“So you two were gawking at her. And Pop said …?”
“We weren’t gawking! We were appropriately surreptitious. But we were spellbound. Pop said, ‘You know, that kind of beauty, I’ve seen it before. That effulgence.’ I didn’t know what effulgence meant, so he explained it was like radiating, burgeoning, blooming. ‘And every time I’ve seen it, it’s from a woman who has come into a certain moment of her life. She’s sending out rays. Every time, every time a woman like that is ready to take a man and have a baby, her aura, that strength, is sending out a signal. She’ll have a baby within a year.’”
“How would Pop know!”
“He said Mom had been that way and he came to her ‘like a moth to a porch light.’ Then he named a woman he’d known in college, and the daughter of one of his friends, then one of his colleagues at work. He’d noticed their ‘effulgence’ and before long they’re shacked up with some guy and pregnant. He said Mom had noticed it, too.”
I tried to picture my father talking this way. He would never have been so forthcoming with me, but that was reasonable—this was one man to another. And he knew Erik was leaving soon; he probably wanted to connect intimately with his soon-to-be-gypsy son. I wasn’t scandalized that he’d been talking about a woman twenty years younger. He’d said nothing prurient or lecherous. I couldn’t see it as sexist, either, one of those elbow-in-the-ribs comments about the amusing peculiarities of the weaker sex. Pop was not at all that kind of man. It struck me as honest admiration of a natural phenomenon, and an observation made from experience.
“Was he maybe warning you that if you encountered a woman like that, like ‘be careful unless you want a kid’?”
Erik thought about it. “No. He was just appreciating the whole thing. He thought it was a beautiful fact about life. We finished our ice cream and went on our way. Never mentioned it again. But I’ve seen it myself since then. He was right. There comes a moment.”
I would have asked him about that—had he seen that moment in his girlfriends, his wife?—but he yawned and looked weary and I figured I should let him go to sleep.
“Nice story,” I said. “Dear Pop. Our dear Pop.”
He roused as if he’d forgotten why he brought it up. “Right. Annie, I don’t know if you feel it, or know it, but you’re there. You are effulgent. You’re putting out that signal. You’re … effulgent.”
“Go to bed,” I ordered him.
He shrugged, kissed me goodnight, and went out the door. I heard him moving in the next room over as I got ready for bed and turned off the lights.
Chapter 42
For the next few days I checked to see if I felt effulgent—a rather ugly word for a beautiful phenomenon, lending the whole premise a somewhat comic quality that Erik and I joked about. I kind of knew what he meant. But I had known women of every age, very young and very old, who seemed to overflow with vitality, to exude burgeoning energy and magnetism; surely it was not only linked to readiness to take a life mate or have a child.
Still, coming so soon after my discovery that I wanted a child, his comment seemed to warrant serious consideration.
My assessment: Compared to the wreck I was when I first came, I was certainly better. Whereas before I’d been a black hole, emitting no light or energy, I did feel as if I possessed some degree of luminosity again. I felt a strand of resilience inside, strong yet supple, in body and psyche, as if I’d been at least partly woven back together. I was conscious of being fertile—the word wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t been working the soil and using the word as a farmer does—a new awareness, almost a sensation, like a sphere of potential I carried, cradled between the bones of my hips.
But sometimes I still curled grublike around loneliness at night, one spoon alone in a drawer without a fellow spoon to nestle into. I realized that the nighttime physical proximity of a loved one provides an existential reassurance in ways that daytime company can’t. Your mind may be far away in dreams, but your sleeping body absorbs the warmth of the other, unconsciously counts your bedmate’s heartbeats and breaths, and these provide deep and timeless affirmations.
And I was working on a dairy farm. I figured it was hard to feel effulgent or come across as effulgent when you’re wearing knee-high rubber boots covered with cow manure, layers of dirty, fraying jackets, a man’s knit cap, oil- and shit-stained leather gloves. But when I mentioned this to Erik, he said it didn’t matter. To a man feeling those rays, that kind of thing contributes to the effect.
Another puzzle, maybe more about men than about effulgent women. In any case, I was usually too busy or too tired to give it much thought.
The first snowfall set the hop yard into sharp relief. The shadows of the poles doubled the effect of the rows: hundreds of horizontal stripes converging with vertical ones. They confused and dazzled the eye. But they served as marvelous solar clocks. As the sun crossed the sky, the forest of shadows swung across the ground, pointing west in the morning, straight uphill in the middle of the day, and east, toward the farmyard, in the evening. As the solstice grew nearer and the sun sank lower, the bars of blue dark grew longer and longer.
As I predicted, Erik spent less time at the farm. He didn’t tell me of his adventures, or where he spent nights when he didn’t return. I deduced that he had acquired at least one steady date, because he often drove up to the ridge to make calls on his cell phone. We had no phones in the bunkhouse, but he could
