Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page A

He’d bought the cashews as a present to take her mind off her sunburn. By then Vera was starting to suspect that all those addictions Lowell had kicked had taken their cerebral toll. The miles those cashews had traveled from Ceylon to Mexico seemed suddenly like an infinitesimal fraction of the distance between her and Lowell.
    By the time Louise sent money, Vera and Lowell weren’t speaking any more than it took to arrange some vague plan to fly back to New York and try to work things out. Vera’s secret plan, which made her feel like one of those Mafia widows who marry their husband’s killer and wait twenty years for their middle-of-the-night revenge, was to try working things out without Lowell. But when their plane ran into a storm—two very long hours of freefall plunges and dead silence except for the clicking of rosaries—Lowell put his hand over Vera’s and told her stories of Royal Burmese Airways: how when the planes turn around for takeoff, the passengers pile out onto the runway and push; how a lady beside him found a chilled, semiconscious scorpion in her plastic-wrapped dinner tray. He’d just begun telling her how the Burmese pilots turn the signal lights out at night to save fuel when their plane limped into Kennedy and they looked at each other and knew that their love and bravery had brought them in for a landing.
    Peter Pan and Wendy, they flew hand in hand through baggage claim, customs, straight to the marriage-license bureau. By the weekend, they’d already found an apartment and conceived Rosalie. Lowell got a Christmas-rush job on the Gimbels loading dock. Vera went to work for the Downtowner , cutting self-help articles to fit snugly around the ads. Rosie was born. They fell in love with her and briefly again with each other. Then Vera went back to work while Lowell took care of the baby and started a screenplay that, she realizes now, was his domestic version of digging for Mayan treasure; the script, she vaguely remembers, was a kind of Preston Sturges comedy involving the Annual Tannana Ice Derby, when all Alaska bets on the minute and second the ice in the Tannana River will crack.
    She can almost graph those weeks: up on Wednesdays when Lowell bought his New York State Lottery ticket, down on Tuesdays when the winning numbers came out. She can almost smell the spoiled-milk odor of the Ninth Street Market Stop with its astronomical prices, its aisles narrow as arteries, clogged with old ladies stalled by the cranberry juice, its power to make you imagine it after closing, rats scrabbling over the cheddar cheese in the pale half-light of the dairy bin. She sees a procession of brown paper bags marching toward her like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s brooms, most filled with awful things that Lowell had bought and she wouldn’t touch with a stick: sauerkraut in salami-shaped packages, rainbow-hued breakfast cereals, meat in brine with fat globules waving like sea anemones, and cornflakes, always cornflakes, the dropped-from-the-sky-by-helicopter manna of Lowell’s Alaskan childhood. And still she kept sending him out, kept testing him. Because no matter how often it happened, it never seemed possible that he would really spend the money for Rosie’s diapers on some new brand of rolled anchovy.
    Yet now, as Vera goes for another bite of eggplant and finds she’s already finished, it seems just as unlikely that you could stop loving someone for being unable to go to the grocery. Vera can hardly believe it, but she knows This Week readers could: SHOOTS SPOUSE FOR SHOPPING SLIPUP . Shopping slipup. Vera tries saying it aloud a few times, then notices that the people around her have looked up from their sausage heroes and are staring at her strangely. How fitting that she should be taken for a screamer! How many screamers clutch grease-stained, crumpled letters just like hers! Vera stands and slides her tray into the stack with such excessive precision that anyone watching would think she