How to Stop Loving Someone by Joan Connor

Author:Joan Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2011-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

Halfbaby doesn’t eat breakfast, just juice and coffee. Morning food makes her sloggy, like bees are droning in her head. She likes her head clear and light so that she can see time. She’s as thin as Rockmother is fat, looks more kin to the three sisters who are spindle thin like cob dolls, than she does to Rockmother.

Mornings, after she cleans the dishes, she likes to sit in the attic. Used to be mornings she had home school with Rockmother, doing figures and letters. Rockmother liked reading the horse hide Bible, where there’s a book named for her—not the Book of Rockmother, the Book of Ruth, her name before she hardened. Ruthmother.

Halfbaby liked the reading better than the figures. She never had knack with numbers. She thinks some people think numbers, some think words, or maybe scenes. The Cole boy used to think numbers, maybe he still did over on the mainland, counting like he used to do here: I been to the mainland twenty-two times this year. That spool’s got a good four yards yet. Takes twenty minutes to walk to the pier, twenty-four in snow.

He knew degrees Fahrenheit, the pound weight and ages of people he talked about, their shoe sizes, how many lamp posts and mail boxes lined the back cove road. He must have spent his whole life counting. When he talked to Halfbaby, his numbers made her dizzy. They cluttered her up.

The attic clutter didn’t make her dizzy. She knew everything that was there even if she didn’t count it up. From the high window she could see the bay, and the light from the window raised swirls of sequiny dust. Rockmother’s brace was there, the one for her back.The doctor made her wear it, her back bad, he said, because she was carrying two people in weight. Halfbaby can remember her wearing it like a skeleton on the outside of her body. But Rockmother outgrew it long ago, grew a third person, and Halfbaby can’t believe that it ever snapped around her like a slatted coat. Sometimes she crawls into it and lies on her back, imagining her stomach pouching out, her breasts swelling and swelling until she fills the brace like her own rib cage. But Rockmother even then was twice the woman she is.

She sits in the attic now, thinking about chickens in the poppies run red riot around the marsh farm, and she laughs again thinking about how they walk in two directions at once. Did the tail lead the head or the head the tail?

She can smell the varnish cracking on the high chair, feel the decal of the puddle duck curling from the wood. Someday she’d be sitting in the attic and the decal would be gone, finally crackled into paper, into dust. Then it could spangle the window light, settle in the floor crevices.

There’s a pile of guano on the floor by the chimney where the bats hang and a neat little pile of delicate bones—mice? voles?—where a barn owl nested once before they puttied glass back into the window frame.

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