Things Invisible to See by Nancy Willard Read Free Book Online Page B

pink ribbed underpants and sleeveless undershirts—it was a joke among Helen and Vicky and Nell while they were growing up that all the women in their family together hadn’t enough to fill one bra.
    “Let’s put your things away in the drawers, shall we?” said Helen.
    But Grandma wanted nothing put away. She hung all her clothes on hooks at the back of the closet door. “I want everything out where I can see it,” she said.
    The radiators began to pound and clang. By evening a suffocating heat filled the house.
    At bedtime Grandma locked her door. Unlocked it. Called out to Helen, who was already in bed, “Did you lock the door?”
    “I locked it,” Helen called back.
    “Good. I just wanted to be sure.”
    The door of the guest room closed. The dresser bumped against it. Next came the scraping and dragging of the chest of drawers. But was the front door locked? Patiently, relentlessly, she dragged the dresser away from the door, opened it, and shouted into the hall, “Did you lock the front door?”
    “I locked it,” replied Helen.
    She was lying in the dark, her borrowed copy of Outward Bound open to her place, face down on her chest. When Grandma was asleep, she would turn on the light and finish the play. It wasn’t the sort of play she would have chosen, but she wasn’t on the committee to choose what the play-reading group would present every month. At least nobody swore in this one; she was thankful for that. She could hardly bring herself to say “damn” in front of the other women. Only Debbie Lieberman loved to swear and throw herself into the naughty speeches.
    I’ll have to drop out of the group now that I’ve got Clare and Grandma to take care of, she thought.
    She would miss that group. She would especially miss the women not connected with the University—women like those she’d grown up with—whose company she preferred to that of the other faculty wives.
    She climbed out of bed, tiptoed over to Hal, reached across his chest, and snapped off the radio he used to put himself to sleep. He slept like a pharaoh laid out for the voyage to the hereafter; not a wrinkle perturbed his blankets. In college, halfway through his first night in the dorm, his roommate had waked him and then apologized: “I’m terribly sorry—I thought you were dead.”
    She pulled the covers close to her chin. Hal liked fresh air, and he opened the window wide, even in winter; but the window opened over her bed, not his, and she felt the full force of the breeze. He was twenty years older than Helen, and there was no use trying to change him. She never knew his age till they got the marriage license, and she’d hardly ever thought of it since, except to marvel at the difference between their ages: when I was born, he was graduating from the University. When I was starting school, he was finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard. If anybody had told him, “You’re going to marry a kindergartener from Corunna …”
    She felt at the foot of her bed for the comforter and pulled that over her, too.
    Dear God, help Clare walk.
    She thought she ought to say more, but she never prayed for more than one thing at a time, so as not to appear greedy. Besides, it was hard for her to hold more than one problem in her head at once. She prayed only for other people, and she never prayed for anything she felt was downright impossible.
    The Lord’s Prayer and a poem she’d learned in Sunday school: these were the only formal prayers she knew by heart.
    Once she’d heard a man on the radio urge all his listeners to pray for peace at the same time—he gave them the time and the words of the prayer—and he assured them that he would be praying too. A thousand prayers coming in at once would flood the mailrooms of heaven. A thousand identical prayers would sound like one large prayer and be easier to understand than a clutter of small ones, and God would notice and would incline His ear.
    But maybe God would like the poem best? Oh, I