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Show page 168 are healthy these days." Annie followed her hand and head, breathing on his nakedness. She laid the articles on a chair, backed out. "Don't worry, Ben, I didn't peek." But she had peeked, all the time, and took a moment to say, "Use all the hot water you want to, Ben, it's cheap." While Holder bathed Annie took a quick drink from a bottle, and in her bedroom stripped nude herself. The shades were drawn. She switched on several lights of the room, looked at herself in her mirror. She stretched, bent her neck like a turkey, now this way and that, trying to see some softness, some inch of allure. But even in her loins appeared the creaks and cracks of age. She brushed furiously at her hair, doused herself with almost a can of powder, letting surplus powder fall to the rug in gobs, as though she were a miller shaking a used flour sack. She then dressed anew, careful of quality but careless of fit. She had no curves upon which to hang any clothes, even the most expensive and treasured. Excess powder, lining weathered creases of her face and neck, made her appear to be a mummer. She was at her food-covered dining table in a thirty-year-old silk when the front door slammed. She rushed out, her chest constricted and acidbound, to see Holder walking across the front lawn to Mrs. Shelton's porch. Annie flushed to her liver, clawed at the tight fit of her dress around her throat, had the feeling her inner organs were knotted strands of rope, binding her and restricting her breathing. Dragging herself back to her kitchen, she finished her bottle, set out a new one, crammed the foo#back Into the o*ercrammed icebox, and peered from her |
