Women and Children First Read Free Page B

dusk, when she used to read and not notice till her husband would come in and say, “You’ll go blind.” She breathed harder, slightly panicky now as the white light turned an odd shrimp color, then deepened to a dull blood red, and a memory stung her before she quite knew what it was.
    It was something her husband once told her about his first astronomy job, as an observatory tour guide. The best part of that job, the part he never tired of, was helping the tourists see through the solar telescope, see the sun. It took quite a bit of focusing, and as the tourists struggled with it, he would look into their eyes and know exactly when they saw. Because at the moment they focused, the solar reflection flashed onto their irises: a brilliant, perfect, red disc of sun, shining at him from each eye.

Women and Children First
    G ORDIE LIKES TO SAY he can read the writing on the wall: Soon armies of upscale D.C. couples will be buying second homes in quaint Highland County, driving property values sky-high. They’ve already done the Blue Ridge. Janet can’t quite believe that the moving finger is writing about real estate, but she knows that for Gordie prophecy means advice. Janet rents a farmhouse in Highland and trucks in antiques which Gordie sells at American Beauty, his Georgetown shop. Gordie says that renters in Highland will soon be dinosaurs in museums; Janet should buy some failing crackerbarrel mom-and-pop store and turn it into American Beauty West.
    They have just smoked a joint in Gordie’s bedroom in the basement of his shop. They are sitting cross-legged on his carved four-poster bed, amid the Chinese knickknacks, the Oscar Wilde bearskin rug, the moth-eaten taxidermy Gordie says is illegal even to own, and looking through a carton of antique nursery-rhyme illustrations, the remnants of some disintegrated kids’ book that someone recognized as beautiful and worth saving, and which Janet found yesterday at an estate sale in Slate Mills.
    Janet turns a cardboard wheel, and beneath a cut-out window, a cow jumps over the moon. Next comes the laughing dog, then the hand-in-hand dish and spoon. Gordie says, “These are a gold mine. I can frame them—the perfect new-baby gift. Sure you don’t want to steal a couple for Kevin’s room?”
    “Kevin?” says Janet. “Gordie, this is ‘Hey Diddle Diddle.’ Kevin’s got Tina Turner on his wall.”
    “I had Tina Turner on my wall,” Gordie says. “Well, anyway, Ike.”
    Janet would like to keep the page she is holding, but feels that her work gives her daily instruction in letting go. It would be easy for her to accumulate objects, to be buried beneath them. Yesterday she wondered how the elderly brother and sister who had come to supervise the estate sale, the disposal of their parents’ things, could sell these pictures at all—their childhood fantasy images, a dollar for the whole box. She kept reminding herself that there was a lesson here, that basically they were right.
    “I’ll tell you something weird,” she says. “Last night I was spinning this ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ wheel, just looking at it. Kevin was upstairs asleep. After a while I heard him come down. He said he’d had a great dream about a flying cow.”
    Gordie says, “Could he have seen the picture?” and when Janet shakes her head, he says, “You really should get this checked out.” This sounds like medical advice, which in a way it is. Gordie has a friend at Georgetown Medical School who told him that someone there has gotten a small grant to study family ESP. What friend? wonders Janet. Gordie often uses the word to mean some guy he found attractive and maybe even had a long conversation with at a bar.
    Janet says she’ll ask Kevin; she knows he’ll never agree. Kevin takes it for granted that he and Janet have the same thoughts, he can’t understand why Janet gets so excited about it. Maybe he worries that thinking like a girl means you are one. He says that all kids and