Women and Children First by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page B

villains after they get turned to glass and smashed to smithereens.”
    “Oh, no,” say the girls, and hide their faces against Raymond’s long legs.
    Claire’s tensed, as if Raymond’s infringed on Joey’s right to name things, or worse, is making fun of him. But Joey’s laughing, he likes Raymond’s names as much as the real ones. Claire steps up to the telescope and aims it at the thin crescent moon, at that landscape of chalk mountains and craters like just-burst bubbles. But all she sees is the same flat white she can see with her naked eye. Something’s wrong with the telescope, or with her. The feeling she gets reminds her of waking up knowing the day’s already gone wrong but not yet why, of mornings when Poppy’s been sick in the night, or last summer when Joey’s mother was dying.
    By now the others are all lying on the hillside looking for shooting stars. There aren’t any, not yet. Claire wonders if Dottie is listening to the inner silence, or thinking of past lives; if Raymond is inventing more constellations. She can’t imagine what Joey’s thinking. She herself can’t get her mind off Jeanette the electrician and her boyfriend, drinking wintergreen tea and checking that sliver of moon to see if this is a safe night for love.
    On the way in, Joey says, “Lying out there, I remembered this magazine article I read years ago, about Jean Genet at the ’68 Democratic convention in Chicago. The whole time, he kept staring at the dashboard of the car they were driving him in. And afterwards, when they asked him what he thought about the riots, the beatings and so forth, he just shrugged and said, ‘What can you expect from a country that would make a car named Galaxy?’”
    Over coffee, the conversation degenerates into stories they’ve told before, tales of how the children tyrannize and abuse them, have kept them prisoner in their own homes for years at a time. The reason they can talk like this is that they all know: the children are the light of their lives. A good part of why they stay here is that Vermont seems like an easy place to raise kids. Even their children have visionary names: Poppy, Miranda. O brave new world!
    When Claire first moved here with Dell, she commuted to New York, where she was working as a freelance costume designer. She likes to tell people that the high point of her career was making a holster and fringed vest and chaps for a chicken to wear on Hee Haw . Later she got to see it on TV, the chicken panicky and humiliated in its cowboy suit, flapping in circles while Grandpa Jones fired blanks at its feet and yelled, “Dance!” Soon it will be Halloween and Claire will sew Poppy a costume. So far she’s been a jar of peanut butter, an anteater with pockets full of velveteen ants, Rapunzel. Last fall Claire made her a caterpillar suit with a back that unzipped and reversed out into butterfly wings. Poppy’s already told her that this year she wants to be new wave, so all Claire will have to do is rip up a T-shirt and buy tights and wraparound shades and blue spray-on washable hair dye.
    Dottie is telling about the girls making vanishing cream when Joey pretends to hear something in the garden and excuses himself and goes out. Dottie says she wants to stay up for the meteor shower but is feeling tired so she’ll lie down awhile on the living-room couch.
    Claire and Raymond are left alone at the table. It takes them so long to start talking, Claire’s glad her crush on Raymond will never be anything more; if they had to spend a day in each other’s company, they’d run out of things to say. Still, it’s exciting. Raymond seems nervous, too.
    Finally he asks how her day was, and Claire’s surprised to hear herself say, “Pretty awful.” She hadn’t meant to complain, nor had she thought her day was so awful. Now she thinks maybe it was. “Nothing really,” she says. “One little thing after another. Have you ever had days when you pick up a pen and the phone