AMERICA BY LAND

from America by Land

by Robert Olmstead

There is a true story about a woman in New Mexico and a boy riding out to see her. It goes like this: He's riding a big American motorcycle from Pennsylvania, from New York State, from wherever he's been, and as he rides he thinks, Nobody knows me like she does, nobody. She's his cousin and he misses her sorely. They haven't seen each other for some time now. He's thinking about the weighing of time, the missing, the leaving behind.

She's wearing a skirt she sewed together from her father's neckties. Most are striped and paisley silk; some have whales on them. Not the phony kind with fatheads, fuming spouts and curled flukes, but real whales, sperm, pilot and killer, whales that rise up to her hips when she spins in place and settle back down around her ankles when she stops.

But she doesn't spin in this heat, this air that fills the lungs like warm talc. She dabs at her neck and cheeks and forehead and gives up, letting the sweat trickle to between her breasts and under her arms and down the inside of her legs. She didn't grow up here. She grew up where it was cool and green and breezy, the wind soothing the trees or freighting snow, and out beyond, the deep, sonorous ocean.

She waits for him at the sink, under the pale dead moon that takes up the night sky. He's riding in from the East Coast. She lets herself think, This is how it is with women, always waiting at the sink cooling their blood from a point at the wrist where the water crosses, listening to it guzzle, while with men, they're always coming or going, coming or going. They are so busy.

She waits for rain, too, and when it comes it'll thump the earth like small hooves, making splashes of dust, then going to mud. She shuts off the faucet and, barefoot, pads quietly over the cool square tiles. She goes to the room where she sleeps, unbuttons the skirt and lets it drop to the floor. She lies down and thinks about rest, thinks about forgiveness.

She's in the days of longing, longing fixed like the hands of grief at her throat. Breathe, she reminds herself. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. It's okay. It's okay for now.

from Stay Here With Me

...This was high summer, years before and late in the day when me and Afton started up Eye Hill, stopped awhile to watch a squirrel stutter-run along the top log of a rotted crib for skidding timber, watched it run as if it were jumping through itself, its tail floating behind, acorns and seeds and pods and nuts on its mind. Afton was two years older than me. I was eighteen and she was twenty and I was so in love that, when we touched, my bones ached to come through my skin to meet hers.

Afton liked to think and was a kind of beautiful. She was in love with ideas and books, and sometimes her eyes would flare and she'd go quiet and then patiently explain her thinking. She wore a tan that looked dusted on and she had long white hair and she'd braid it and it'd stay without a clip or barrette for the longest time, slowly coming undone, and then she'd braid it again. One day she was stopped on the street and offered a thousand dollars for her hair and she laughed and shook her head. I know this because I was walking with her. When we walked we fit, and sometimes she'd turn her cheek to my neck and I'd feel like I was king of the universe and she was the polestar and we were in concert.

That was how I was in love with her, but at the time I don't think she'd quite made up her mind about loving me.

Afton had been away from here for some weeks but surprised me when she showed up this sunstruck afternoon. She dropped her yellow Schwinn ten-speed in the grass at lane's end and came walking across the mowing like she'd walked all the way from the seacoast where she'd been.