The Annunciation by Ellen Gilchrist

Author:Ellen Gilchrist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Annunciation
ISBN: 9781940941172
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 1983-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

Now two weeks had gone by since Amanda was in Eureka Springs. Will had moved half his clothes into her house and they were stacked in a cardboard box on the floor of her closet. Every time she passed the box she felt giddy and silly, as if the boundaries of what passes for reality had broken down entirely and the proof of their dismissal was that cardboard box holding Will’s unironed clothes sitting on her closet floor.

One event leading to another event. First his clothes on the floor of my closet, then his guitar beside my piano, then a toothbrush and a razor. God knows what everybody’s thinking. At least my friends have read about such things. What do his friends think?

“Will and I are going to bring back fun,” she told Katie. “We’re going to start a fad.”

“That’s great,” Katie said. “That’s what we need, some more fun.”

“It is what we need. I’m tired of misery. People are crazy, Katie. They don’t have enough sense to be happy. We all starve to death all our lives. Starve to death in the middle of a feast. Here it is, more beauty than the eye can bear to see, miracle after miracle after miracle. And I could not even see it.”

“That’s it,” Katie said. “A clinical definition of love.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re in love. And that’s a good thing to be. As long as you keep on working. Don’t stop working, Amanda. The work will be there long after the boy is gone.”

“I can work and be in love at the same time. I got a lot done this morning. I translated the whole inventory of things she took to Lyons. You ought to see it. It’s really something.”

“That’s great,” Katie said. “Actually it’s revolutionary. If you can work and be in love at the same time, you’re the first woman I ever knew that could. Maybe you’re the missing link, Amanda.”

“Maybe you ought to get a job for the Ladies’ Home Journal. They like simplistic shit like that.”

“All I know how to do is tell the truth,” Katie said. “It’s the only challenge there was down in Alma.”

“Well, I’m not interested in truth this month,” Amanda said. “This month I like lucky charms and fortune cookies.”

“Hot tips and long shots?”

“Yeah, stuff like that. Incense and votive candles.”

“Call if you need me.”

“Phone calls,” Amanda said. “True Romances. Dreams of order.”

One day during these weeks a friend sent her a Chinese prayer-poem in the mail from San Francisco, a little gold and red piece of rice paper with Chinese characters on it. Write a secret wish on the back and burn it, the directions said. That night Amanda took the poem outside and burned it in the moonlight on the balcony. The fire crackled into tiny points of light on the railing. Above, the stars were bright in a blue-black sky. She could not make a wish. Life is the wish, she thought. Life is enough.

She really did try to work.

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