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Show 29 In the afternoon and in the evening and again the following morning, Annis watches Robeck sit in the little chintz chair, not moving, wheezing slowly as he breathes, the fingers of his old gray hands knotted around the ends of the chair. She begins to bring him some of the things she has uncovered in her relentless, unceasing packing: a corsage he had given her, now brown and papery, pressed between the pages of a book; a lacquered eyeglass case which had belonged to his mother's mother's aunt; an address book from almost fifty years before. She opens it to random names; Robeck says he can remember none of them. Somewhere in the attic she finds a box of photographs; she sorts out one of him, dressed in knickers and holding a coil of rope and an ice axe; she brings it to him because she has found the knickers too, among the contents of a chest of discarded clothing the children had used for costumes. She can remember the summer, she says, they had spent in the Canadian part of the Rockies, and she describes idyllic late-summer evenings, camped on a high plateau, watching their fire surrender to the night and the stars overwhelm the sky. "That was too long ago," he says. "I don't remember." She finds the ring he had worn in college, and a box of trophies from the swimming team. "Get those out of here," he says, "I don't want to think about them." He looks at her with disbelief, and watches the way her hands clutch these old, forgotten objects: the ring, the photograph, the small bronzed statues. He begins to realize what he has been seeing, as he has watched her month by month pack away all the objects of their lives: she is turning inward now, |
