Prologue — The wrist
The radio across the side yard was playing something with a trumpet in it, thin through the screen, and the porcelain figures on the sideboard caught a bar of late light and gave it back dull. June knelt on the rug because the chair was Ruth’s and the stool was under the mending, grey sweatshirt rucked at her wrists, the old trousers warm behind the knees. Ruth’s thumb moved over her knuckles. Once. Again. A count June already knew in her body, the same slow measure from the album afternoon, back when a grip could still be called grief.
She had come in from the pharmacy with the pressure prescription folded in her pocket. The doctor had spoken to her, not to Ruth. Someone should be in the house at night. Ruth had watched from the velvet chair and held out a hand when the door shut, and June had taken it, and the taking had put her here, on the pattern of the rug, with the notebook shut in the drawer under the stockings and the page for the day still blank.
Ruth did not speak. The cardigan was buttoned. Silk showed at the throat, a little loose where the skin had softened, and the smell of her was lavender water and the wool of the chair and the warm, private salt June had learned with her mouth and then tried to file somewhere the tenant could not see. The thumb kept counting. June’s stomach dropped in recognition. Lower, duller, her cunt ached at a touch that could still be denied at a kitchen table. She felt herself go wet against the cotton, a slow seep, shameless and ordinary, the way a body answers a hand it has already obeyed. Her breasts tightened under the sweatshirt. She hated the speed of it. She did not shift her hips. Shifting would have been a confession the blank page could use.
Ruth turned June’s hand over. The pads of her fingers tested the wrist, the thin place where the pulse showed, and June’s breath snagged on the contact. Not a caress. An inventory. Ruth’s skin was dry and hot. The nail of the thumb grazed the blue line and June felt the graze travel up the inside of her arm, across the nipple already drawn tight, down into the ache she was sitting on. A sound almost left her. She swallowed it. The trumpet next door wandered off the melody and found it again.
“You can still call it the cream,” Ruth said.
The sentence was tired. It was also a door left open on purpose, the old lie about the leg and the jar, offered now when both of them knew the jar had been capped months ago and the nights had not stopped. June looked at the drawer. She thought of Ohio, of the cousin’s pause in the hall, of Tucson and her mother’s questions, of the tenant who would need a new signature if she stood up and meant it. Under those she thought of the simpler, meaner thing: she wanted Ruth to keep looking. Not kindly. Looking, the way she looked when she wrote the dates down. Seen, and spent, and not allowed to be only the person who fetched the bulb.
Her mouth had gone dry. Between her legs she was not dry at all. The wet had spread, a slick warmth when she breathed, and the waistband pressed a seam against her that she refused to rock on. Ruth’s fingers left the wrist and rose, slow, into her hair. They closed. Not a pull. A claim, fitted to the scalp, the same weight that had steadied itself there in the narrow bathroom while the cream warmed on a shin. June’s eyes stung. The sting and the throb did not cancel each other. Her lips parted. She leaned in because the page would be written anyway, and she wanted one mark on it that Ruth had not ordered.
She turned the hand she still held and put her mouth to the inside of the wrist.
The skin tasted faintly of soap and of Ruth, thinner than the taste she knew from between those thighs, the pulse beating against her lower lip. She kissed once, then stayed, mouth open, breathing there. Ruth’s fingers tightened in her hair. A small sound came out of the older woman, not the thin cry from the chair and not the silence of the tablet night, something lower, caught. June felt it in her own cunt, a fresh clutch, fluid slipping, her knees spreading a fraction on the rug before she could stop them. The velvet of the chair arm was against her shoulder. Ruth’s blouse rose and fell. Neither of them had undone a button. The radio laughed at its own horn line and went on.
June kept her mouth on the pulse. She did not ask what the blank page was going to say. Ruth’s thumb stroked once behind her ear, possessive, almost idle, and June shook, a fine tremor through her thighs, still dressed, still kneeling, the want unfinished in her mouth.
