back and the dazzle of it coming off the water and forming a bright nimbus about his head.
He says, “Can I ask you a personal question?”
She feels a pressure in her chest. An infarct? That Cuban sandwich? She takes a deep breath and another. “Sure,” she says.
“Why do you walk like you do?”
“What do you mean?” she asks, knowing very well.
“All slumped over with your shoulders rolled forward. Is this embarrassing? I mean you didn’t have some kind of tragic childhood disease?”
“No.” Floods of shame.
He slips behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders. His fingers probe, pull, gentle but insistent. “What is this in here, concrete?” he says. “Just relax, okay? Let me do this.” His left arm slides around the front of her and rests just above the line of her breasts and he pulls her into the pressure of his thumb, which now seems to be penetrating her body in a way that is both pleasant and slightly frightening. His hands move to the muscles around her neck. His thumbs press and move an inch, press and move on. It’s not at all sexy, but it’s not clinical either. She has been massaged before but nothing like this. She feels waves in her flesh. Control is slipping away, control she did not really know she was exerting. But now she exerts.
He feels the resistance and stops. She drifts a little away and says, “What was that?”
“Shiatsu. Your ki is blocked up big-time.”
“Thank you.” Coldly. “Did you learn that at the University of Girl?”
“I did.” Now she swims away from him, feeling anger. She is not sure she wants to join that faculty yet. She leaves the water and starts walking back to where they have left their blanket. She feels strange in her body, and at first she thinks it’s only because she’s been floating in salt water for so long, but then realizes that it’s not the usual heaviness and imbalance you get when you leave the support of the sea but its opposite. She feels lighter and more balanced on her feet. She is not slouching as much, her shoulders are back, her breasts seem to have filled with air.
They lie on the blanket at a respectable distance from each other. She has no idea what to say to him now. He is lying back with his eyes closed, a rolled towel behind his head.
“God, I’m really tired,” he says.
She starts to rub sunblock on her skin. “Take a nap,” she says. “Would you like me to put the handcuffs on you?”
“You’ve been dying to ask, right?”
“Busted.”
“The reason is because I’m a somnambulist.” He tells her about the egg-woman nightmare and his wanderings.
“Interesting. You’re being told that anonymous sex with eggheads is a room with no outlet. A closed hell.”
He laughs and says, “So no more sex with eggheads is the prescription for restful nights?”
“Oh, I think eggheads are fine. It’s the anonymity you have to watch.” Their eyes meet now and there is a silence that becomes uncomfortable. She looks away first.
“Have you tried pills?”
“No. Pills won’t help. What it is, to tell you the truth, I was sort of knocked out of the real world for a while. And some of that other…stuff stuck to me.”
“You mean that voodoo business?” Her eyes go to the thing around his neck.
“That voodoo business, yes.”
“But you don’t really, I meanreally, believe in all that.”
His eyes open and his stare is flat and baleful. “I don’t know what I believe anymore. But I’m not as ready to call it bullshit as I used to be. And I got news for you: Our girl Emmylou in your nuthouse, she’s been there too. I can always tell.”
His eyes close again. A small cloud covers the sun now, and a little chill wind like a wraith speeds along the beach. She feels a shiver pucker her skin.
By the time she finishes with the sunblock, Paz is breathing deeply, fast asleep. She is actually glad about this, as she needs time to think. Lorna does not care much for violent amusement park rides, but she has been on a few, and this is what it feels like when the roller coaster is towing the car up the first steep slope: anticipation, and the desire to flee, and the expectation of the screaming rush of descent. She works on her breathing.
She lies back and turns her face toward him. His skin is four inches from her mouth and out of nowhere comes an intense desire to lick it, and the thought that it will taste like caramel. Now she actually smells caramel coming off him. Synesthesia? No thank you! She sits up, astounded, and says stern things to herself. It’s ludicrous, she hardly knows the man, and with all those other girls, probably has three or four on the string right now, she absolutely does not need this after Rat Howie….
As if propelled by something other than her mind she jumps to her feet and goes to the water’s edge. She looks out at the cut. There is a large white cabin cruiser moving slowly across her field of view. There is a man on the rear deck. He wears a ball cap, and now he removes it and wipes his face with a bandanna. He is very pale and his hair is flaming red. He replaces the hat and raises something black to his face, a long tube of some kind. A telephoto lens, she can see the glint of the glass as he trains it in various directions. He is at it for an oddly long time. She looks around to see if there is any spectacular wildlife behind her, but there is nothing but mangroves and pines and a few gulls. The red-haired man turns to whoever is running the boat, and in the next moment the engine roars as the boat shoots away. It does not occur to her then that he has been photographing her and Paz and Paz’s boat, because why would anyone want to do that?
All that morning long the Prussian General von Steinmetz sent waves of young soldiers up the steep ravine of the Mance, where they were cut down in droves by the rifles of the French. Walking wounded began arriving at Bois Fleury shortly after Marie-Ange had settled the stricken peasants in her own bedroom, and when she saw these wretched men and realized that there would be many more in the same state or worse, she sprang into action with her characteristic energy and resolve. Marshaling the household servants and the farm workers, she had the carpets rolled, the furniture moved, lamps and candles arrayed, and pallets made of straw and the linen of the chateau. Maids were set to turning tablecloths and napkins into bandages. In short order, the German regimental surgeons learned what she was doing and set up their dressing stations in the grand ballroom.
Having seen to everything at the chateau, and having placed her steward in charge, the intrepid girl assembled some farmhands and wagons and made for the battlefield itself. There she directed the gathering of the helpless wounded onto carts and sending them back to Bois Fleury. She herself crawled through the thickets by the banks of the Mance to find wounded men caught there and then commanded terrified laborers and the few soldiers not engaged in the fighting to help drag them out while shells exploded and bullets snapped through the branches. By late afternoon, she had donned a cook’s apron and wound a large white damask napkin cloth around her head, but besides that she remained in the clothes she had put on that morning, under the cavalry cloak. Her house slippers were by then cut to rags and filthy, and a Prussian officer made her put on ammunition boots taken from the body of a French drummer boy. Those who recalled that dreadful day later described Marie-Ange as being everywhere at once, comforting the sick, collecting the wounded, lashing her people to greater efforts. Here she showed for the first time the remarkable powers of organization that would serve her well in later life. One Prussian officer reportedly remarked that “had this girl been our general instead of that old lunatic Steinmetz, half these poor devils would be walking still.”
Toward the end of the battle, the Prussians brought their heavy guns to bear and blew the French lines to pieces, after which the stream of wounded pouring into Bois Fleury were French and not German. Of course, these were cared for equally with their enemies, and dying men of both nations had as their last earthly vision the sight of a young girl’s face, full of compassion, framed by a white headdress spattered with blood and a white cook’s apron. Thus was born in the ranks of both armies the legend of the Angel of Gravelotte.
— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
