Start reading the next book from Barbara Kingsolver, Partita
Read an extract of Partita by the global bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver.
Prelude I
The first night after Sigurd called, I put down the phone with my hands shaking and a sick feeling that I’d been waiting for something like this. Not a train, but a reckoning coming at me. This phone call, out of a blank silence of twenty-some years. (I’m pretending I don’t know exactly how many years.) His voice I’d known instantly. The idea of him coming here, seeing him in person, felt like a bomb he’d put in the phone that might explode in my ear. I told him I needed time to think. Seven days, then. He would call back on the weekend to find out what I decided. I couldn’t put any name to the shock I felt. Either choice, yes or no, carried the feeling of a disaster.
I’ve had plenty of practice at masking nerves, or did have when I was younger and played for audiences, but that was faint help getting me through supper across the kitchen table from my husband. Trying to think of questions I should ask him about the chance of rain, the hay he had to put up. Staring at the patterned Formica tabletop that has irritated me for what feels like a hundred years, because it looks like dancing rubber bands. Listening to the clock tick. What if that call had come an hour later? Instead of buzzing in my apron pocket while I was frying the apples, my phone could have been ringing on the counter right then. Charlie could have been watching the life drain out of me while I said Okay and Where? and Let me think about it. Watching me fall into the sinkhole in my middle so deep, a lot of other things might collapse into it.
That’s not what he’d have seen, though. Charlie would ask if I was okay, and when I made up something, a student rescheduling a lesson, he would believe me. Pick up his knife and fork and cut up his pork chop. That’s the man he is, solid and good, which makes him sound ordinary, or I guess maybe the enviable side of ordinary as husbands go, but it’s more unusual than that. His mind could no more hold thoughts of betrayal than a good strong hand can hold water. Just not built for the task.
I was young when I’d known Sigurd, only twenty and barely more than a child, even if I thought otherwise. Years ago, anyway, time enough for forgiving and forgetting trespasses, even if they felt murderous at the time. Or so I told myself, while dishes were washed, while the newspaper was folded to the local section and read, while we said our good-nights before Charlie turned in. But an hour after midnight, I was still playing Chopin in the dark house, trying to stop time. If I didn’t ever go to bed and get up again, if six more days didn’t pass, we could go on here, unrattled by this earthquake I didn’t ask for. At least I knew my playing wouldn’t disturb Charlie. He is early to bed and early to rise, a farmer to his bones, and could sleep through the Second Coming. He’s told me if he ever does turn over in our bedroom upstairs and wake up to one of my nocturnes, the sound of me sends him right back to his dreams. So there he lay above me while I sat in the dark living room playing all the Chopin preludes I could remember, then the mazurkas, and after that the nocturnes.
My hand was cramping like a fiend, and I finally quit on Chopin in the middle of a cadenza. Right hand is the bad one. That was Sigurd’s fault, and one ruined hand the least of it. I snapped on the little brass music lamp on the piano, stood up too fast, and took hold of the fallboard to steady myself, not wanting to trip over the dog curled at my feet or ding my hip on some sharp corner in the dark. That’s bodies for you, underneath all the mind’s drama, just pitiable flesh. My legs had fallen asleep. I saw the shoes under the piano and said quietly without thinking: “Oh, Mom is here.”
Gaz looked up at me with his ears pricked, pale eyes curious in the sudden light. He looked at the shoes and back to me, assuring me that whatever I was thinking, he agreed. “Nobody’s here,” I told him. “Just you and me.”
But somebody was, or something. These were not my dead mother’s shoes, obviously. I’d taken them off there when I sat down, needing to feel the cold pedals under my bare feet. Empty leather flats with the sad, squashed look of weariness, just like the ones she used to park beside her recliner every time she gave up on another day, accepting her life as the sum of its disappointments. If an elephant had scuffed around the kitchen all day in those, I used to think to myself, they would not look worse. A child can’t hate her mother without putting the load-bearing walls of the known world at risk. I settled for hating her shoes.
I hooked two fingers into their backs and carried them with me outside to the porch. I breathed in the late-summer smells of mown hay and ragweed while I watched Gaz make a quick check of the perimeter of the yard. All I could see of him in the dark was the rippling gait of his white feet and the tip of his tail, the rest of him all one with the night. I rubbed my hand where it always ached with too much use or any change in the weather. The ancient injury. He didn’t even know. If I were to tell Sigurd now, it could not be kind: I am sundered past the repair of any steel pins. I stood awhile under the accusing stars with heartless crickets singing in my ears: If this is true, if this is true. If I’m no better than the sum of my disappointments.
Does every woman turn into her mother? My sister-in- law, Mickie, used to say so. But that was all of a piece with becoming a mother herself, in those years when we drank coffee and visited in her kitchen between the interruptions of shrieks and tears, the U shape of bite marks on a pudgy arm, the discovery of the naked Barbie show behind the couch. She confessed to hearing her own mother come out of her mouth: Because I said so and Right this minute, young lady, words that ooze down through leaks in the roofs we build between generations.
Mickie loved her children madly, it was plain to see. The eye-rolling was probably her way of apologizing to me for this miracle she knew I could never have. The other ancient injury. But what was motherhood to me? The sting of a wash-damp hand on a cheek. Or words, of the kind that can sting parts of a child more tender than flesh. Her curdled fortune inside me would not get passed on. What happened to me was for the best.
I left the shoes outside the back door and went upstairs to bed. I always thought of my mother as old back then, older than dirt, but she wasn’t. Late thirties or so when she lost Cy and gave up on the rest. I was younger than that when I lost everything.
Extracted from Partita by Barbara Kingsolver, releases 6 October.
Partita
by Barbara Kingsolver
The story of a brief, passionate, life-changing love affair, wrapped up in what might be the greatest romance of all: our eternal human longing for art and beauty.
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