Read Lila: A Novel for Free Online Page B

knew what she looked like, with her big hands and her rangy arms, and her face that had been burned a hundred times, more, and her scorched hair and her eyes the sun had faded. In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you’re pretty. Mainly she’d cleaned up around the place, helped the others with their clothes and their hair. When she tried to pretend, they’d laugh. He did have a way of looking at her, when he looked at her at all. She had to admit it. But if she let herself start thinking like that, he would begin to matter to her, and the times she had let that happen, those two or three times, nothing had come of it but trouble. She had a habit now of putting questions to him in her mind. What do you ever tell people in a sermon except that things that happen mean something? Some man dies somewhere a long time ago and that means something. People eat a bit of bread and that means something. Then why won’t you say how you know that? Do you just talk that way because you’re a preacher? This kind of thinking made a change in her loneliness, made it more tolerable for her. And she knew how dangerous that could be. She had told herself more than once not to call it loneliness, since it wasn’t any different from one year to the next, it was just how her body felt, like hungry or tired, except it was always there, always the same. Now and again she had distracted herself from it for a while. And it always came back and felt worse.
    But she began to think about getting herself baptized. She thought there might be something about that water on her forehead that would cool her mind. She had to get through her life one way or another. No reason not to take any comfort the world seemed to offer her. If none of it made sense to her now, that might change if she let it. If none of it meant anything, after all, no harm done. Then he told her that they would be having a class, and she would be very welcome to join them. She was still making up her mind, just walking past the church because she thought she might be early or she had come the wrong evening, because she had walked past twice before and had not seen anyone going in. She never really knew the time, and she could lose track of the days. But then there was the preacher coming along the street toward her, so she just stood there where she was and waited. Nothing else to do. He had taken off his hat when he saw her, so he probably meant to speak to her. She had not thought what she might say to him, had not expected to speak to him at all, only to sit in the row farthest from him and listen and keep her questions to herself.
    He said, “Good evening. I’m happy to see you here.”
    And she said, “I figure I better get myself baptized. No one seen to it for me when I was a child.” Realizing as she heard herself say the words that after all her thinking she felt almost in the habit of speaking her mind to him. Didn’t she know better than to let herself think like that? Hadn’t she told herself a hundred times? This is what was bound to come of it. He didn’t even look quite the way he looked to her in her thoughts, and still she had spoken to him as if she knew him. That’s what came of living the way she did.
    “Well,” he said. “Yes. We’ll take care of that. Certainly.”
    Everything she said seemed to surprise him a little. No wonder, when it surprised her, too. She thought, How do I know what I’ll be saying with all them church people watching me? She said, “I can’t come tonight. I got to work.” And she turned and walked away, instantly embarrassed to realize how strange she must look, hurrying off for no real reason into the dark of the evening. The lonely dark, where she could only expect to go crazier, in that shack where she still lived because it was hard for her to be with people. It would be truer to say hid than lived, since about the only comfort she had in it was