Glass Grapes by Martha Ronk Read Free Book Online Page B

politely.
    She could feel the trance coming on. It was a cloud of dew, faded and in faded color. He was telling her about a place he wanted to visit. It was Kyoto he said, and he began to show her photographs of gardens, gardens with raked stone, one garden with a giant white cone in the center. The world is coming to an end, he said. I have to visit Japan before it happens. Was he joking, shewondered? He had barely enough money for rent and food and yet he was as serious as she’d ever seen him. In the corner of the room he had put three stones, a start of something perhaps. He said gardeners pull up every weed, every bit of green, creating a calm ocean of stillness, a replica of ripples just barely indented across the graveled surface. He turned the pages slowly and forced her to focus on the photograph. The book itself was tiny, a small edition meant to be carried in a pocket, so small that it was impossible to flatten the pages and almost impossible for more than one person to look at unless they moved awkwardly close together. His hand looked outsized; it was large in any case and always looked larger, she thought, because his arms were thin and long. She stared at the veins on his left hand, at the veins in the maple leaf, at the tiny book. It had never occurred to her to want to go anywhere, much less to a place as foreign and far off as Japan; it was so at odds with what she thought of as their history and she thought he had thought this too. Wasn’t he the one who was nostalgic, the one who talked on and on about that quite ordinary porch and the patch that produced summer squash and corn. What had these cold white arrangements to do with that, she thought, and found herself sunken and irritated.
    One day he burned the last book on the grate. She saw the cone of ashes, fragile and insistent and unswept. Next time the bed was gone. He was sleeping, he said, on a sort of bedroll, like being in the army. When wereyou ever in the army, she asked. He made them tea, but this time it was green and bitter and she couldn’t drink it, and he presented it to her as if he were moving in slow motion. And there was only one cup. He wanted to share it with her, insisted on his taking a sip followed by her taking a sip, but she didn’t want this tea he offered and the handle had been snapped off and she could only stare at the jagged spot.
    At the edge of the parking lot to the market there was a man wrapped in a dirty blanket. She saw how brown his skin was from sleeping in the sun. She got some groceries and parked at the far end of the parking lot before going home. The ice cream melted through the brown paper bag and left a triangular stain on the seat. She couldn’t stop thinking about the roll of a man and about what she should do.
    After a few weeks passed in which she had stayed away on purpose, she found herself thinking of black and white cones, of sand and stone and shapes, and it was all she could think of. Had he learned, she wondered, to fire a gun, and had he really been in the army? Why would the world come to an end just now and why would he think so? She thought about how easily things passed away. If she didn’t see him, perhaps these thoughts would go away; she thought maybe if she just didn’t see him or if she stopped putting her thumb into the slight indentation on the way up the stairs. I’ve stopped, she told herself. I’ll never do it again. It’s the same thing, however, she knew, it was the same always to do something or alwaysnot to do it. She didn’t go back. Sometimes she’d ask a casual question of someone, but no one ever responded in a way particular enough to let her know.
    She decided to paint her living room and moved all the furniture into the middle and covered it all with old sheets so that the room was transformed into a figure of sorts, one draped chair positioned against another. She bought paint and looked at everything rearranged. In the