LITMIR.BIZ

       NAOMI

      She tilted her head back and let the sunshine bathe her like a woman of the jungle. Oh to let it feed her flesh as it would seep into the garden in which she stands like a child with a mother, the afternoon full of her freckles and red hair, red as the color of chestnut, pomegranate, and manzanita, and as warm as wine. She wanted it, the warmth of the color of her hair which never spread over the pale complexion of her skin. She wiggled her fingers into the soil. Call it soil, dirt, or recycled shit, but the black under her fingernails was not unclean, and the odor of ammonia was better than deodorant. She wanted health, to feel her body shine again like those farm summers of her childhood. She wanted chickenshit on the porch and the odor of hay. She wanted it not as a vacation but every day, dirt, sloppiness, shloshiness, a mush of life churning, seething, and forever red. To be clean, a body rid of all test tube profits, clean of what was not even worthy to be called shit or piss but was a cancer spoon-fed into her blood in the blasphemy of nutriment. She would fight the poison with tomatoes and eggs, splatter the face of chemicals with seeds and yolk, protoplasm against death. With her sweaty hairy friends she’d bring the farm back, a food conspiracy to bring dirt into the town. She went forth to battle the rats that were invading the compost. She had built a new box in the corner of the garden. Now she had to line it with tin so the rats couldn’t eat through the wood. And then move all the compost from the old box which was too close to the house. She spread t corrugated sheets of tin in the driveway and cut them with the big sheers. Then she fitted the pieces along the sides of the box, inserting them at least two feet below the level of the ground or the rats would dig and come up from underneath. She nailed the tin tight with roofing nails. And now she shoveled the compost from the old box and dumped it into the new one. Into the wheelbarrow went the history of meals. Shovel by shovel she lifted and dumped all campaigns, small planet recipes, the meat-guilt of vegetarian penance, rebellious pork-chop bones, defeated corners of the refrigerator, ignored leftovers, ambitious dinners that burned or exploded, rice, egg shells, spoiled raw vegetables, cooked vegetables, moldy bread, moldy cheese, moldy jam, green disgusting moldy fruit, corn cobs, melon rinds, tea leaves, worms, sawdust, dirt, the asparagus-piss and rotten-egg stench of decay, a mesmerizing pile of weird colors, reptile green, death white, sensual black, clotted red, food for food.

      In the evening under the quilt, with the dog curled asleep and snoring at the foot of her bed, she cuddled into the warmth of a big fat simple novel, a bunch of people and history, a plot of life she entered like a child into the folds of time, war and peace. The Modern Library Giant filled her little hands as she lapped the sentences phrase by phrase feeding her imagination by the low light of the lamp over her shoulder, her loneliness in abeyance. She paused, her eyes suddenly out of focus, seeing double as she remembered her childhood curled on the rug, her ear to the console radio listening to the Life of Riley. How wonderful people were, families of people. There would be a large bucolic space, warm golden shafts of light through high shade trees, and all the people she had ever loved would be there and she would slip into them and swim between their bodies. Natasha would eventually be with Pierre. She knew that. After a thousand pages and twenty years Natasha would be with Pierre. It would all work out. But Sonya, poor Sonya, was there no one for Sonya? When the dog wants love he wags his tail and someone pets him. It was as simple as that. To learn how to wag her tail. And he would come. Come, oh my Dominic, come lie with me and by my love. With a child and all of us here.

      — A baby, I want a baby.

      She shut the light and shut her eyes and fell asleep hugging herself for protection against the night.

      And Marian? When Naomi suggested to her that they all live together she said, “Yes, we must try.” And so began the many meetings about money and who had a rich aunt to borrow from, an inheritance to tap, a car to sell, or savings to gamble on the wild chance that it would be possible for all of them to live together under the same roof. And so the strange words, escrow and mortgage. And so this enormous old house on the comer with a row of garages and a giant garden, a chicken coop and a duck yard and a rabbit pen. And a woodpile piling higher and higher, and an ecology shed overflowing with bottles and cans. And clogged toilet bowls and broken pipes. And three dogs and two cats and four cars two of which never run and three garbage cans three of which are always full. And a communal living room that was once a barber shop and now looks like a barber shop with everything gone except a few chairs and an old calendar. And so Marian comes down the kitchen in the morning and then goes over to one of the garages which she converted into a studio for her loom.