Women and Children First by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online

the face, like teenage killers, Charlie Starkweather and his girl. Claire can hardly remember Dell’s face. He always had something in front of it—a can of beer, a camera. If he had only put it down and looked, he’d have seen what was going on. Anyone would have. In the photo, it’s early spring, the woods are full of musical names: trillium, marsh marigold, jack-in-the-pulpit.
    On the day they learned Claire was pregnant and went straight from the doctor’s to the marriage license bureau in Burlington, Joey pulled off the road on the way home and took Claire’s face in his hands and told her which animals mated for life. Whooping cranes, snow geese, macaws, she’s forgotten the rest. Now they no longer talk this way, or maybe it goes without saying. Claire’s stopped imagining other lives; if she could, she’d live this one forever. Though she knows it’s supposed to be dangerous to get too comfortable, she feels it would take a catastrophe to tear the weave of their daily routine. They’ve weathered arguments, and those treacherous, tense, dull periods when they sneak past each other as if they’re in constant danger of sneezing in each other’s faces. Claire knows to hold on and wait for the day when what interests her most is what Joey will have to say about it.
    Some things get better. Claire used to hate thinking about the lovers they’d had before; now all that seems as indistinct as Dell’s face. Though they’ve had eight years to get used to the fact of Poppy’s existence, they’re still susceptible to attacks of amazement that they’ve created a new human being. And often when they’re doing something together—cooking, gardening, making love-Claire comes as close as she ever has to those moments of pure alchemy, that communion Poppy and Miranda must share if they’re storing their pee in bottles.
    Soon they’ll get up and mix some marinade for the chickens they’ll grill outside later for Dottie and Raymond. But now Joey pours himself some coffee and they sit at the table, not talking. It is precisely the silence they used to dream of when Poppy was little and just having her around was like always having the bath water running or something about to boil over on the stove.
    First the back doors fly open and the girls jump out of the car and run up to Poppy’s room. Then Dottie gets out, then Raymond. From the beginning, Raymond’s reminded Claire of the tin woodsman in The Wizard of Oz , and often he’ll stop in the middle of things as if waiting for someone to come along with the oil can. He goes around to the trunk and takes out a tripod and something wrapped in a blanket which looks at first like a rifle and turns out to be a telescope.
    “Guess what!” When Raymond shouts like that, you can see how snaggletoothed he is. “There’s a meteor shower tonight. The largest concentration of shooting stars all year.”
    The telescope is one of the toys Raymond’s bought since his paintings started selling. Raymond’s success surprises them all, including Raymond. His last two shows were large paintings of garden vegetables with skinny legs and big feet in familiar dance situations. It still surprises Claire that the New York art world would open its heart—would have a heart to open—to work bordering on the cartoonish and sentimental. But there’s something undeniably mysterious and moving about those black daikon radishes doing the tango, those little cauliflowers in pink tutus on point before an audience of sleek and rather parental-looking green peppers. And there’s no arguing with Raymond’s draftmanship or the luminosity of his color; it’s as if Memling lived through the sixties and took too many drugs. What’s less surprising is that there are so many rich people who for one reason or another want to eat breakfast beneath a painting of dancing vegetables.
    Claire has a crush on Raymond; at least that’s what she thinks it is. It’s not especially intense or very