Private Life by Jane Smiley Read Free Book Online

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    about a mile and a half, but there was no question of that. When her grandfather drove the
    buggy, he took the western way around, which was more or less level and about three
    miles, in order to save the horses. That would have been her more sensible choice, but in
    fact she turned southeast, toward the bottomlands, because, after a flat stretch of some
    quarter of a mile, there was, first, a long curving hill around Old Saley's Bluff, then a
    long rise, and then the turn toward town. At this point, the road rose slightly again, and
    after that there was a set of steep dips and rises through Walker's Woods, followed by
    another flat stretch down Front Street (and right past the office of the newspaper). By this
    late in the year, the road had frosted and was pretty hard, though not icy. She
    congratulated herself on her good sense.

    Pedaling straight forward was a new experience for her, and she understood at
    once how Dora had gotten all the way around the famous Forest Park in an afternoon.
    Covering distance in this solitary manner was marvelously intoxicating. The brown fields
    and the blue sky were all around; they seemed to dissipate crisply and evenly into all the
    distances--forward, backward, upward. The fields were darkly defined by the denuded
    brown trunks of hickories, black walnuts, and oaks. In Mr. Jones's pasture, across the
    fence from John Gentry's hay field, five or six white hogs were grunting and rooting for
    acorns; the noises they made had the clarity of gongs ringing in the air. And then she
    went down. She gripped the handlebars and felt the cold wind lift her hair and, it seemed,
    her cheeks and eyebrows. The brim of her hat folded back, and the hat itself threatened to
    fly off her head, but though she gave this a passing thought, she didn't, could not, stop.
    The wheels made a brushing, clicking noise in the dirt of the road, and she knew
    instinctively to keep going no matter how much such going now shocked her. Tears
    poured down her cheeks, and then she was halfway up the next slope--inertia--she knew
    what it was called. But she slowed again, and then she was stopped and the bicycle tilting
    to the side. Truly, riding a bicycle was living life at a much faster pace, and very
    stimulating. She dismounted and pushed the bicycle up the remaining expanse of the
    slope. She was now two farms away from Gentry Farm. She had forgotten this part of it-that she would be a solitary traveler for the first time in her life. She remounted the
    bicycle and pedaled for the next few furlongs, possibly as much as a mile. Everything
    about the effort was more difficult than she had expected, and fairly soon she was
    breathing hard. She rarely if ever had done that before in her whole life, given her lazy
    nature and her mother's views about proper female employments. She knew, of course,
    that she could turn the bicycle around and go back to the farm, but she also knew that she
    was more than halfway to town. The long slopes behind her seemed to grow longer,
    steeper, and more arduous with this thought, and then she was to the series of dips into
    Walker's Woods.

    The pleasure of these dips, which she had happily foreseen, was that from this
    direction, south, they gradually diminished toward town. There were three of them. She
    pedaled hard into the first, and over the edge. She lifted her feet out to either side, and
    down she went, holding tight to the handlebars. She aimed, with some nervousness, for
    the bridge at the bottom of the hill and then was across it. After the bridge, the trees
    thickened and the light grew dimmer. Her momentum carried her fast up the first bit of
    the next hill, and she managed to resume pedaling more quickly than she had, and so
    pedaled to the top, back into the sunlight. The drop of the second dip was immediate;
    down she went. This time, she started pedaling as soon as she got to the lowest point of
    the road, and once again managed to get up the entire hill before