those beautiful white legs amp; thighs, and my cock gave a little leap. Like a fool I immediately averted my eyes, amp; she hurried into the bathroom, but she was laughing as she closed the door.
I could hear her shut the water off amp; settle into the tub. Sarr's axe still rang out from time to time from over near the woods. I waited a really feel – 'You sure you don't want me to scrub your back?'
She didn't say anything for a second; maybe she was actually considering the idea. Then she said something about Sarr's not liking it.
'He's half a mile away,' I said, giving it the old Freirs try. I really would have loved just to see her… She laughed again, I think, amp; then – alas! – she said, 'Not today.'
Well, so much for that dream. If she wasn't up for anything then, I'm sure she never will be. Moments like that don't come very often.
Oddly enough, she was extremely friendly – almost affectionate, really – for the rest of the morning. After she got dressed she made me some delicious wild-blueberry pancakes (with berries she'd picked herself), amp; it seemed plain that she liked having me there while she puttered around the kitchen.
Today, she informed me, is St Swithin's Day – whoever the hell he was – amp; she recited a little rhyme:
7” rain on St Swithin's Day, forsooth,
No summer drouthe,' or something like that. Apparently the day's weather is supposed to determine the weather for the next forty days. All very scientific, like that business with the groundhog. I looked out the window, but the sky was so changeable that I found it hard to decide exactly what kind of weather we were having then amp; there, much less going to have. The clouds were moving fast across the sun, with a huge grey one looming just above the horizon. So as I see it, we're in for forty days of sun, clouds, nastiness, amp; fog, with just a touch or two of rain.
Sarr came in around lunchtime, looking troubled. Seems he'd accidentally killed some kind of thin white snake that had been crawling along one of the branches. He'd sliced it in two with his axe, amp; the thing had had babies inside.
'It was a milk adder,' he told Deborah, as if that signified something of great importance. She asked him if there'd been much blood. 'Yes,' he said. 'But it was white.'
He explained to me that milk adders are supposed to get their sustenance by sucking the milk out of cows' udders. Maybe this one had been on its way back from the Geisels'. They're the closest ones around here who own cows.
I said I thought all that was only a legend.
He nodded. 'So did I.'
He had buried the thing immediately, before the cats saw it. The babies had gotten away.
Later he fell to talking about some other local legends – about the Hop Ghost, that hops behind you when you walk past a churchyard at midnight, and the Magra, a sort of unwanted companion, and something known as the 'Jersey Devil,' the thirteenth offspring of a Mrs Leeds, who'd cursed being pregnant again. In the end, Sarr said, she'd given birth to a horrible half-man half-bird thing which flew up the chimney amp; disappeared.
He also told me about dragon beetles, supposed to be as big as a man's fist, amp; screwworms, which can breed in people's nostrils, amp; hoop snakes, that swallow the end of their tails and roll along the ground behind their prey.
I was curious about the last; it sounded like a variation of the old Uroborus myth, the dragon with its tail in its mouth. The alchemists had used it as a symbol of eternity, unity, the all-in-one, or some such blather. Maybe there was something to it after all.
Actually, I've always had a yen to read that Eddison novel, The Worm Ouroborus, but I'm told it's impossible to get through. Waded through some poems in The Ingoldsby Legends before dinnertime, amp; that was punishment enough.
Omelet for dinner with home-grown herbs. Damned good. The hens have been laying well lately.
At night the wind blew from the north amp; the sky got very clear. I spent close to an hour sitting out back in the deck chair with my Astronomy Made Simple amp; a flashlight. There was no moon out, but so many stars that I. could almost read the book by their light. I picked out the Eagle, the Swan, the Plowman, amp; the Bear, amp; sat amp; watched the Dragon chase the Virgin. I'll forget all the names in a day or two amp; don't intend to learn them again, but it was nice to have done it once. Saw at least eleven shooting stars, then I lost count.
The Park West Institute of Dance was one of the few places in the neighborhood not yet gentrified, although the old two-story building it occupied on the west side of Broadway now housed a joggers' shop and a fancy new women's boutique. Carol had been coming here for nearly six months and had begun to feel like a regular. Until this summer she had had to content herself with a single weekly dance class on Tuesday nights, but now, thanks to Rosie, she could afford to take an additional class when she was in the mood; and she was in the mood tonight. It was Friday, and her datelessness weighed more heavily upon her than usual. Tomorrow, at least, she had something to look forward to – Rosie would be taking her to an evening concert in Central Park – but tonight she knew she couldn't bear to go home immediately after work to sit alone in her apartment reading Rosie's articles, air conditioner or no air conditioner.
As she slipped on her leotard in the noisy little locker room, she wondered how many of the women around her had husbands or boyfriends waiting for them at home. Not that many, from the look of them. They were an older, unhappier-looking bunch than the
Tuesday-night crowd, women who were filling some gap in their lives or who'd suffered too many disappointments; they were taking it out here, throwing themselves into an activity where they need depend on nothing but their own bodies. She was pleased to see that, as usual, she was one of the thinnest in the room; she told herself she would look young for years and felt no envy for the woman to her left, cursed with huge breasts that were already starting to sag. There were a lot of plump thighs and soft-looking stomachs. Dance, for some women, was probably no more than a pleasant way of dieting.
The main room stretched for half the length of the building, occupying the space above three stores. One wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors whose silver backing, here and there, had flaked away. Windows ran along the opposite wall, above a barre worn smooth by years of ballet students. Carol had not taken ballet since college. She regretted she hadn't continued with it, and didn't pretend that the modern dance classes at Park West accomplished anything more than keeping her limber.
There were sixteen people in tonight's class, including three slim, amiable-looking young men she immediately assumed were gay. The teacher – not the one she had on Tuesday – was a wiry little woman in her late thirties with tight black curls and a drill sergeant's voice that belied her height. She, too, seemed less than happy to be here tonight.
The first half hour of the class was given over to mat and barre work, stretching arms and shoulders, twisting necks, and raising legs in modified plies, all to the softest of calypso tunes played on the tape deck in the corner of the room. Outside the dirty windows she could see the lights of the buildings across the street, a starless black sky overhead. There was no sign of a moon.
The teacher clapped her hands for attention. 'All right, let's review the combinations we learned last time.' For this part of the instruction the class moved onto the polished wooden floor in ranks of four across, following the teacher's moves while a disco beat, louder than before, now rocked the room. The steps were familiar to Carol from her Tuesday-night class and she was good at them; although she would be learning nothing new, she was pleased to be singled out several times for demonstrating the correct form. 'Watch the redhead,' the teacher said more than once; it took Carol a moment to realize the woman meant her. As she danced, twisting her torso and letting her arms swing free, she watched herself reflected in the mirrors on the one side and the glossy blackness of the windows on the other. She liked what she saw.
With twenty minutes still to go the teacher switched cassettes again, the disco music giving way to a reggae group Carol had never heard before. Once more the volume was raised; the rhythm grew faster and harder to resist.
'All right, people,' said the teacher, 'it's time for improvisation. Back against the wall in groups of four, and come out when I call you.' Dividing up the class, she motioned for the first group to come forward. Improvising was something Carol had never done before; immediately her pride gave way to nervousness, as if she'd been asked to speak in public on a topic yet to be announced.
Still, the music was persuasive; she found herself tapping her foot and rocking her hips to the beat while
