Peaceable Kingdom by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page A

that she had married a man to whom she looked like Tinker Bell. An unpleasant buzzing in her head reminded her of Gabor’s painting. Was the miracle the appearance of the bees or the getting them out of the baby? She said, “It was just a feeling I had that something was telling me something.”
    “Telling you something?” said Jerry. “Please. Keep your feet on the ground.”

RUBBER LIFE
    T HAT WINTER I READ a lot and worked in the public library. A fog settled in on my heart like the mists that hung in the cranberry bogs and hid the ocean so totally that the sound of the waves could have been one of those records to help insomniacs fall asleep. Always I’d been happy when the summer people left, but that fall I couldn’t look up when the geese flew overhead and I avoided the streets on which people were packing their cars. Always I’d felt that the summer people were missing something, missing the best part of something, but now it seemed that I was the one being left as they went off, not to their winter office life, but to a party to which I had not been asked, and I felt like you do when the phone doesn’t ring and no mail comes and it’s obvious no one wants you. Of course I had reason to feel that way. But oddly, I hadn’t noticed. How strange that you can be satisfied with your life till the slamming of some stranger’s car trunk suddenly wakes you up.
    I was trying to be civilized, cooking fresh produce till the market ran out, although it was only for me. The house I was caretaking had a microwave oven that seemed important to resist. The microwave surprised me. It was a colonial whaler’s house, white clapboard with a widow’s walk, so perfectly restored and furnished so obsessively with period pieces that all the comforts of modern life were tucked away grudgingly in some hard-to-find wing or upstairs. There was a cherrywood table on which I read while I ate. I had promised myself: no television till 10:30, when Love Connection came on. I loved that show with its rituals of video dating, its singles who rarely loved each other as much as they’d loved each other’s images on TV.
    The house was supposed to be haunted—but so was every house in our town; a resident ghost could double what you could ask for summer rent. The Carsons, who were returning from Italy in the spring, told me their house had a ghost they’d never seen or heard; they could have been referring to some projected termite problem that never materialized. I didn’t listen too hard. I’d heard similar stories in several previous houses, and such was my mood that fall that it depressed me to admit that ghosts were yet another thing that I no longer believed in.
    I read through the evenings and weekends. I found out how not to OD. When I got tired there were books I could read for refreshment, fat non-fiction bestsellers detailing how rich people contract-murdered close relatives. I skimmed these books as fast as I could and let their simple sentences wash through my brain like shampoo.
    I couldn’t read at work, except on quiet mornings. We were surprisingly busy. Our town had a faithful daytime library crowd—young mothers, crazies, artists, retirees, the whole range of the unemployed and unattached. The best part of my job was seeing them come in from the briny winter cold, into the shockingly warm, bright library where the very air seemed golden with the fellowship and grateful presence of other people.
    At first I read mostly new books, picked indiscriminately from the cartons that came in. Most of them were boring, but I liked knowing how to live with tennis injuries and diseases I hoped never to live with. I preferred these to books about why women lose men, books that made me so anxious I’d fall asleep reading and wake up long before dawn. It was a winter of lengthy biographies: lives that seemed longer than lives lived in actual time. I read a book about Edith Wharton and Henry James, and then I read Edith Wharton. I