In Love and Trouble Read Free Page A

my deliverance is at hand!
    page 24
    Mordecai did not come today. I sit in the arbor writing down those words and my throat begins to close up. I am nearly strangled by my fear.
    page 56
    I have not noticed anything for weeks. Not Ruel, not the house. Everything whispers to me that Mordecai has forgotten me. Yesterday Ruel told me not to go into town and I said I wouldn’t, for I have been hunting Mordecai up and down the streets. People look at me strangely, their glances slide off me in a peculiar way. It is as if they see something on my face that embarrasses them. Does everyone know about Mordecai and me? Does good loving show so soon? … But it is not soon. He has been gone already longer than I have known him.
    page 61
    Ruel tells me I act like my mind’s asleep. It is asleep, of course. Nothing will wake it but a letter from Mordecai telling me to pack my bags and fly to New York.
    page 65
    If I could have read Mordecai’s scribble pad I would know exactly what he thought of me. But now I realize he never once offered to show it to me, though he had a chance to read every serious thought I ever had. I’m afraid to know what he thought. I feel crippled, deformed. But if he ever wrote it down, that would make it true.
    page 66
    Today Ruel brought me in from the grape arbor, out of the rain. I didn’t know it was raining. “Old folks like us might catch rheumatism if we don’t be careful,” he joked. I don’t know what he means. I am thirty-two. He is forty. I never felt old before this month.
    page 79
    Ruel came up to bed last night and actually cried in my arms! He would give anything for a child, he says.
    “Do you think we could have one?” he said.
    “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
    He began to kiss me and carry on about my goodness. I began to laugh. He became very angry, but finished what he started. He really does intend to have a child.
    page 80
    I must really think of something better to do than kill myself.
    page 81
    Ruel wants me to see a doctor about speeding up conception of the child.
    “Will you go, honey?” he asks, like a beggar.
    “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
    page 82
    Today at the doctor’s office the magazine I was reading fell open at a story about a one-legged woman. They had a picture of her, drawn by someone who painted the cows orange and green, and painted the woman white, like a white cracker, with little slit-blue eyes. Not black and heavy like she was in the story I had in mind. But it is still my story, filled out and switched about as things are. The author is said to be Mordecai Rich. They show a little picture of him on a back page. He looks severe and has grown a beard. And underneath his picture there is that same statement he made to me about going around looking for Truth.
    They say his next book will be called “The Black Woman’s Resistance to Creativity in the Arts.”
    page 86
    Last night while Ruel snored on his side of the bed I washed the prints of his hands off my body. Then I plugged in one of his chain saws and tried to slice off his head. This failed because of the noise. Ruel woke up right in the nick of time.
    page 95
    The days pass in a haze that is not unpleasant. The doctors and nurses do not take me seriously. They fill me full of drugs and never even bother to lock the door. When I think of Ruel I think of the song the British sing: “Ruel Britannia”! I can even whistle it, or drum it with my fingers.
    SEPTEMBER, 1961
    page 218
    People tell my husband all the time that I do not look crazy. I have been out for almost a year and he is beginning to believe them. Nights, he climbs on me with his slobber and his hope, cursing Mordecai Rich for messing up his life. I wonder if he feels our wills clashing in the dark. Sometimes I see the sparks fly inside my head. It is amazing how normal everything is.
    page 223
    The house still does not awaken to the pitter-patter of sweet little feet, because I religiously use the Pill. It is the only spot of