But the idea of moving out of my parents’ house into a place of my own seemed impossible. I had no job, no money. Where could I go? I thought for a moment of moving here, with Sheldon, in his room, and the image of my parents alone in their parlor arose in my mind as if already it was a painful memory. “I don’t know what else I can do,” I said. “I can’t live alone now.” And he didn’t suggest I should come to live with him, just laughed and said that he guessed he’d have to wait until I was a librarian. Before I left he held me very gently in the way that would bring back all my trust when the fear began to get strong, and I kissed him all over his face and neck, kissed his beard and the hair growing over his ears, squeezed him hard with my arms and saw the faces of my parents behind my closed eyelids. “We’ll talk about it when I get back,” he said. “All right, when you get back.” Only he didn’t come back. I t was the first day of May when Ifainted in the women's restroom in the lecture hall. After that I was sick for a few days, and then in the mornings I would still feel dizzy and think it would turn my stomach until I ate some toast and felt better. But I didn’t think it was anything but the flu. My heart was sick too, of course, now that Sheldon was gone, and this was the stronger sickness that consumed my days. I still sat with my father evenings, turning my pages, but this was a ritual in which I no longer had faith, and he must have sensed it too for he no longer shared his atlas with me. I wasted the semester in a fierce sadness that never left my mind. I didn’t notice I had missed my April period, never thought that the tingling that sometimes came in my nipples was anything but despair, drew no connection with the lingering nausea that seemed, as much as anything, to be a bodily manifestation of my grief. But by I F YOU LISTEN TO THE WIND, REALLY LISTEN, YOU WILL FIND THAT IT BLOWS CONSTANTLY, IT NEVER STOPS, AND IT IS THE SOUND OF LIFE, A GREAT BREATHING THAT YOU CANNOT CHANGE, NOR CAN YOU CHANGE WHAT IT TAKES AWAY OR BRINGS BACK TO YOU. the end of May I realized with alarm that it might have been March since I last bled, and that my stomach, which had always been flat as a flagstone between my hip bones, was softening and loosening at the waist. At night in bed I would run my hands over my body, feeling for tender places and strange contours, then turn over and press my breasts and stomach against the mattress as if to flatten them. The sickness had passed, but I could hardly bear to eat, thinking each swallow would fatten my stomach more. Still, my clothes fit, and when I looked in a mirror fully dressed I could see no change. I stopped looking at myself naked now. The dread of what I might see was at the edge of my consciousness, and I pushed it back, simply, by not looking. Instead of bathing, I washed myself Clinton St. Quarterly 23
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