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Show Moon - 30 Anne loved James not in the way of enjoying but in the way of anxiety. He wasn't easy. Every time, he asked her, "Did you come?" She tried at first to explain that she wasn't quite sure what that meant, and did it really matter so long as she loved him? His stone blue eyes flicked sideways and he said, "Of course it matters. You'd know if you had. How else am I going to get a son?" His scowl would deepen and she'd feel afraid and do whatever she could to soothe him. After a while, she simply answered him, "Yes. It was wonderful." Once in a South Carolina hotel room Joy crawled into their bed, snuggled against her mother. Anne turned over and gathered her daughter into her arms, feeling warmer and happier than she had for a long time. Anne used to sleep snuggled up to her daughter, but Ruth had found them like that when Joy hadn't been even a year old, and had torn the covers off the bed, shouting, "Bad, evil, unnatural woman!" Since that time Anne had put Joy in her crib to cry and rock herself to sleep alone. Now Anne held her breath against James1 waking up and finding them like that. But they'd been to a party with his officer friends, and he'd drunk his fill of scotch. Nothing would wake him now. Some of this I know for a fact because you told me, for instance, that James believed a woman has to have an orgasm if she is to conceive. And I think he believed your kind, fearful lies, which were lies I can sympathize with, for James had blue eyes that were scary when he was not pleased. The rest I know from stories told by Aunt Gloria and from the fiction of firsthand memory shaped by the need to make sense, to justify, to bring events into line with the way life looks now. If now I were a woman who looked at life with serenity and wisdom, would the picture be different? Is it possible to tell a true story? Each |