This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud Read Free Book Online Page B

That is the way it is when you are travelling, even at a moderate pace, in a moving vehicle. What will she think then? Daniel wonders this but knows, even as he wonders it, that it is something he will never ask.
    That is the pace they are travelling at. Daniel gets four words into the distance between the approach and theturn, and then he wonders how many more he can get in before his mother’s house. If the space between here and the house is enough. “I mean right now,” he says. “Are you thinking nothing … now ?” He waits. “How about,” and pauses again, “now!” he says, very quickly and loud. Maybe she even jumps a little.
    Before she smiles Daniel sees it. “Hey?” he asks. Encouraged. “Hey? Hey?” He says again, and takes a risk, and touches her. He takes a hand off the wheel and gives her a little poke on the shoulder to match his last “hey?”
    She sways a little toward the window, but doesn’t pull back from his touch, as he’d been afraid that she might. And she does, she smiles. At first she tries to hide it, but then she shifts in her seat, and tosses her hair over her shoulder to look at him—at Daniel—and then he can see that everything’s all right.
    â€œI didn’t think so,” Daniel says, to answer his own question.
    Once they make the turn, leaving what’s left of the Knutsen place behind, the land really does seem to just fall away. It doesn’t drop off, it just extends itself out—just stretches on and off, right out onto blankness. Especially this time of year, when all the colours are so muted and not even really colours at all but just a suggestion of the sort of colour they once had been. It just seems to go on for what, Daniel assumes, is as good as forever.
    He thinks this, and then feels happy that he does. Happy, too, when he realizes he has chosen to stay out here,in this part of the world, when it was not at all certain that that is what he would do. That he has chosen to stay in the Midwest, where a man can think thoughts like the one he has thought, just now, seems to him like the best kind of decision he could have made. He knows that on the East Coast and on the West, there is the imposition, always, of objects on other objects. The sky is interrupted by the hills, the hills by the trees, the trees by more hills, and houses, and so on. But out here, in the middle, it’s possible to find a section of the road to look out at and not see anything for miles. It is possible just to see and see until it gets hazy and you can’t see anymore—and even at that point, at the point where you stop being able to see any longer, it’s not because what’s out there is covered up by anything, it’s just—that’s the limit.

F RENCH L ESSONS

    Thereupon, the signifier (the third meaning) is not filled; it keeps in a permanent state of depletion (a term from linguistics that designates the empty, all-purpose verbs—for example, the verb faire ). We might also say, on the other hand—and this would be quite as true—that this same signifier is not empty (cannot empty itself); it maintains a state of perpetual erethism, desire not finding issue in that spasm of the signified that normally causes the subject to sink voluptuously back into the peace of nominations.
    â€”ROLAND BARTHES
    Â 
    For Sarah
    WHEN MARTHA FIRST arrived in Paris—before she met Charlie, and settled down, and her real life began—she stayed with blind old Madame Bernard on the Left Bank, in an old apartment with narrow rooms, which linked themselves like train cars all the way back. Madame took her coffee in bed, and at exactly 8 A.M . Martha would fix it and carry it in, to where Madame, already raised on her pillows, would be reading books in Braille, her fingers skimming the surface of the page, making a whistling noise. If not for the morning coffee, Martha perhaps never