local atmospheric pressure variation

“I’m going to marry Carl,” she told them, her face blank and her voice toneless.

In mid-slurp, Adam set down the aluminum can, retaining it in his clutch. Before wiping his lips, he asked, “Why now?”

Josie slapped the back of his skull.

Linnae sighed, drew her wrist across her perspiring forehead under its fringe of baby-blonde curls, then moved her roving hand to her belly.

“Is it a problem, Daddy?” she asked, as her palms traced the sweet crescent covered in white eyelet cotton.

Adam wiped his mouth, snorted, scratched the spot where Josie had struck him, wiped the entire surface of his face starting and ending with his chin, the nbrought his hand down on the table with a dull report. With a philosophical flick of his wrist, he said, “No.”

She nodded. “Good.” Picking up a peach from the table, she made her laborious way out of the kitchen.

In the hall, Linnae momentarily weighed her choices—outdoors would be hot, with little respite, while the parlor would be uncomfortably solitary, and questions awaited upstairs. Heat presented the least evil, and she turned her face to the screen door at the end of the striped hall. However, Canna came galloping down the stairs, hissing in a stage whisper, “Oh, cripes, you told them, didn’t you? Cripes, you look awful. Well, how’d he take it?”

“Okay. Josie is in there scolding him now.”

“Yeah, she’ll keep him in line. Well, anyway, it was clever of Carl to beat it out of here before you told Daddy.” Glancing around, Canna lit a long grey cigarette.

“I don’t see how it helps. He’ll have to see Dad eventually.”

“Why?” Canna looked up over her cupped hand. “It’s not like this situation beat him out of the bushes the first time.”

“What situation?”

“The baby!” she said exasperatedly, motioning with her smoldering finger.

“Dad already knows about the baby, Canna,” Linnae said. “Good grief, I’m five months along. He’s figured out I’m not just getting plump.”

In perplexity, Canna’s eyebrows plunged like vulture’s wings. “Then what were you telling him?”

“I’ve decided to marry Carl.”

The cigarette scarred the floor. Quickly, Canna stubbed it out. “Marry?” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No.”

“Did he ask you?”

“Of course he asked me.” She maneuvered past Canna, and up the stairs. “If you see Polly, tell her I’m up here.” Linnae clumped heavily to the second floor, clsing her ears against the successive inquiries with which Canna pursued her from the landing.

She went into her little white room, at the top of the house, separated even from the second floor by a little step ladder. The lace curtains listlessly fingered the inert windchimes, which had hung there since Linnae’s twelfth birthday.

She sat on the wide sill, her face patterend by the lace’s shadow, and lifted her cinnamon-sugar freckles to the breath of a breeze. A shriek below attracted her attention; as she leaned over the window sill, she saw a little three-foot dervish, crowned ina flaxen excess of curls, running in the spray of a broken lawn sprinkler from next door. Polly slipped, presumably on the wet grass, rolled over to regard the clouds, and caught sight of the upper window. With frantic delight, she shook her arm in salute. “Hello, Mommy!”

Linnae waved languidly back in swelling affection. Suddenly, she felt the slippery wood give way under her; in desperation, she clutched awkwardly at the sides of the window, and braced herself out over the expanse of air above the lawn. Slowly, Linnae eased herself back into the room, away from the window. In a moment, she could feel pain from the tension her wrists had experienced, bracing up her one hundred and seventeen pounds from a grassy lobby of eternity. She smoothed back her curls, which had fallen forward, and rested into her bed’s crackling pillows.

She loved the unsullied purity of her girlhood room. White had alwys been her favorite color as a child, even when friends informed her that it was not a color, at all. She loved the perfect fit of the planed boards against each other in the corners of the ceiling, how they kindly sloped to form a vault of ivory over her head. When at Sunday school she heard the story of God’s creation, she had always imagined the forming of the firmament, which He called Sky, in terms of her little loft room. Somehow, however, the remembrance bothered her, so that she was not sorry to find herself coughing against the tendrils of light-tar smoke that intimated Canna’s entrance.

Pushing aside Linnae’s feet, Canna settled on the bed, which sank unwillingly under her. She breathed in heavily several times, as if about to speak, but each time released the breath in defeat. At length, she measured LInnae’s downturned face with squinted eyes.

“Marry?” she probed.

Linnae did not answer for a moment; she met Canna's stare begrudgingly. “Is that so hard to believe?” she asked.

“What did he ever do for you?” Canna parried. With an abrasive snort of laughter, she motioned with her cigarette at Linnae’s belly. “Except…”

Linnae rose quickly from the bed and stared ou the window. Now Polly was gone.

“Careful,” Canna said. “Don’t get too close to the window. Your weight will carry you over. Josie really should put screens on them.”

“Do you remember the time Max saved my life?” Linnae asked.

Canna was inspecting the room, her head turning like an owl's, this way and that. “What a dump,” she muttered.

“I was seven,” Linnae mused. The curtains brushed against her cheek tenderly. “We were playing on the roof of the barn at Aunt Cilla’s, up north. And I almost fell down the side. Remember that? I don’t’ know how he did it—he just dove after me—he ought to have fell, himself. After that, I thought he could fly.”

“What’s that you say?” Canna asked.

“Remember when cousin Max saved my life?”

“Max? He wasn’t our cousin, featherbrain. Cilla took him in when some lady from church had cancer.” Canna blew out oa jet of smoke. “He never saved your life.”

“He did. I was seven.”

“You were twelve.”

“Canna, I was seven. I remember it.” LInnae did not mention the wish she had made on her eighth birthday, four months later, concerning Max, the New Hampshire autumn, and Aunt Cilla’s white clapboard church covered in glowing moss.

“Well, I guess maybe you were eleven,” Canna conceded. “You worshiped Max after that little prank, didn’t you?”

The telephone rang, and Canna rose. The matterss sighed with relief. “That’s probably my agent,” she explained under her breath, as she hobbled from the room. “I’m fed up as hell with these two-bit printers she digs up under every rock.” Despite her professed annoyance, she shambled away with dispatch when Adam’s voice wafted up.

“Canna! It’s that writer’s mack from Savannah!”

Josie came in with Polly in her arms, and laid the child on her little corner cot. “She fell asleep watching the cloud shapes,” she smiled. Linnae put out her hand to stroke Polly’s flossy curls. “Don’t’ wake her up,” Josie cautioned. “She’s a light sleeper. I could kill your father for hollering like that.”

“We all learned to sleep over Daddy’s voice,” Linnae smiled.

The red and purple print of Josie’s skirt spread copiously over the bed. “How you holding up?” she asked solicitiously. “Come sit down, baby, let me rub your feet.” A breath of wind followed Linnae from the window, cooling the toes she cushioned in Josie’s lap. “Did you ever know a summer so hot? Makes me think of those summers we used to spend up north, when I was a girl. All them maple trees never let the heat through so bad as here. And fall time! Well, I guess it’s now wonder Priscilla stayed up there when she got older. She was the only one went to college, you know. Did you ever think about college, Linny?"

Linnae shook her head with a sad smile. “When did I ever have time to think of that, Aunt Jo?” she asked. “I met Carl in high school.”

“I didn’t mean for you, sweet pea. I meant for Polly. College might be a real good thing for her, someday. She’s real bright.”

“Do you ever hear from Aunt Cilla anymore?” Linnae asked. “Does she write?”

“Sure, baby. Nobody like a sister for company, even when you’re twelve hundred miles apart.”

“Does she tell you anything about Max?”

“Max?” Josie’s brow crimped. “Well, I guess she does talk about him sometimes. All those babies, and no daddy!” Josie bit her lip in a rare flush of embarrassment. “Adopting, I mean, you know.”

“Max wasn’t a baby when she adopted him, though, was he?” Linnae asked.

“Seems like he was thirteen when Cilla took him in. I guess we all though she was in for it, with a boy that big. He was always real quiet, and we guessed he was up to mischief, or hiding dirty books, or something. Shoot, maybe he was. But he helped her with the babies, and kept the place looking real spruce. Cilla dropped about ten years after he came, she was that relieved.”

“What’s he doing now?” Linnae asked, thinking of ten years dropped like a garment around the ankles.

“Oh, working, I guess.”

“Did he stay in New Hampshire?” LInnae was desperate to know that he had stayed, never migrated south of the Mason-Dixon. Max belonged to that cool, shadowy realm of falling leaves and pristine clapboard houses, where water tripped over stony brooks instead of lolling sluggishly in cricks, puddling muddily in hollers.

“Seems to me he went somewhere round there. Mayb New York. I guess Cilla said he takes some trips to Montreal on business.” Closing her eyes, Linnae drew deeply of the thick air, steadying herself.

“Max was real smart,” Josie conceded. She looked at Polly againk, then back to Linnae, stroking her face tenderly. “I’m so proud of you, baby,” she said affectionately.

“Oh, Aunt Jo,” Linnae murmured. The comfort and sadness of her bed cushioned her thickly from a widening split she felt within.

“Polly’s such a good little girl,” Josie continued. “She’ll be a real star one day. Anybody can see that. She’ll come to something real fine. You’re doing just fine, baby. Don’t forget that.”

They heard Canna’s voice ricocheting off the hall’s peeling paper. Josie rolled her eyes. “Lord have mercy,” she said. “We’ll live to rue the day she took up with that writers’ club. But at least she’s got a job in the works.”

“Maybe I should have got a job,” Linnae mused. “Maybe it would have helped.”

“Nothing could have been better than these two precious babies you've got,” Josie said irrefutably. “You’ve done the best with everything you’ve had. Remember Della’s girls? All of them gave away the babies and went to California, trying to be film stars. Seems like all the girls were doing it at once—running off to Hollywood to be an actress.”

Feeling lost, Linnae said, “I never wanted to be an actress, Aunt Jo.”

“I know, baby,” Josie answered. After a pause, she scratched her head. “You were always the one I never understood too well.” She rose to leave, her flowered print clinging to her generous hindparts. At the door, she turned for a moment.

“So you’re going to marry that boy?”

Linnae nodded mutely. Josie sighed with closed lips.

“Well, that’s probably good,” she conceded. Then, in mid-stride, as if she almost had kept it to herself, she added, “Good to get a daddy for those babies.” She closed the door behind her.

Polly murmured in her sleep, and Linnae knelt beside her, not feeling the weight of her belly as much as before. She touched Poly’s cinnamon-sugar freckles, brushed the long black tendrils of her eyelashes, traced the round line of her jaw to her oyster-shell chin. Angrily, she pulled out of her head, like a hairy, noisome weed, the thought of any partner in Polly’s making. The child had seemed to sprout inside her, like a fluffy dandelion seed flying through the air in late summer, coming to rest in a warm, sunny hollow. Idly, Linnae wondered whether dandelions ever grew in New Hampshire.

There was a sound like ice clinking weakly in a glass. During one of the last summers she spent in New Hampshire, Linnae had admired the windchimes that hung in Cilla’s window, and Max later found her in the yard, with bits of string and broken glass strewn around her, trying to copy the chimes for herself. Max did not laugh, but took her hand and put her on the front of his bicycle; together, they rode to the general store, two miles away, where he took down a middle-sized ring of shining metal rods, threaded strongly together with a ball hanging in their midst invisibly. He could not have known that, when she would hang them up at her home, the air would be too stagnant for them to make any music. Once Linnae pushed it with her hand, and then harder, insistently.

The clamor woke Polly, who blinked, sat up, and giggled blithely, "Do it again, Mommy!" Seeing her, Linnae let her hand drop, and felt the fruitlessness of her anger.

The telephone rang, and Adam hollered again. “Lin!” he shouted. “It’s your boy.”

Linnae flatly answered his shout, “Tell him he can try again later.”

“We got the mail today,” Polly volunteered, wiping the sleep from her eyes. “You got a card, Mommy. It has a picture on the front.” She pulled a crumple of pasteboard from the pocket of her overalls. “I was holding it for you.”

Linnae smoothed the the wrinkles from a postcard that showed a tower of nineteenth-century prestige, rising against a blue sky from a lawn covered splendidly with leaves.

“Auntie Joe got a letter, too,” Polly said, pulling herself out of her cot. She made her own way down the stairs.

Linnae watched her go and wondered why she had never thought of going to college. Some people had talked of doing it, when she was in school. Probably she couldn't have done it, and maybe she'd instinctively known so--but still, Linnae thought, I ought to have thought of it! Polly was smart—Linnae wondered if Polly would think of going to college. She must, Linnae decided, she must think of going, before too long. All Linnae had thought of, in regard to the future, was having a baby.

“Well!” she thought fiercely. “Now I’ve got one.”

She wished there were an old dog or something near to kick. She had borne a baby before she was sixteen, and damned if she wasn’t going to have another one. She had never considered another.

"Just because I wanted one," she thought, balling up her fists, "doesn't mean I want another one!"

It was like she had pushed a rock, just to see how far its own weight would carry it, and the ground had turned out to be a slope, carrying the rock fast and far away. It seemed unfair to her, but there was no one to blame.

She wondered what it might be like to be an actress, to put on make-up and be somebody new all the time. Hollywood, where Della’s girls had gone, only meant tall white letters on a hillside to her. She wondered what they stood for, to lure Della’s girls and so many of the young girls away.


In the evening, Linnae lay on her back in the long grass, where the yard sloped away into nameless meadow. The sun was still high and insistent; hints of approaching twilight came in stealthy breaths through the grass. Polly came to her where she lay on the ground—Linnae felt the cool of her small shadow over her eyes. Polly settled her belly down on top of Linnae’s pumpkin-sized bump, laying her head against Linnae’s chest. With difficulty, Linnae heaved her breath in and out.

“When does the baby come?” asked Polly. As Linnae tried to gather strength to answer, Polly gave a little gasp. “Oh! I can hear him.”

Linnae lifted her chin slightly, in surprise.

Polly cupped her ear attentively to the top of Linnae’s belly. “I can hear,” she whispered. “I can hear. He’s talking.”

They both lay still for some moments. Linnae felt tears squeezing from her eyes, running down into the cradle of her ears.

“Polly, don’t,” she croaked weakly. “It hurts mommy when you do that.”

Polly rolled off her belly and into the grass beside her. Tears welling from her eyes, Linnae lifted up a grateful inhalation. She felt her daughter’s knees clamber against her side. Polly seemed to be trying to tuck herself in along with the baby.

“I think we should name him Herman,” she mused.

"How do you know it's a boy?" Linnae asked, brushing Polly's flossy hair out of her eyes.

Polly cocked her head to one side. "Well," she slowly drawled. Then she closed her eyes and rested her hand on the side of Linnae's belly.

Josie came out to find them. "I've been waiting supper for twenty minutes!" she said exasperatedly. Polly popped up obediently.

"Did you get a letter today, Aunt Jo?" Linnae asked, remaining on the ground.

Josie paused, nonplussed.

"Well!--how did you know?--I had a letter from Cilla. And what do you think?” Her pause was punctuated by Linnae’s steady breath. “She's coming down for a little visit, and she’s got Max coming to keep her company,” Josie concluded. "How did you know?"

"She got a postcard!" Polly hopped up and down on one foot. "I saved it."

"It wasn't really for me," said Linnae. "It was for everyone." She pulled it out from her pocket, handing it up to Josie.

"Well! This is where he lives, now. That's real nice. He was always a nice boy, wasn't he? Says here that he wishes you could be here, when they come to visit..."

"I know!" said Linnae, starting to laugh. "He doesn't think I'm here! He thinks I've gone away!" Her laughter shook her with increasing violence. She saw Josie looking at her with alarm. Linnae feared she could not stop, that it would shake her to death. But then she thought she heard the resounding of the windchimes; the sun fell, at last, and dusk was bringing a rare breeze.

(from 6 October 2001)