Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Read Free Book Online

became my adult friends: Nina, Gabrielle, Esther, George. I married Victor and we whispered a lot in bed, on all sorts of delicious as well as grueling subjects. The unexamined life is not worth living, Victor quoted to me as we were falling in love. Impressive. But is the examined one? That is what I wonder.
    My parents, who carried so many heavy things in their arms, in time weakened and died. When I think of them now, it is mostly their last years I remember, the specific declines in their bodies. But once in a while, in an unlooked-for flash, I see them as they were that summer at the brown house, my mother short and soft in her long yellow nightgown, barefoot, her cheeks ruddy and her straight cropped hair—dark like mine, dark like Vivian’s—still rumpled from bed, her face unlined and clear-eyed, her suntanned hands bearing the knife to the vegetable garden, deftly twisting the zucchini on their stalks without hurting them; my father, lean and hairy in his navy trunks, beginning to have a bald spot in his light brown hair but still able to awe us with a taut bicep, poised on top of the dune effortlessly holding umbrella, kites, rubber rafts, beach towels, paying tribute to the ocean he loved so well. These flashes are given to me, simple gifts, as in the Shaker song my son Alan used to play by ear: “And when we find ourselves In the place that is right We will be in the valley Of love and delight.”
    I understand now why Evelyn liked the gentleness of the bay, and I marvel that I should have been so intrepid so young, inviting those rough waves to tumble me and rising laughing and ready for more. My sister crossed the ocean to live among mountains. I wish she had never left. I have never felt such rightness as I did that summer, when our proclivities and declivities complemented each other as neatly as the broken halves of a bowl. I would like to go back to that time. Not to the brown house itself, but to that condition, which though it partook so thoroughly of the natural cycles seemed utterly static and safe; a condition of harmony vastly inclusive yet lived against three broad, clear stripes; a condition of being intact and guarded by a wise and providential power. I can still see the brown house and those twenty-one days like one long sandy day, and hear my father explaining about the paths and the cycles. I suppose new paths are still being made every summer by the feet of people climbing up and down. I suppose nature is a cycle to which we contribute our lives and deaths and should do so willingly, but sometimes I just don’t want to be a part of it at all. Everything had the chance to be so beautiful, and look what has happened.

Schooling, 1957
    In college we took for granted our private distortions and perversities. They were not yet called “hang-ups.” We might deplore them as we deplored a birthmark or a thickness of the ankle, but that they were ours no less inseparably we never doubted. The fluid issues, open to constant reexamination, were ideas. They drew our fervent emotions like pipers charming rats. Over chocolate chip cookies in the small hours, we thrilled to Plato’s parable of prisoners in the cave, sadly debarred from the light of true wisdom. Through the grimy glass of iron-grilled dormitory windows we too—Nina, Gabrielle, Esther, and I—watched shadows, cast by intermittent traffic under Broadway’s street lights, and nodded sagely. Girlish still, we played with our ideas like jacks, feeling their cold hardness, pressing our fingertips against their sharp points and round protuberances, testing how many we could scoop up at once and cradle in our palms—twosies, threesies, foursies! Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Heraclitus—their names as exotic as their accounts of the nature of the universe. The earth is made of water. The earth is made of air. No, the earth is made of the four elements mingling, crowding each other out in a struggle for preeminence. No. “This universe,