Glass Grapes by Martha Ronk Read Free Book Online

and again, and when he was feeling especially generous, he put her there as well and gave her a tall glass of lemonade with ice cubes. After her initial extravagances, they agreed never to give one another anything other than these memories, these scenic postcards embroidered with memories that were more than what they actually remembered. On her birthday, however, he gave her a drawing he had made of a place he agreed they had both visited at one time or other during their childhoods. The world’s going to explode, he said. The black cones he’d drawn, superimposed in ink across the picture, were proof.
    He remembered the sounds of birds just before the storm hit. Not only that the light turned itself up a notch. The bird calls intensified and the silvery falling notes of the bird whose name neither of them remembered, only the sound, as if even that link, a name, were unimportant, less important than the thrill of remembering a sound as they both insisted that they did, staring into the space over the table. Do you remember, he’d say and she’d settle in.
    Sometimes she wanted that porch more than anything, more than their sexual encounters, always so quiet, so without sound or movement, and always she thought, not really the point of whatever they were up to, though what it was they were up to she couldn’t say anymore than she could stop. She thought the porch was screened in, everything looked out through a mesh of screen and as the conversation went on, the mesh closed up and darkened and she felt as if she were about to sleep and sleep in some easy way she hadn’t slept for years. She remembered the house as well, gray-green and massive with the porch running all around three sides. In the back was a small garden with beans mostly and leaves with red veins running through. Beets buried in the ground. She had no idea where this house was. She knew she’d seen it and she remembered coming around the left side, but whose it was and in what Ohio town, she didn’t know. It was a vivid memory that could more easily have belonged to someone else. She focused on his hands. They stood out as in portraits ofCivil War soldiers; they hung down and she could only watch them when he was so involved in his own story, he didn’t notice she was staring.
    He began. It dampens one’s spirits, he said, it comes long and pale, willow leaves across the plains. It’s inserted behind every leaf of every tree. It’s something like the shape of a hand though not exactly, and one can only watch and so one watches all afternoon. Sitting on the porch all afternoon, the light shifts from white to green to a pulsing absence of all color and I watched the coming light as if my limbs had turned into whatever waiting is. As if by waiting, I had become both absolute distrust and absolute certitude. And then the storm came, cool and breaking over the distance and then right at my feet, and I sat under cover of the porch and stared at the rain coming straight down and taking all the layers off my skin that had gathered all afternoon.
    She was fixed in his description though she didn’t know why she could listen to him in that way. Others she knew told stories that were cleverer. It had happened to her throughout her life, someone would be talking and a sort of trance would start to come, to move across her like a coming storm. Sometimes she shook it off, worried that someone would look at her and see how her skin pulled. It was the sound of a voice, his voice, as if the air were heavy and filled with insects, as if something were not about to happen, but just over and done with, and you could contemplate it full and on all sides as a three-dimensional object that floated in the space just in front of where you couldn’t take your eyes off it if you wanted.

    He began to give things away. At first she didn’t notice. Busy and with a project at work, busy with some semblance of regular life, she