Elaine Coffman by My Enemy My Love

Author:My Enemy, My Love [Love, My Enemy, My]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Mourning stood before the carved cherry mirror in her room and cast a long, critical appraisal over her pale lavender dress with softly gathered pleats at the throat and wrists, then retied the grosgrain bows that held the looped braids above each ear. Her frown was one of careful deliberation as she looked at her reflection in the mirror. She regarded herself critically, the fine network of shadows forming under her eyes a product of sleepless nights and too much worry. Next, she considered the more prominent purpling of her left eye—a by-product of Cad’s opening the door that belonged to the keyhole that Mourning had been using to spy on Eleanor and Clint.

Life, Mourning began to think, was something she didn’t understand at all, and she could only pray that God understood it a little. What fool had said, You dance your way through life, when it was all she could do to wrestle her way from one plateau to another? Sadly, Mourning began to imagine her life as a fast-spinning merry-go-round she couldn’t slow down enough to get off.

To her, life was like the Chinese proverb What does not poison, fattens, and she was acquiring vast amounts of the animated promise of those words—so much, in fact, she had decided what you don’t experience, you don’t know. Couldn’t she just remain ignorant for a while? As Tennyson said, Others’ follies teach us not/Nor much their wisdom teaches;/And most, of sterling worth, is what/ Our own experience preaches. Reflecting on this, Mourning made a discovery that, although not new, was most assuredly new to her. One arrives at the various stages of life quite a novice. It’s like being forced to play, she thought, before you know the rules of the game. Life is an expensive onion that one peels crying.

Mourning thought back to the conversation she’d heard between Joe and Buck one evening as they sat around the fire, just as she was going to sleep.

“By the time you understand life you’re too damn old to anything with what you just understood. It’s like being given a comb when you’re bald,” Buck had commented.

“Na, life ain’t so bad, it’s kinda like takin’ a piss in the wind— It’s all right as long as you go in the same direction,” was Joe’s reply.

Life was indeed strange. And if life was strange—well, the people who lived it were stranger still. Life’s experiences were certainly revealing some pretty weird behavior patterns in a few people she knew—one man in particular. In Clint she saw a man full of potential who approached relationships like static electricity; highly charged and capable of singeing a woman’s hair ribbons off with a single kiss, yet not really progressing any further than the sexual-games or the social-ritual stage. Mourning was ready for more. She was tired of her seduction-and-retreat or quarrel-and-reconciliation relationship with Clint. She was primed for a full-blown, all-out romance, and she wasn’t getting it. What she was getting was frustrated.

Clint, she knew, had all the answers to all the questions she had about man-woman relationships.

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