Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) Read Free

chance to if he lived to be two hundred.
    “ Where are you going said Milder to-oo Malder…” “Where” was not the question, he realized. The question was why are you going. One had alternatives. There was Bulton and his villa, an open invitation; or that little place in Iceland where one could be on one’s own in earnest; or even home, for Heaven’s sake — cousins and young strangers. It would be an adventure of sorts merely to light down among his own family at last.
    No. Go to Dorothea, commanded impulse, across this bright, painful landscape. Apart from the peculiar and obscure drive to make the journey in the first place, there was nothing to it, really: first Albuquerque tucked into the long seam of the Rio Grande Valley; sixty miles north along the river to Santa Fe; and another seventy miles should bring him to Taos, his destination, which he had already been told should be pronounced to rhyme with “house.”
    Go to Dorothea in Taos and see why.

    Thursdays were her days in town, where she donated her time to the bookstore, Old Possum’s. That was the name she and Nathan had playfully given the place when they’d started it, and though he was gone and Dorothea had sold the store, the new owners had not yet gotten around to changing the name.
    It was a good day: golden with quiet. No one was in the shop all morning except a girl in a peasant skirt and blouse mooning over the astrology shelves. Sally Raines came in, agitated about an up-coming show at her gallery. Dorothea, listening to her outline the difficulty, was amused; we should all have such problems.
    “Dorothea,” Sally groaned, “what in the world am I going to do about Helen Macleary? She wants in, for God’s sake, with those junky patio bells of hers, as if they were art! It’s embarrassing. But now Betty is making noises about pulling her best stuff out if we don’t hang Helen’s things. It’s some weird alliance they have from when they were both sleeping with that Volvo mechanic in Las Trampas or wherever it was.”
    There was more: old gossip laced with new spice. Dorothea liked having people come talk with her at the bookstore. Seeing friends here was preferable to having them come out to the house, from which they could be very difficult to dislodge. Meantime, she did her reading in the store, a good thing since there was no more room in the house for books unless she invaded the studio, which she could not bring herself to do.
    Dorothea said, “I think you could mount Helen’s stuff very handsomely if you use all the bells she has, arranged in sized groups and hung together against one wall. A sort of waterfall effect.”
    “Ha,” Sally accused, “you mean make her junk into art for her.”
    “Why not? It’s a nice thing for one woman to do for another, and it would get Helen out of your hair and sweeten Betty for you. And I’ll bet some Texan with too much money in his jeans comes in and buys the whole lot.”
    “It’s kitsch and you know it; those bells.”
    “Come on, Sally, anything goes these days, including kitsch.”
    Sally grumbled something about standards. She yanked a thread from her raveled gray sweater. “Well,” she said, “it might work out. Thank God there’s somebody around here who keeps enough distance to be able to give a decent, unslanted opinion!”
    Dorothea felt a faint stab of discomfort at this: did other people think that she kept her distance, think that she was arrogant perhaps?
    Sally invited her to a pot-luck dinner the next week, which Dorothea declined without thinking.
    “Hermit,” Sally said affectionately, and she left, bookless but cheerful again.
    And of course it was true, to an extent. Once you started keeping to yourself, any time you accepted a social invitation anywhere that acceptance became charged with more significance than you could possibly intend.
    The wise woman of the bookstore, she chided herself, driving home that afternoon. But of strictly a private wisdom,