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Show 14 Luel. But I allow her into my apartment anyway, offer her a drink, show her some of the pictures I have kept in my journals. "It's a kind of family album," I say, but she does not seem to understand. There are pictures of five or six years of women at the GoldenGlow, some of them old pictures, like the one Elsa left yesterday, of themselves and their sons or their dogs or their husbands, in their wedding gowns and traveling suits, with their little boys dressed in sailor outfits and their girl-children wreathed in curls. There are new pictures too, which they have taken of each other with the Instamatic cameras their relatives have given them: pictures on the lawn of the nursing home, winning at poker in the day-room, of two or three of them sitting together in the lawn chairs in my garden. Luel finds a picture of her grandmother, together with Adelia, Bernice, and Elsa. "Aren't they ever jealous of each other?" she asks. "No." But I see that she is on the right track. Perhaps, after all, she can understand. "Did they all leave rings?" she insists. "Did they all wear the gown?" "Yes," I say. But now I see that Luel is sitting closer to me on the couch, her legs uncrossed, stretched out apart beneath the table. She leans toward me to see the pictures, and I can breathe the throaty smell of perfume. "How can you?" she finally asks, "even for the rings?" I ignore the insult, and try to explain to her what it is like to touch these women, what it is like to run your hand along a thigh that has not been |
