Slow Hand (29 page)

“And, Sister Karen,” Anne had said, after the first time she sang it, “let that be a lesson to you.” Karen had been too sick to laugh. And there were days when she was so sick that she only wanted one song, but she never told Anne that, she just let her sing and hoped she’d come to it eventually. “When you wake, you will find/All the pretty little horses. Dappled and gray, pinto and bay/All the pretty little horses.” Karen’s mother had sung that song, but never the part about dappled and gray. Had Anne made it up?

She was already at the apple orchard when she remembered the Irish songs. Anne had thought of them late, when Karen was already mending, so she associated them with the best days of the illness, when she and Anne could talk and laugh, and she could eat, and Anne took such touching pleasure
in bringing her food, always carefully arranged on the plate, trimmed with bits of parsley, accompanied by slices of apples in whose restorative properties Anne firmly believed. An apple a day.

“You may take the shamrock from your hat and cast it on the sod/But ’twill take root and flourish still though underfoot ’tis trod.” Once Anne had figured out all the words, she sang it almost every day. A fighting song, she said to Karen, good for you. “And if the color we must wear is England’s cruel red/Sure Ireland’s folk will ne’er forget the blood that they have shed.” Anne’s English father hated that song, she said, so she sang it often, especially in March, especially when she couldn’t get his attention any other way. He hated that song most, but he hated all Irish songs. Maybe, she said, maybe that’s why she knew so many.

Anne used to say good-night with “Danny Boy,” which, as often as not, she changed to “Annie Girl.” After a while she’d make Karen sing the last two lines—while she kissed her: “For you will bend and tell me that you love me/And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.” The better she felt, the more lines she would sing, the more Anne would kiss her, her forehead, her cheeks, her ears, her neck. And, when the song was over, her lips. The kisses got longer, and one night they kissed so long and it was so dark and cold that Anne asked if she could stay. She could, oh yes, she could.

Karen picked up the pace, partly because she was running downhill, partly because she couldn’t bear to remember what had happened that first night Anne stayed. The sweetness if it, the youthfulness of it, the carefulness of it, the wholeness of it. Whole and healed she had felt afterward, lying in Anne’s arms. She didn’t want to sleep because Anne was asleep, and she wanted to watch her, so small, so lovely, so delicate, so unlike the vigorous woman who had cared for her so competently, day after day, for almost three months. Sweet gum leaves were falling all around her, red and orange and yellow, she knew, though they all looked alike in the dark. She wanted to see a real fall someday, a Vermont fall, for example, a New Hampshire fall. Anne said that you had to see it to believe it but that
they deserved it, the New Englanders, compensation for the cold and the dark.

By catching leaves and giving them colors—pomegranate, persimmon, pumpkin, grape, mustard, ocher, olive, chestnut, aubergine—Karen could stave off exhaustion for a while. She stuffed them into her pockets so she could see, after sunrise, if they lived up to their names. She ran and ran. It was still dark, but you could feel dawn. She knew she should stop because she’d been running an hour after years of not running and her knee ached. She knew she should stop because she had gone too far already, mostly downhill, and it would be a long hike back. She knew she should stop because she was too old for this, not the running but the running away. But she kept going because Anne’s taste was still in her mouth, Anne’s smell in her nose, Anne’s fingers on her breasts, Anne’s leg between her legs, Anne’s eyes everywhere. Run, Karen, run.

In the half light of this All Saints’ morning Karen started to feel her knee collapse. She cried out in irritation that her old injury had recurred, that it was so cold, that she was so many miles from Julian Pines, that she hadn’t finished running. She dragged herself to a tree and sat down against the trunk. After a few minutes she had to shift her weight because her good leg was falling asleep and her tailbone ached. She thought of Anne’s hands, generously covered with almond oil, cinnamon scented, starting with her feet and massaging their way up, every muscle, large and small, succumbing to their warm pressure. Thanks, she was convinced, to those daily rubs, her limbs had worked admirably when she left her sickbed.

She leaned against the tree, almost warm on her back. She listened for cars, heard nothing for a long time, thought again about crawling to the nearest house, then fell, briefly, asleep. She dreamed. A vague woman, a half seduction, a windowless room, a cup of coffee she tried to smell but couldn’t, a heart—hers—beating fast, hard, loud. She caught herself before she toppled over onto the ground, dream suspended. She was cold, her bladder was full, her knee hurt. She wondered why no one came.

Finally she heard a car approaching, more slowly than she would have expected, the curve around her tree. She was relieved that it didn’t sound like a pick-up. She wouldn’t ask a ride from a stranger, but there were, she reminded herself, friends in the mountains. It was, however, none of the Halloween guests, still sticky from her caramel apples, who was driving the car. It was one of the witches. “Anne,” she shouted. “Anne.” Anne parked the abbey Toyota in a small clearing on the other side of the road from Karen’s tree. She got out slowly and walked, just as slowly, across the road. She sat down next to her. “Hi,” she said. “Hi there.”

“Hi there, yourself,” Karen said.

“You forgot your chocolate.” Anne held out the wrapped balls. Karen shook her head.

“I picked an apple on my way through the orchard.”

“Looks like it’s still in your pocket”

“It is,” Karen said, “minus a bite.” She took it out along with the leaves, most of them disappointingly brown, which she tossed in Anne’s direction. Several landed in her hair. “Happy fall.”

“Happy fall,” Anne said, “oh happy, happy fall. When did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Fall.”

“How do you know I fell? Maybe I’m just resting. Waiting for the sun to rise over the mountain peak.”

“You’re facing in the wrong direction.”

“And what are you doing in these parts, Sister Anne Stratford?”

“Looking for a runaway nun,” Anne said. “Tall, thin, brown hair, wearing jeans and a green jacket. Early forties, very attractive, bum knee, answers to ’Karen.’ There’s a reward.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, a cup of steaming hot coffee. Scones and boysenberry jam. Me.”

Karen licked her lips. “I had a dream.”

“Was she beautiful?”

“Very.”

“Did she look like me?” Anne asked.

“Not a bit. She was tall, elegant, dressed in some sort of smoking jacket. When she was dressed.”

“Nice dream. Did you run away?”

“No,” Karen said, “I woke up. And I was cold and my knee hurt.”

“That’s the trouble with dreams,” Anne said, reaching out to help Karen to the car.

“But maybe,” Karen said, “maybe that’s the trouble with sex.”

And so the conversation went, predictably enough, all the way home, Anne wanting, it seemed, to go over every inch of the night’s territory, describing the warmth of it, delineating the loveliness of it, dwelling on the usefulness of it. “We have been talking for twenty years,” she said, “arguing away our lives. I feel as though we’ve settled something, come together, loved each other again in some significant way.” Absorbed in the eloquence of one and skepticism of the other, they missed the sunrise.

“I tasted blood,” Karen said.

“How did it taste?”

“Bitter,” Karen said, “and strong.”

Anne one-handedly unzipped her jacket and unbuttoned her shirt and lifted her breasts, one at a time, out of her bra. “Look,” she said, “whole and pink. If you tasted blood it was your own. Maybe you bit your tongue.” One at a time, Karen tucked the breasts (they were soft, smooth, tempting, unmarked by teeth) back into the cups; she buttoned the shirt; she zipped the jacket. She exaggeratedly examined her tongue in the visor mirror.

“Tongues heal quickly,” Anne said, as she turned into the abbey entrance and drove slowly up the dry dirt road to the common house.

“Maybe breasts do, too,” Karen said, “on the feast of saints. You know, a sort of miracle in honor of Agnes, who lopped off her breast to save her hymen. Or did the Roman lop it off?”

“The Romans. And it was Agatha. Or maybe you’re thinking of Lucy who plucked out her eyes,” Anne said, “or Apollonia
who jumped into the fire. They were bloody and savage women, our virgin martyrs.”

“I smell coffee,” Karen said.

“Well,” Anne said, “let’s drink to them: St. Agnes, St. Lucy, St. Agatha, St. Perpetua, St. Felicitas, St. Apollonia, St. Cecilia, St. Anastasia, St. Catherine, St. Bebiana, St. Christina, St. Ursula, St. Dorothy, St. Barbara, St. Emerentiana, St. Margaret, St. Martina …”

“Anne,” Karen said, interrupting the litany, “sometimes you exhaust me.”

AU
THOR’S NO
TE

I have been thinking for a long time about Allan Sillitoe’s story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” and Grace Paley’s brilliant contribution to the conversation, “The Long-Distance Runner.” It occurred to me that Paley accomplishes such interesting things by replacing the handsome male adolescent hero with an overweight middle-aged woman that I wondered what would happen if I replaced him with someone who differed not only in age, appearance, and gender but sexual orientation as well.

I then found a story by the English writer Sara Maitland called “The Loveliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” in which the main characters are lesbian, but I didn’t think the story worked very well. So, I wrote my own, using characters about whom I have been thinking and writing for several years—a group of offbeat nuns in a monastery in the Sierras. The original title was “The Nunliness of the Long-Distance Runner.”

Some of these names are real, some invented.

Carolyn Banks
is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories, including
Mr. Right
and
Patchwork.
She and her husband raise horses on a farm near Austin, Texas.

Rebecca Battle
works as an actress in Los Angeles and New York. This is her first published story. “Since I have a sublet, I had to type it at a public terminal, which turned out to be somewhat traumatic—writing about such things with all those people strolling behind you, discussing the latest fonts I Still, it definitely added to the excitement of the experience.”

Idious Buguise
lives in London near Paddington Station. “I have never been in therapy—except once for forty-five minutes when I was eleven years old—have two small children who know where babies come from, and hate people who wear fur coats.”

Liz Clarke
is a 1992 college graduate. A native North Carolinian, she wrote her first poem at age six and began her first novel two years later. She is an alumnus of the University of Virginias Young Writers Workshop. “I’m fascinated by sex
and sexuality these days because I spent so much of my life utterly out of touch with, and terrified by, my body, and so I’m making up for lost time.”

Sara Davidson
is the author of the bestselling novel
Loose Change,
which was turned into a miniseries. Her other books are
Real Property
and
Friends of the Opposite Sex
(from which “The Wager” was excerpted). Currently writing for television, she lives in Los Angeles with her two children.

Jenny Diski
was born in London where she still lives and writes full-time. She has published five novels:
Nothing Natural, Rainforest, Like Mother, Then Again,
and
Happily Ever After.

Susan Dooley
is a writer living in a small New England village.

Sabina Faye
is a mystery novelist who has lived in Australia, Nepal, and Switzerland; when not traveling, she makes her home in Washington, D.C. She has worked as an au pair, a manual laborer, a bartender, and as a dancing extra in an opera company.

Barbara Gowdy
is the author of two novels,
Through the Green Valley
and
Falling Angels.
She lives with her cats, Jack and Emma, in Toronto, where she can be seen as one of the guest interviewers for the TV-Ontario book program “In Print.”

Kay Kemp
is a Canadian novelist and short-story writer.

Wendy Law-Yone
was born in Mandalay, Burma, grew up in Rangoon, and lived in several countries of Southeast Asia before settling in the United States in 1973. Her first novel was
The Coffin Tree;
she is at work on a second. Her work has appeared in
The Atlantic
and in
Grand Street.
The mother of four, she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award.

Carol Lazare
lives with her daughter, Lilly, in Toronto. Her work as an actress earned her two Canadian film awards; more recently, she has concentrated on writing for theater and film. “‘Footpath’ is one of a collection of short stories called
When the Cycle Ends
that I’m currently working on. All of the stories, of which there are now five, revolve in some way around the same characters, Sarah and Eddy; this one describes their first meeting and sets the tone for their obsessive relationship.”

Susan J. Leonardi
teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Maryland. She is the author of
Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists.
“Too Tall for Grace” will appear in a longer version in her collection
Nun Stories.
“I’m also working on a detective novel and collaborating on something more academic, a book called
To Have a Voice: The Politics of the Diva.
This is a project that perhaps suggests a secret longing to exchange the privacy of the page for the exhibition of the stage. In my next life, I’m going to be a performance artist.”