15
If you waited long enough, it would take you away. It would not look twice at the bunnies, or the blankets, or the Home Cooking Play Corner, or at any of the things you had established to make this fragile space seem permanent. It would simply wrap you in its arms and hold you tight. It would teach you all the secrets you weren’t supposed to know.
“Men run away from love; it’s in their nature,” Mrs Anderson told Sal the next morning. They were sitting in a cheery blue breakfast nook eating eggs, bacon, and cottage cheese. The walls were adorned with little plastic models of Jesus dying on the cross, glass-framed butterflies, and faded photographs of ugly children scowling into a camera. “They see love come their way and they head for the hills, it’s some instinctual reaction they’re born with. Men’re basically lone wolves, little girl, wandering around in their big white Volkswagen vans, and running like hell at the first sign of trouble.” Mrs Anderson wore a big plastic blue bubble on her head, knobby with hair curlers. She smoked lengthy cigarettes and crushed them out in her half-finished fried eggs with brisk little movements, as if she were extinguishing each man she had ever known, one mistake at a time. “Trust me, little girl. I’ve had five men take off on me in the last twelve years, and they were as different as five different species of animal. But they were all identical in one respect, and that was their fear of love, commitment, and marital harmony. When I didn’t love them, boy, there wasn’t no problem; we got along great. In fact, when I didn’t love them, they hung around forever, there was no place they’d rather be than with their hotlooking little yours truly. They fixed broken boards on the roof. They repaired plumbing and electrical problems. For a while, I’d have everything a woman wanted: sex in the afternoon, homedelivered pizzas and cigarettes, and a competent man to lay