Mission to America Read Online Free

sensed, and might even float free from my gray corpse and drift forever in the Etheric Breeze, a permanent speck of quintessential Mason-ness that couldn't think or remember or speak its name but only wish and wish and wish.
    â€œI'm supposed to be able to feel it. Here,” said Sarah. “A little bump-bump or twitch that tells me when.”
    â€œDid you?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    â€œLet's keep going.”
    â€œIf you're confident.”
    â€œI'm confident.”
    â€œConfident or just determined?”
    â€œThe longer you jabber and pester me,” I said, “the more confident I get.”
    Across the field, by some wonder of acoustics that summer in the mountains brings on sometimes, I could hear the voices of our chaperones—four ancient ladies drinking mint tea from thermoses and plotting their annual trade fair in Missoula. AFAs lived to ninety quite regularly, and not a touchy, arthritic, dependent ninety but an unflappable productive ninety that, among the women, led to supreme achievements in the crafts realm. They sewed and crocheted with the patience of near immortals, complicating and miniaturizing their stitches, detailing and elaborating their patterns. It was as though they were working their way down to some primary depth of tininess and fineness that, if they ever succeeded in touching it, might allow them to reweave the cosmos or, if their fingers slipped, unravel it. They didn't hold on to their handiworks, however; they sold them to strangers from a rented stall at a Missoula's weekend farmers' market. Their pieces commanded handsome prices. Those old crones loved their money, it was plain to see, though why they loved it wasn't clear. They rarely spent it, just packed it into shoe boxes or sewed it into the linings of their coats for their heirs to come across someday.
    â€œI'm feeling the twitch,” Sarah said, and she was off me, quickly enough to avoid a pregnancy but not to avoid a gluey wet mess. She wiped us both clean with the hand towel (had she planned for this?) and reminded me, after pausing to let things settle, that a clock had just started on our eventual wedding. Once I'd proven myself as a provider by amassing the money and Virtue Coupons necessary to buy a house and a share in the Bluff co-op, we would be married in this very field, on this very spot beside the creek. Until then, more intimate contact was forbidden; our memories of the Frolic would have to serve.
    â€œWe're in the Book of Love now,” Sarah said.
    In practice, this meant meeting for Sunday suppers at her family's house on Isis Street, a standard aluminum-sided three-bedroom cube built by community labor in the eighties from plans drawn up by the Church Domestic Architect. These blueprints changed only every thirty years or so, resulting in uniform little neighborhoods that I found cozy and reassuring but that the fussier women of our town (my grandmother called them “the Parisians”) loved to gripe about. And, yes, each house style did have certain flaws, such as the tendency of my parents' roof to collect so much snow in the winter that when spring came the copious runoff would flood the basement and swell the soil near the foundation. Repairing the damage this caused was often expensive, but the fact that every squat white stucco bungalow clustered around ours was ailing in the same manner softened the blow.
    At the Kimmels' house the problem was lack of air, which made me groggy and inarticulate during my weekly visits. Sarah's father, a laborer in the talc mine that was Bluff's chief source of outside income, suffered more spectacularly, coughing nonstop and rubbing his runny eyes until the lashes all fell out. Sarah blamed the dustiness and stuffiness for her dull skin, her dandruff, and her dry mouth. Only her mother seemed unaffected, perhaps because she seldom took a breath. The woman was a husky kitchen whirlwind who cleaned as she cooked and had no true