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Show •64 the root; new beans opened their doubled leaves like cupped hands. "Linda was a pretty woman," Jacob said. "You can see it in Buck. But she and Adam agreed that it was degrading for women to wear frilly clothes and makeup. Most of the time she wore jeans and a shirt like a man would." Jacob was talking about my mother but I didn't know how to stop him. "She did man's work around the house, too. Adam washed the dishes and she fixed the car; he did his sculpture and she put a new roof on the garage because there ought to be no such thing as man's work or woman's work. But one summer when I was ten years old a funny thing happened; I wandered into her room and she had put up her hair and put on a summer dress with yellow flowers and lace around the neck; she had lipstick on, and eye-shadow. It was all a little clumsy, because she wasn't used to it, but it astonished me." "Why did she do that?" Morgan said. "She fell in love with one of her students." Jacob steered her down another path between two beds of lettuce; the new plants, already thinned, were lined up on the brown dirt like so many fallen green stars. "She had a job that summer teaching English at the Oregon State Penitentiary and she fell in love with a Hawaiian merchant-marine sailor who'd killed a man in Astoria." "Buck never talks about her," Morgan said. |