Read One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] for Free Online Page A

the glove is off and she grabs the baking soda to put on the spot, she notes the rapid swelling in the webbing between her thumb and index [her hands her best feature, better than the legs even], the throb, already throbbing, and steps back outside to check if it was a hornet or wasp and glimpses as she peers into the coleus the dusty reddish thing, the sickening hourglasses along its thick length as it creeps soundlessly into the foliage, and it passes through her mind as her body is passing out that Southerners sympathizing with the North were called Copperheads.
AND, vacuuming the rag rug, listening to Nina Simone: The record had a catch in it. Always started over at “Old Jim Crow is dead.” When the phone rang, and she shut off the vacuum cleaner, not the record player, and the caller said Hunter [expletive] Crumb is dead.
VINDICATION
After that she would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell.
Her husband would come home from work and she would be in a rage, and he could not understand it. He would repair to his shed to build his models.
There is a sanctuary in the mind made of balsa and glue. Perfect little gliders constructed in perfect quietude.
There is a sanctuary in the mind made of poetry and music and laughter. Whiskey and cigarettes never run out, and the ironing board is never in use.
There is a sanctuary without the stench of diapers, the drone of the sewing machine, or the fretful pawing of rosaries.
DEAR ABBY,
My mother-in-law said she read in your column about how to make dirty diapers disappear.
DEAR MISINFORMED,
I am not a magician.
Everybody has a problem.
Once and once only, she mentioned: He may have been conceived in the middle of the Ohio River, Stephen.
THE MAN IMPORTED FROM MEMPHIS, the Invader: I don’t see many of the Invaders anymore. Coby is still here. Cabbage is here. Drives a cab. J Smith went back to Atlanta and got a Ph.D. Calvin works for the convention center. Marrell, works for the CIA. Before that, undercover for the Memphis police. [Seconds after the assassination, he was on the balcony.] Don, he was an informant too, we became good friends. Gwin, the one that was cut in the attack, she went to Nebraska. King Jewel faded from the scene. I don’t know what happened to Cornbread. Can’t remember his last name. Saw his sister not too long ago.
Eddie T was wild. Couldn’t do a thing with him. Heard he died in Cummins Prison. His wife stayed in Big Tree a long time. I had never heard of Big Tree before I got the call. I had never crossed that bridge to Arkansas.
I went to prison twice. Last time I stirred things up—about conditions—the crowding, the food, and so on. They put me in what had been the women’s unit. Little old knee-high fence. Fished all the time. When I got out, I went back to seeing everybody on Beale and Hernando. Things were going on in Memphis.
Now I wonder whatever happened to Cornbread.

V, deep down, she may have been as sad as a cover band. She might have felt drier than a clod of Arkansas dirt. Lonely lonely lonely, like the hunter green suitcase that hadn’t been used since her honeymoon.
Some honeymoon, she later told Gert, with that off-color smile, she almost had to rape him. She said this near death. As her executive organs were shutting down and she was finishing the NYT crossword, September 2, in ballpoint:
What is a suffix of book
ish
Who is a major exporter of coconut oil
Samoa
A colorless liquid
ouzo
A defeatist’s words
I [nospace] lose
The artist of the etching and aquatint, el sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
[ Does it follow that the sleep of monsters produces reason? ]
It was the Thursday Times. They get harder. But the others got thrown out. This was on a shelf of dust under the silhouette where a boomerang had hung. The boomerang’s silhouette and the telephone’s and the outline of her iconoclastic altar, stayed white. Otherwise the walls were solid nicotine.
Had cancer after she had her last baby. Had a hysterectomy.