat long after our exchanges had taken place—their books in bags, their cash in the register. Men craned their necks to watch me walk down the street. A troupe of break-dancers on the corner stopped what they were doing—their naked gleaming torsos in the sun—when I walked by.
Ooooh, baby. Look at that.
    The cottonwoods burst, and the fluff attached itself to the two of us as Jon and I walked through the park with our arms around each other.
    At home, we had to pick the soft stars of it out of each other's hair.
    We got married in July. We bought the farmhouse. Chad was born, and then—and then?
    And then the next twenty years happened in the staccato flashing of some colored lights!
    Where, I wonder sometimes, have those wild friends gone?
    Jon and I stayed in the general area, but it's been fifteen years since I saw any of them around. Several would be older than I am, assuming they're still alive. But it's impossible to imagine any of them like this, like us, so much older, so much time having passed, so fast—and, yet, it seems as if it hasn't actually been so long that it wouldn't be possible to just call up, arrange a time to meet at the Red Room for a drink, to catch up, if the Red Room had not been closed for twelve years now, replaced by a Starbucks.
    A few weeks ago, it feels like, since I last saw those friends. Or a couple of seasons. Have I changed? How much?
    Sometimes I feel more like that younger woman now than I felt then, back when I felt already so old.
    But whether or not those wild friends would recognize me now—maybe I'm better off not knowing. Maybe it's just as well that I didn't keep in touch, can't make that date for a drink to find out.
    Besides, I never really was one of them, was