Patterns of Swallows (7 page)

She didn't get thrown in the
lake that day. Instead, he carried her back up on the beach and
placed her gently on the driftwood log.

That day at the lake was the
first time they had touched. On that day, they both knew their
relationship was changing.

Summer was longer than usual in
Arrowhead that year, but when fall arrived, it set the valley ablaze.
The vibrancy of the changing colours was set off by the dull
constancy of the evergreens and the fresher green of the resting
alfalfa fields. Gold was the colour of the season, and all the
poplars and birches wore it. The maples defied fashion and flaunted
their flame-tipped foliage proudly.

On the mountainsides, the
larches made patches of rust, like Scottish heather, against the
deep, mountain blue. The mixture of sun and cloud from the changing
weather revealed previously-unseen contours and features and colours
in the mountains. In fall, a certain interplay of light and shadow
brings out in stark relief the ridges, the mountain valleys, and even
the trees on the mountains.

It was fall as fall should be.

Since leaving
Arrowhead, Ruth hadn't felt
fall
.
Since coming back, it was as though she was arousing from a kind of
sleep to all the dimly-remembered-but-certainly-not-forgotten
childhood feelings of fall-ness that found her in unsuspecting
moments – splitting kindling in the cool of the evening with
the smell of woodsmoke in the air, polishing an apple picked from the
tree by the house, mixing up a batch of pumpkin for pies on the old
cook stove, watching the wild geese cutting a noisy, southbound V
across the white sky as she took in the washing. Life felt like it
was supposed to again. Or like it was supposed to though it never
had before.

There was the other element in
her life now that heightened her sensibilities. Even the old joys
were new, and the new joys were birthed every minute, freshly-minted,
as though no one had ever heard of them before, much less laid eyes
on them or held them in trembling hands. They could only have been
made just for her.

*
* *

Graham asked her to his church's
fall hay ride. It was the church his parents attended. Graham
attended nominally if not usually in fact.

Ruth had never been asked by
Graham to anything that might qualify as a family or church function.
This was definitely a church function though anyone was welcome.

Ruth knew Graham's parents
wouldn't be coming to the hay ride. She suspected it was the reason
this was the first church event Graham had asked her to.

She recognized most of the faces
on the hay wagon. People smiled at her pleasantly enough and a few
greeted her by name. The people here were being nicer than they
generally were when she met them elsewhere, she thought, and she
decided it was because they were "at church," even though
it was just a hay ride. Not that any of them were ever nasty to her.
Just usually a little more negligent. Not quite so much going out
of the way to be extra-friendly.

The night held the magic only
fall nights hold. It was chilly with just a sliver of a moon,
garlanded in wisps of clouds.

The hay wagon passengers sang
songs Ruth didn't know. One man had brought a guitar and could play
it reasonably well. Kids and teenagers took turns pushing or pulling
each other off the back of the wagon to land in the scratchy,
still-green alfalfa in the field below. Then they had to run,
laughing and shouting, to catch up to the horse-drawn wagon.

Ruth and Graham sat close,
barely touching, just enough to feel the warmth from each other. The
warmth was welcome. Ruth should have worn a heavier jacket for the
fall night air.

One of the younger boys Ruth
didn't know caught Graham unaware and pushed him off. Graham ran to
catch the wagon, and Ruth extended her hand to him, laughing at his
failing efforts to get one foot onto the edge of the moving wagon.

"Laugh, will ya?" he
said, and gave her hand a quick jerk with his weight behind it. As
she tumbled, he dropped with her, shielding her from the ground with
his body.

They rolled twice, and Ruth
looked up into Graham's face in the semi-darkness, as close as it had
ever been to hers. There didn't seem to be any great rush to catch
the hay wagon on his part. She knew there wasn't on hers.

He touched her face and hair.

"You're beautiful," he
told her.

The words went to her head like
wine.

"It's the moonlight,"
she told him.

"What moonlight?"

"Well then, it's the
moonshine."

He laughed. "I haven't
touched a drop tonight. It's just you. That's all."

"You're beautiful," he
repeated. Then he kissed her. Just gently.

Afterward, he pulled her to her
feet and, taking her hand, ran with her toward the wagon. But by
that time, the wagon was too far away to catch.

They slowed to a walk.

"Never mind," he said.
"There's a bonfire after and hot chocolate and marshmallows.
We'll walk back to the house and be there for the bonfire before
anyone else gets there. We'll cut across the field and beat them
back."

"Won't people wonder where
we went?" Ruth asked.

"Let 'em," Graham
said.

They walked in silence, hand in
hand, heading for the lights from the windows of the farm house and
the spot of wavering light that was the bonfire.

When the rest had joined them
around the bonfire, in spite of the mug of hot chocolate Ruth cupped
in her hands, she couldn't stop shivering. When her teeth began to
chatter, Graham noticed and slid an arm around her shoulders. No one
seemed to be observing them.

"You're freezing," he
said. "Take my coat."

"No, I'm not cold.
Honestly!"

"Oh yeah! You're not
c-c-c-cold! That's not very believable."

"It's not the cold,"
Ruth confessed.

"Oh!" Graham said,
getting it. But he put his coat around her shoulders anyway.

*
* *

A
complaint we women hear constantly from men is that they can't
understand us. Implicit in the complaint lies the belief that women
(not
a
woman, but
women
,
taken as a mass) should be understandable – that there is
surely a formula if only there were some Einstein who could unlock
it.

The hope of a formula is a
forlorn one. There are few constants in deciphering the woman
question, but there are a few. The first one to learn and commit to
memory is that there is no formula.

The inherent problem lies in the
fact that women are all different. Not only are women different from
men (obviously!), but every woman is different from every other
woman. And every woman is different from herself ... just as a river
may be the same river for thousands of years but the water flowing
over the same rock is never the same water from one moment to the
next.

We women find the men just as
hard to understand. It's the fact of the patterns themselves, the
fact of the Man-formulas, that baffles us. Humans and formulas, by
their very natures, seem as incompatible to women as rivers and
formulas.

There is one predictability to
be counted on in women, however. I've never met an exception. This
predictability is a commonality that unites the human race. This is
a rock over which all our rivers flow.

We all have a craving for
beauty.

Yet those cravings take
different forms. Men crave to have what is beautiful. Women crave
to be what is beautiful.

And that fact may be the closest
thing to the Woman-formula that any Einstein will ever discover.

*
* *

The lighter-than-air feeling
stayed with Ruth for days afterward.

Pulling her hair up for work,
she couldn't help examining her face a little closer in the
rust-spotted mirror of her bathroom's medicine chest the morning
after the hay ride. What had Graham seen to call beautiful?

Oh, stop
thinking about it. It's just the kind of thing a fellow says when he
wants to kiss a girl because she happens to be there and he thinks he
should,
she told herself, but she couldn't get her thoughts to behave. She
kept on with her examination, turning this way and that, trying to
see herself from all angles. What did Graham see when he looked at
her?

There was an ugly kind of
beauty, or perhaps a beautiful kind of ugliness, to her face. She
saw it for the first time. It was a face full of angles and bones
and character, but perhaps there was something in the height of the
cheekbones and the molding of the skin around them when seen from the
right angle. Maybe something in the lift of the head. Maybe
something in the darkness of the eyes.

The way she usually wore her
hair, up and pulled back away from her face, did nothing to soften
its angles, she knew. Mother always told her with hair like hers she
shouldn't bob it. With its kinks, if it was short, it would never
lie flat against her head. It would turn into a mushroom of frizz.
Not flattering.

She stopped putting her hair up
and let it fall where it lay, nearly to her waist. Maybe with a
different style, like the ones in the movie magazines ... They had
permanents now that could take out natural curl with its wilfulness
and put the curls right where they were supposed to be. What would
she look like with one of those hair styles? Now she had to know.

After work, she stopped into
Goldilocks' Salon on the off-chance they might be able to fit her in
right then. Marigold Simpson, the owner, had an opening and got her
into the cutting chair. Mari had been eyeing Ruth's hair for months,
itching for a chance to do something with it that would flatter
Ruth's features. It would be a challenge she'd enjoy.

"Are you nervous, Ruth?"

"A little."

"Well, don't be. You'll
look great. But don't do this if you're not sure. It will be a big
change. It's a lot of hair to go all at once."

"No, I'm sure. I trust
you. Oh, and Mari? You'll have time for the permanent today, too?
I don't want it cut but not permed. You know what kind of a
permanent I'm looking for, right?"

"We'll give you the works
today. You'll leave her looking like a new woman. You want to look
like the picture of Carole Lombard over there, except not blonde.
Got it. I think that's a style that should work well for your hair
and face. And it won't be so short as to be shocking to you."

"Don't worry about shocking
me. I'm looking for a little shock."

When it was all over, Ruth
couldn't stop looking. All the way down the street, the shop windows
enticed her eyes, not for the goods they sold, but for the reflection
of the person in them she barely recognized. But what would Graham
say?

When he saw her that evening, he
said, "What'd you do?"

"It's a cut and a
permanent. Do you like it?"

"I don't know. It takes
some getting used to. I liked your long hair. It made you stand
out."

"Well, get used to it,"
she snapped, more disappointed than she liked to admit. After all,
the new style wasn't for Graham.

"
I
like my new hair," she informed him with more emphasis and
volume than was necessary.

*
* *

From the time of the hay ride
on, though going steady was still not discussed between them, Graham
no longer dated anyone else. They had a tacit understanding. It was
turning serious.

In those gorgeous fall days,
they did a lot of driving, watching the progression of the colours,
watching the leaves fall, watching the branches bare, watching autumn
make way for winter, watching things change. At least Ruth watched.
Graham mostly drove or gave her instructions as she was driving,
though she barely needed them any longer. Sometimes they took his
pickup; sometimes her new, used car. The drives were ostensibly for
her to practice her fledgling, car-handling skills, but the driving
sessions usually ended in kissing sessions. With the change in their
relationship, it was all Graham seemed to want to do when he had Ruth
alone.

It wasn't that Ruth didn't want
to kiss him. It was just that she missed doing other things.

"Not right now!" she
told him firmly one day, putting up one hand and backing him away.
"Let's talk instead."

"Talk?" Graham said as
though the idea was foreign and outlandish. "About what?"

"About ... anything. About
whatever occurs to us to talk about."