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seven The Friday evening before the party was balmy.A sudden warm spell, unusual for this late in October, had come.A good omen for tomorrow night’s party. Six of the actors, including Mr. Harrison, had accepted invitations and, after hours of heated discussion with her sister, Cammy had decided not to invite her parents. Lexi was relieved. She didn’t want to meet a grandmother who drank too much. She could hear Cammy’s animated voice down in the living room. When Cammy read to the children after supper, she went up to her room, glad for half an hour’s rest. Usually she leafed through Cammy’s old Vogue magazines or, before she was called to put the children to bed, tried to read one of the Mennonite devotional booklets that were regularly tucked into her parents’ letters.There was always a strange lurch in her belly when she switched from one to the other, but the uncomfortable feeling didn’t stop her admiring the beauty of the girls and their clothing. She wasn’t sure what it was that interested her so much, but often she wished she’d been born one of them instead of having the heaviness of the Mennonite ways and laws weighing on her. She wanted to be just a person. She wanted to walk down King Street as just a person.What would that feel like? Who would she be? Sometimes she reread letters from her brother Willy, who was at the Tabor College Bible School in Hillsboro, Kansas. She loved Willy so much and yet she envied him, first because he was allowed to finish high school, and then because the rich relatives in Newton paid his way at Bible School. No one would ever dream of doing that for her. Willy had such beautiful handwriting. Sometimes he drew little pictures in the margins of his letters, illustrations to go along with the descriptions in his writing. A caricature of a teacher he disliked, for example. In his latest letter there was a drawing of a girl. Emma in the Library, he called it. Most of her face was in shadow and her head was bent, reading. She looked intelligent. She looked so content. Lexi yearned to be that girl sitting in the library, reading.Were there actually girls at the Bible College? She found that impossible to believe. Here in Waterloo she was too restless to read. She often thought of writing something in one of the yellow notebooks but nothing ever 60 Annie Jacobsen jacobsen_text 8/27/07 10:05 Page 60 happened and the pages remained blank, white as the prairies in winter, empty. Vast and empty. One pale pink ribbon of cloud floated across the deep purple sky. Something about the inevitable fading of that pink cloud made her jump off the bed. She threw on a sweater and tiptoed down the back stairs to the back door. She would go for a walk and enjoy the night air. It was a thrill and it was scary to have such freedom, to have to answer to no one. The dim yellow light coming from the garage window made her think of the coal oil lamps at home, how they made even their poor house seem cozy and warm. She walked by the garage window, peeped in and saw the back of Dr. Oliver’s head wreathed in smoke. She was startled. What was he doing in there? After a few steps across the lawn, she turned back to the garage, as if pulled by an invisible cord. She turned the door handle. Afterwards , she would remember how cold the steel ball had felt on her fingers . Dr. Oliver was leaning against the hood of the car, smoking a cigar and holding a drink in his hand. He turned when he heard the garage door open and stood up straight, the cigar still in his mouth. “I…I…” she stuttered.Already she knew her face was beginning to go pink. She pulled her sweater more tightly around her. “Sorry.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and stared at its glowing end for a long moment. The lantern hanging on the wall hissed slightly. She glanced at it and then at him.The hood of the yellow car stretched between them, gleaming lemon. “Well, Aleksandra?” “I was going for a walk and I just wanted…to see…I mean, to know…” She was trembling now… “You...
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