The Flowered Sofa

Jessica stood in the yard, translucent, touching lightly the distant yellow hills. “Old lady,” children whispered, passing on the other side of the hedge, so she moved her grey bulk across the grass and took clothes from the line, folding them into a plastic basket. On the porch the cat crouched by the door, waiting to run inside.

At dusk, while she ate cottage cheese from a bowl and the two clocks ticked, a moth kept battering itself against the kitchen light.

When she went to bed, out of habit, she listened for the child. “It’s all right,’ she used to say to him, “It’s just the wind.” And she had been comforted.

In another room, her father and her aunt, who had once noticed death in the eyes of the flowered sofa, laughed raucous, pure. She longed to be with them.

Her mother, smiling and smiling, was left out too, since she thought of them as savage children unable to see the obvious design of life.

Jessica had heard about it at Sunday School. Jesus didn’t want her to hit her brother even if he spit in her hair on purpose. She was to sit up straight at the table, and when she wanted to suck her thumb, it was the Devil tempting her, trying to ruin her teeth. Fleas, she thought, scratching herself, must have something to do with the Devil since they bite you when you have done anything to them. The cat crawled out from under the covers and scratched at the door.

In the morning she drank orange juice, the two clocks ticked, and she did not look for the moth.

As she watched, the afternoon yard between the house and the hedge slowly became a meadow. A man and a woman came out of the woods on the other side, walking slowly. They were remarkably beautiful. Jessica, in her Goddess form, ran to meet them, touching their faces, praising them. “Mother!” David shouted. Oh, it was David, and his wife Anna. They looked frightened, so she took them in the house and made them some tea, chattering about her vegetable garden, asking them about the children. And all the time a baby was crying and crying, somewhere, in one of her rooms. Anne, wearing a spider in her hair like an ornament, was scrubbing the baby, was scrubbing Jessica, this woman with a spider —no, it was a carved wooden clip. She was washing between Jessica’s legs, one corner of her mouth pulled up as if something smelled bad. There were other people moving around the room, and the baby was still crying. “Why doesn’t someone pick that baby up?” Jessica asked.

“Mrs. Johnson, you are in a nursing home. There are no babies here.” The nurse said it mechanically, as if she’d said it a hundred times already. Then baby went on crying and crying. Then it stopped.

Copyright May 1978