Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

the hand it controlled had a pencil in it, but a lobe that understood music instantly and totally, without words, and took paintings to heart, without knowledge of perspective or schools or strange jargon like “pointillism.” Though their thoughtful, intellectual conversations almost never got through to her, almost never penetrated her defensive wall of jokes and suddenly remembered chores—escapes from the room in which the talk went on—their talk of the poor, sad, miserable right lobe had stirred her to attention. It was the lobe that controlled the left side of the body, the sinestre, the lobe that had to do with intuition, mystical leaps, with her own ability—or so she translated their talk—to guess the first names of people she’d never met. She’d discovered it first at her father’s factory. She could look at a man who worked for her father and know immediately that his name was Ray, or Virgil, or Ben. She’d probably been wrong more often than she remembered, she realized, but that wasn’t what mattered. Often she was right. And in the same way she could look at a woman and know what kind of house she lived in, what the furniture was, what kind of children she had. Martin had been telling her since before they were married that she ought to be a novelist, and for all his own novels he got her to help him with what people should be called, what their houses should look like, what games they should play. They talked of the right and left lobes of the brain, Martin and Paul, soberly reasoning, saying to each other that what both of them needed, as writers of fiction, was a more highly developed right lobe of the brain, and they would hold out their hands to the light from the fireplace in the Vermont house she’d lately gotten Martin to buy, observing to each other how both their left hands were blotchy and poorly defined, weakling in comparison to their deeply lined, muscular right hands, proving that their right lobes were sickly, unable to assert themselves; and she’d realized they were talking, without meaning to, about her. She’d felt a partisan’s sadness for the sickly right lobe, and she’d realized, sitting in the flickering light in that huge Vermont house without furniture, that she was all both Martin and Paul were not, could do all they futilely demanded of themselves; and she’d realized, in the same flash of insight, that like the right lobe they spoke so admiringly of, she was mute, inarticulate, couldn’t possibly make clear what she was and stood for, because as soon as they gave her the freedom to speak she would forget what it was she’d intended to say, would laugh and blush, like her father, and make some joke.

All that was in the future. What she knew as she lay in the Kaiser Hospital was that leaving San Francisco to return to Missouri was like a death. Why was she doing it? —There had never been any question about her not doing it. But for all her pain and sorrow and confusion, the question was locked into her flesh like some medieval instrument of torture: Why am I doing it? It would present itself even more dramatically later: he would beat her senseless, chase like a vacant-lot puppy after bitches, and though she was the proudest woman in the world, she would cling to him. Why? Neither the stupidest woman she’d ever met, a faculty wife for whom all the world was a sorry comedown from Lincoln, Nebraska, nor the shrewdest and most powerful woman she knew, one of her two closest friends in San Francisco, the Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn, would have put up with such nonsense for an instant. The longer she endured it, the more she saw of salvation by divorce, the more her pride should have pushed her away from him. But it was never a question. It wasn’t reasonable, and at times she would admit it was hard to call it love. But she’d decided. Why? She had decided.

I’ll go with him, she thought. I’ll take him for every fucking penny he ever earns.

Then the pain struck again, and she forgot her rage. She rang for the nurse. No one came. She became frightened and rang again, then again. Still no one. The pain came out of nowhere, possessed her in a flash, and then was gone again, leaving no trace but a rawness, a feeling exactly like a skinned knee, but inside, and everywhere. A shadow fell across her, though there was no one in the room. “Martin,” she cried out, “don’t leave me here!” Then the nurse came, fat, stupid. Joan couldn’t have a shot for at least another hour. “Doctor’s orders,” she said. “I’ve got to,” Joan said, but the nurse shook her head, sublimely boss. “No use to playact. That’s the doctor’s orders.” Joan saw at once what she was dealing with and threw the pitcher across the room, screamed with all her might, raised the hospital roof. They at once called the doctor, who told them sternly that they should have called him sooner. She got her shot. She slept.

To Martin she said nothing of her horror at the thought of returning to Missouri. Her father had had a light heart attack; that was one of Martin’s reasons for wanting to return, or so he told her now. He wanted Evan and Mary to know their grandparents and cousins. What could she say? He was telling the truth about his reason for wanting to go back, though not all of it.

She remembered fishing with her own grandfather, in one of the sinkholes on his farm. He’d sit on the log that ran down into the water, in a patch of leafy shade, yellow sunlight all around him, and he’d give her advice on baiting the hook or casting toward the middle, or he’d tell her stories of mules he’d had, or his