Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

be brought up almost immediately upon my mentioning an interest in William James. Why did it loom so large in people’s memory, and why did it seem to be the only aspect of James’s work that they retained? It needled me, enough so that at some point I went back and reread the paper, only to discover that the famous bear made the most minor of appearances, invoked only twice and amid a series of instances. Much more remarkable to me was the story James tells of being a child of seven or eight years old and seeing a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it; James stirred the blood around and, his childish curiosity aroused, lifted the stick to watch the blood drip from it. Then, without warning, he fell over in a dead faint. James recalls feeling, even at such a young age, astonished that the mere presence of a pailful of red liquid could provoke such formidable bodily effects. The child and his bucket of blood—now why didn’t anyone remember that?

But as I stood there frozen in the kitchen of Jerry Roth’s house, I felt in my every muscle the indelibleness of James’s oft-cited example. It was simple. When you meet a bear in the woods, you run. And of course that is what I did: I ran.

In another version of the story, I jump out the nearest window and break my neck in the fall. Otherwise I am devoured, or thrown into a fire, or drowned. Barring that, I am dropped from a church steeple as punishment. In the version first recorded by Robert Southey, I manage to get away but am taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Corrections for being the vagrant that I am. It takes almost no effort to dig up these variations; over time, the trespasser turns from curious fox to bad old woman to bold little girl: a girl who is at the start called Silver Hair but who eventually gets saddled with the cloying name she hasn’t been able to shake since. Given the possibilities, it’s clearly best to be young, blond, and impertinent, because then you do not suffer any retribution for what you’ve done. Your escape is assured. As for me, I am over thirty-five, soft-spoken, brown-skinned—yet I, too, seem to have gotten off scot-free.

It can be difficult, however, to sift out retribution from reward, to really tell the two apart, commingled as they often are. For instance, after I left the farmhouse, having never touched my chapter on William James, my friend and I decided to have another go at it, this time more solemnly and deliberately than before, and to our indescribable relief, it stuck. My body grew larger and larger, unrecognizably larger, until suddenly one morning our daughter was born. We rigged up a sort of three-sided crib at the edge of the bed that allowed me to reach for her in the middle of the night and to nurse, without ever having to sit up or even raise my head from the pillow, and when she was done, I’d just slide her back on her special shelf and fall asleep again. Which is all to say that though she slept beside me I never worried, in those blurry months, about rolling over on my child and smothering her; among the many possible horrors I worried over, this was not one of them, this was one of the few I could lay to rest. Strangely, though, my body remained convinced that I had to stay very still as I was sleeping, that I couldn’t toss about or sprawl, that I needed to contain myself to a sliver of the bed, as if to avoid the risk of something terrible happening. It was an odd compulsion, and my hand or arm would often go numb as the result of sleeping in this anxious, unmoving way. Then one night my daughter’s voice punctured my dreaming so cleanly that I was able to hold the shape of the dream before it vanished, and its shape was the shape of Jerry Roth, the monstrous bulk of him, heaving softly beside me in the bed, and I knew, I knew, that I couldn’t move, because to wake him would be—to what? To die? My heart raced, my breath was shallow. I brought my hands to my chest and they were damp with sweat. In the darkness this felt like fear. But I lifted the elastic band on my underwear and put a hand between my legs, and I understood then that my rigid, dreaming body hadn’t been afraid. After wiping my fingers on the sheets, I reached out and found my daughter on her shelf.

As if not to be stopped, I became pregnant again, sooner than expected, and the apartment soon revealed itself as too expensive and too small, making the once unimaginable choice appear to us natural, attractive, inescapable, imminent: we moved to a house in the country. Our town is less than two hours away from the city by train; the backyards peter out into forests or fields; the houses are for the most part run-down, but with a lot of original detail, as the agent liked to say. A specialty food shop has bravely opened up, and there is a drive-in movie theater that still operates in the summer. At dusk, we flick the insects from our eyes and turn blankly to the wide, transparent sky, something like calm sliding over us.

But the days can be long, which I remember from my first stay in the country, and I often catch myself calculating the hours and little activities until dusk falls and the train comes in and the babies are put to sleep. The stretch between the morning nap and the afternoon nap always has a particular endlessness to it. My children are just different enough in age to be impossible to entertain simultaneously; what