Once when the electricity went off, Jon went to the kitchen to get candles, and I crawled under the bed, loving the darkness and wanting to stay in it. The dog came and curled beside me, at the side of the bed. Jon came back quickly, his hand cupped in front of the white candle. “Maria?” he said. “Maria?” When he left the room again, I slid forward a little to peek and saw him walking down the hallway. He walked so quickly that the candle blew out. He stopped to relight it and called my name louder—so loudly that he frightened me. I stayed there, shivering, thinking him as terrible as the Gestapo, praying that the lights wouldn’t come on so he wouldn’t find me. Even hiding and not answering was better than that. I put my hands together and blew into them, because I wanted to scream. When the lights came back on and he found me, he pulled me out by my hands, and the scream my hands had blocked came out.
After the hot grape jelly is poured equally into a dozen glasses, the fun begins. Melted wax is dropped in to seal them. As the white wax drips, I think, If there were anything down in there but jelly it would be smothered. I had laid in no cheesecloth, so I pulled a pair of lacy white underpants over a big yellow bowl, poured the jelly mixture through that.
In the morning Jon is back. He walks through the house to see if anything is amiss. Our clothes are still in the closets; all unnecessary lights have been turned off. He goes into the kitchen and then is annoyed because I have not gone grocery shopping. He has some toast with the grape jelly. He spoons more jelly from the glass to his mouth when the bread is gone.
“Talk to me, Maria. Don’t shut me out,” he says, licking the jelly from his upper lip. He is like a child, but one who orders me to do and feel things.
“Feel this arm,” he says. It is tight from his chopping wood at his brother’s camp.
I met his brother once. Jon and his brother are twins, but very dissimilar. His brother is always tan—wide and short, with broad shoulders. Asleep, he looks like the logs that he chops. When Jon and I were first dating we went to his brother’s camp, and the three of us slept in a tent because the house was not yet built. Jon’s brother snored all night. “I hate it here,” I whispered to Jon, shivering against him. He tried to soothe me, but he wouldn’t make love to me there. “I hate your brother,” I said, in a normal tone of voice, because his brother was snoring so loudly he’d never hear me. Jon put his hand over my mouth. “Sh-h-h,” he said. “Please.” Naturally, Jon did not invite me on this trip to see him. I explain all this to the dog now, and he is hypnotized. He closes his eyes and listens to the drone of my voice. He appreciates my hand stroking in tempo with my sentences. Jon pushes the jelly away and stares at me. “Stop talking about something that happened years ago,” he says, and stalks out of the room.
The wood arrives. The firewood man has a limp; he’s missing a toe. I asked, and he told me. He’s a good woodman—the toe was lost canoeing. Jon helps him stack the logs in the shed. I peek in and see that there was already a lot more wood than I thought.
Jon comes into the house when the man leaves. His face is heavy and ugly.
“Why did you order more wood?” Jon says.
“To keep warm. I have to keep warm.”
I fix a beef stew for dinner, but feed it to the dog. He is transfixed; the steam warns him it is too hot to eat, yet the smell is delicious. He laps tentatively at the rim of the bowl, like an epicure sucking in a single egg of caviar. Finally, he eats it all. And then there is the bone, which he carries quickly to his private place under the desk. Jon is furious; I have prepared something for the dog but not for us.
“This has got to stop,” he whispers in my face, his hand tight around my wrist.
The dog and I climb to the top of the hill and watch the commuters going to work in their cars. I sit on a little canvas stool—the kind fishermen use—instead of the muddy ground. It is September—mud everywhere. The sun is setting. Wide white clouds hang in the air, seem to cluster over this very hilltop. And then Jon’s face is glowing in the clouds—not a vision, the real Jon. He is on the hilltop, clouds rolling over his head, saying to me that we have reached the end. Mutiny on the Santa Maria! But I only sit and wait, staring straight ahead. How curious that this is the end. He sits in the mud, calls the dog to him. Did he really just say that to me? I repeat it: “We have reached the end.”
“I know,” he says.
The dog walks into the room. Jon is at the desk. The kneehole is occupied, so the dog curls in the corner. He did not always circle before lying down. Habits are acquired, however late. Like the furniture, the plants, the cats left to us by the dead, they take us in. We think we are taking them in, but they take us in, demand attention.
