A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Romance, Mothers and sons, Domestic fiction, Psychological fiction, Poor women, General, Literary, Psychological, Fathers and daughters, classics, Illegitimate children, Children of migrant laborers
ISBN: 9780812968347
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2003-04-21T10:00:00+00:00

8

By the time the first cooling thunderstorms came in late September, that house had been fixed up—the roof mended, the steps and porch strengthened, the inside painted and even papered with a special wallpaper Clara herself had picked out of a big book, pale pink with tiny rosebuds. When she was alone in the morning she would sit out on the porch as if waiting for someone to come, or she would stare off across the land that had come with this house, un-tended and belonging to no one really, since Curt Revere did not bother to put anything into it. She would try to think what she was doing and how this had come about: she tried to imagine the old people who had lived out their lives here, a couple who had built everything and worked the land and who had died and lost it so that Clara could sit on their porch and stare out with a stillness that she must have sucked in with the air of the old house, the intimate breaths of that old couple.

Revere had said of them: “They were eighty or more, both of them—the man died first. Their children were scattered and nobody wanted the old farm.”

Clara thought that she had never heard anything so sad.

Sometimes she went walking out in the fields, carrying herself as if she were a vessel entrusted with something sacred or dangerous, something that must not be jostled. As often as she thought of the baby—which was nearly always—she thought of Lowry, and even when Revere was with her she could gaze past his face and into Lowry's face, wondering what he was doing at that moment and if he ever thought of her, knowing that the energy she needed to keep hating him was more than he deserved. These long months were a kind of dream for her. Looking back, afterward, she was never able to remember how she had passed all that time. If Revere had allowed her to ask Sonya out, or if Caroline and Ginny had been able to come (their people forbade them), she would not have needed to drift about so in this sleepy confusion, waiting for the baby to be born. She was waiting for pain too. She could remember enough of what her mother had gone through to expect the same thing. The long, groggy months of pregnancy kept her heavy and warm, slow, a little dizzy with the awareness of what her body was going to accomplish and of the extraordinary luck she had had: where had Revere come from? He stayed with her for hours and held her in his arms, soothing her, telling her how much he loved her and how he had known this at once, the first time he saw her, telling her of all the things he was going to do for her and the baby; and out of all this Clara stared back at the way she had come and tried to figure out what was happening, but it always eluded her.

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