We Can Only Save Ourselves by Alison Wisdom

Author:Alison Wisdom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

IN THE MIDDLE of our neighborhood there is a square of woods that reminds us of what the land must have looked like before we tamed it. Wild. Dense. The city calls it a park, but we are mothers, and to us a park is a place with a slide, swings, a seesaw. This has none of those features. It contains only trees and dirt, and the things that live among them, and so we call it the woods. When we read stories to our children—Rapunzel expelled from her tower and into the woods, Hansel and Gretel left to wander in the woods, Little Red Riding Hood watched among the trees of the woods—this place is what they picture.

Now that we are mothers reading these stories to our children, we see that they are frightening. Mothers die and fathers replace them, children are taken or abandoned or eaten. But we remind ourselves we once heard these stories, too, and look at us. We are fine.

Once, Nancy Pittman and Christine took a cobbler over to Earl Phelps’s house for Veterans Day—every year, one with raspberries and blueberries and a dollop of whipped cream on top, which we all know doesn’t belong on a cobbler, but which Nancy adds anyway to be patriotic. Bev suggested once that Nancy bring over a Tupperware container of vanilla ice cream instead. “There’s your Stars and Stripes,” she said.

“I’ll think about it,” Nancy said, but she didn’t.

Christine had just learned to read, and she was carrying a book of fairy tales. “Can you read that to me?” Earl asked her. He could remember how, when he was a little boy, the world seemed to open when he learned how to read and how it kept opening to him and opening as he got older, and he even left the country, left the continent, learned to read again, this time just a little of a new language, and the world grew, and then the war was over, and he didn’t know it then, but that was the moment the world started closing back up again, and now it was just the size of the garage where he sat. So when he saw Christine with her book, he wanted to remember how the world had once seemed so big he could lose himself in it. “Sure,” Christine said. “Do you want a story about a mermaid or one about a princess?”

“I’ll go put the cobbler inside,” Nancy said, lifting the pie plate a bit to remind him why they were there.

“A mermaid,” Earl said.

“There are mermaids in our ocean,” Christine told him. “Did you know that?”

“Everyone knows that,” Earl said.

Christine sat on the driveway, cross-legged in shorts and her older brother’s baseball T-shirt, and read to Earl as he listened and watched the street. It was a quiet afternoon. Nancy listened, too, admiring the cadence of her daughter’s voice, the easy way her eyes flicked over the words and how each word was like a pearl on

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