The Ladies' Lending Library Read Free

waiting to be discovered, lies the paperback she’d sat up reading until two. She shoves
Death by Desire
into the drawer, to the very back, where no one will find it unless he’s looking for it. Now the night table’s all innocence, showing the nicks in the dull-white paint, paint thick like her own skin, skin of a thirty-nine-year-old woman who’s had too many children too quickly. Bare, dull-white paint with something marring the finish—a bead broken off a dress: if she were in the city right now she’d say a small, jet bead. Though, it’s not black at all, but dark red—she pushes at it with her finger, and legs spring out; it waddles off.
Sonechko.
The children have another name for it, an English name. They sing a nursery rhyme, too; she knows what the words are but not what they mean. She understands nothing of this childhood she’s given them by this miracle she’s never quite believed in—a new life in a new country. Their skipping games, the poems they learn at school, the cards they make for Christmas, birthdays—foreign territory in which she’ll never be at home. The very idea of a card for a birthday, of wasting something as precious as paper!
    Flat on her stomach, face pressed into the dough of the pillow, Sonia plays at suffocation. Tonight Max will arrive with Marta and there’ll be endless rearranging. She’ll have to send Darka to the sleep-house for the week: Katia and Laura can’t be trusted together, they are always at each other’s throats. Why can’tthey get on?—if only she’d had a sister, someone to talk with, confide in, how different her life might have been. All the things she could never tell, even to Olya: hurts and shocks from the village in the lost, the long-gone country. Or the most private things, secrets crawling up and down the inside of her skin. How tonight he’ll walk in while she’s sorting dirty laundry for the next day’s wash, will plant a kiss on her neck, and she’ll stiffen; before she says a word he’ll feel her body closing up against him, and it will start all over again. He’ll tell her how exhausted he is, fighting traffic the whole way up, as if he were a front-line soldier. And she’ll answer back, without meaning it to spurt out the way it always does: “Do you think it’s any picnic for me up here, with four kids, and Darka too—I can’t take my eyes off her for a second. And now you bring me your witch of a sister. What am I supposed to do with her? I’ll go to the office and
you
stay here with her
—you
look after her and the kids all week, see how
you
like it.”
    And he will, yes, how could it ever be otherwise, he’ll turn away from her in the hallway where she’s getting out the sheets to make up Marta’s bed. He’ll kiss whichever of the children are still awake, take them out on the lawn to look at the stars, not even thinking to ask if she’ll come out with them, because of course she can’t, she has a million things to do before they can all go to sleep for the night. And the children will leap to him like fish, like sunfish to a scrap of bacon, even Laura who loves no one and wallows in her own misery; the children he almost never sees and who love him all the more because of it, more than they’ll ever love her. And then, once she’s got them all into bed—which they’ll fight like little Tatars after the excitement of being out under the stars, laughing and shoving each other till Marta will call out, in her vulture’s croak, “Can’t you keep those childrenunder control?”—then he’ll come to bed at last, smelling of the city and the cigar he’s smoked out on the porch. For the children and the stars are only an excuse to indulge himself. He knows how she hates the stink of cigars.
    He’ll undress in the dark, roll in like a driftwood log beside her, the sag in the mattress pushing their bodies together, no matter how hard she tries to keep to her side. Tonight he’ll be too tired, highway-tired, much