Water and Blood by Julie Stewart

Author:Julie Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950539680
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

A friend emailed me yesterday. She wrote, liberty is a funny word, isn’t it?

I looked it up.

It means the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political view, or the power or scope to act as one pleases.

LIBERTY

LORETTA LOVED FULL SKIRTS and high heels and strands of cheap costume pearls.

She loved her two girls, Agnes and Alice, and being able to provide for them.

She did not want anyone to know how she liked to stand in the bathroom, before stepping into the tub, to admire the new muscles in her arms and calves, now etched with the sharp, straight lines of a pencil drawing, how instead of making her feel masculine, her new body made her more maternal. She was taking care of her girls, protecting them.

While she went to work, her girls were home with Loretta’s mother-in-law. They helped weed and keep up the garden. They tended rabbits to supplement the family’s meat rations. Loretta’s mother-in-law took pride in making sure they had enough, trading any abundance for other needs.

Mr. Schuler the druggist would haggle with the old woman. Like everyone in the neighborhood, he knew it was not unusual to find at least one double yolk in a dozen of her eggs. And she got eggs all winter long, when everyone else’s chickens stopped laying altogether.

Only her oldest granddaughter knew the secret, because she was the one who mixed the hot peppers into the birds’ mash every morning, to make them drink more water. Alice had not even told her own mother.

This morning, when Loretta walked off the line, she found a Ball jar sitting outside her locker in the lunchroom. It looked like it contained pure white sand from a beach, or what Loretta imagined sand would look like. She had never been to the ocean. She had read about beaches and sandy footprints at the lacy edge of the tide, and she believed that her knowledge from stories was enough for her to understand and know these things.

Loretta sat down to take off her boots.

The jar held grains of sugar. She could picture the women she worked with handing the jar down the line, each adding a couple of tablespoons from home until the sugar piled up and slid down the sides, piling up like the sand that came downriver on barges.

The women had done this so Alice would have a cake for her sixteenth birthday. Loretta couldn’t wait to get home and show her.

When she turned up the sidewalk of their block, she heard the girls’ voices in the backyard. What Loretta envied most about the daughters was something she could never imitate: that they had each other, someone to lie next to at night and tickle each other’s backs or wake up after a nightmare. She thought when she got married she would finally have that, but it was not the same as what her girls had, unconditional. When Loretta woke up

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