Mudwoman Read Free Page B

as if another spoke through her mouth, and M.R. was the ventriloquist’s dummy.
    Quickly before Carlos could climb out of the car to open the door for her, M.R. opened the door for herself. She couldn’t seem to accustom herself to being treated with such deference and formality!—it wasn’t M.R.’s nature.
    M.R., whom excessive attention and even moderate flattery embarrassed terribly; as if, by instinct, she understood the mockery that underscores formality.
    “I’ll be right back! I promise.”
    She spoke cheerily, gaily. M.R. couldn’t bear for any employee—any member of her staff—to feel uncomfortable in her presence.
    As, teaching, when she’d approach a seminar room hearing the voices and laughter of the students inside, she’d hesitate to intrude—to evoke an abrupt and too-respectful silence.
    Her power over others was that they liked her. Such liking could only be volitional, free choice.
    She was walking along the embankment thinking these thoughts. By degrees the rushing water drowned out her thoughts—hypnotic, just slightly edgy. There is always a gravitational pull toward water: to rushing water. One is drawn forward, one is drawn in.
    Now. Here. Come. It is time. . . .
    She smiled hearing voices in the water. The illusion of voices in the water.
    But here was an impediment: the bank was tangled with briars, vines. An agonized twisting of something resembling guts. It wasn’t a good idea for M.R. to be walking in her charcoal-gray woolen trousers and her pinching-new Italian shoes.
    Yet if you looked closely, with a child’s eye, you could discern a faint trail amid the underbrush. Children, fishermen. Obviously, people made their way along the stream, sometimes.
    A nameless stream—creek, or river. Seemingly shallow, yet wide. A sprawl of boulders, flat shale-like rock. Froth of the hue and seeming substance of the most nouveau of haute cuisine —foam-food, pureed and juiced, all substance leached from it, terrible food! Tasteless and unsatisfying and yet M.R. had been several times obliged to admire it, dining at the Manhattan homes of one or another of the University’s wealthy trustees, who kept in their employ full-time chefs.
    The creek, or river, was much smaller than the Black Snake River that flowed south and west out of the southern Adirondacks, traversing Beechum County at a diagonal—the river of M.R.’s childhood. Yet—here was the identical river-smell. If M.R. shut her eyes and inhaled deeply, she was there.
    Here was an odor of something brackish and just slightly sour—rancid / rotted—decaying leaves—rich damp dark earth that sank beneath her heels as she made her way along the bank, shading her eyes against the watery glitter like tinfoil.
    Mingled with the river-smell was an odor of something burning, like rubber. Smoldering tires, garbage. A wet-feather smell. But faint enough that it wasn’t unpleasant.
    All that M.R. could see—on the farther bank of the stream—was a wall of dark-brick buildings with only a few windows on each floor; and beyond the windows, nothing visible. High on the sides of the buildings were advertisements—product names and pictures of—faces? human figures?—eroded by time and now indecipherable, lost to all meaning.
    “ ‘Mohawk Meats and Poultry.’ ”
    The words came to her. The memory was random, and fleeting.
    “ ‘Boudreau Women’s Gloves and Hosiery.’ ”
    But that had been Carthage, long ago. These ghost-signs, M.R. could not read at all.
    Carlos was surely correct, they weren’t far from the small city of Ithaca—which meant the vast sprawling spectacular campus of Cornell University where M.R. had been an undergraduate twenty years before and had graduated summa cum laude, in another lifetime. Yet she had no idea of the name of this small town or where exactly they were except south and west of Ithaca in the glacier-ravaged countryside of Tompkins County.
    It was a bright chilly October day. It was a day