Read Online The Eliot Girls by Krista Bridge - Free Book Online Page A

and still she was bored by such sincere, fastidious craftsmanship. Still she was puzzled over the wrongness of the gift, but no longer did she see this wrongness as a failing. She pictured Richard puttering around a musty antique store and picking this present in a wave of foolish bliss about their future. To be so smitten that his sense deserted him, to try so hard and be so wide of the mark—there was something endearing about the misstep. Ruth found that to imagine his innocence was to imagine her own, to conceive of herself as a gentler person than she was truly becoming.
    It was out of such surprises that their life together had been born. The ordinary ways people ended up together had always needled Ruth’s conviction that true love must grow out of inflammatory circumstances. She and Richard had met at a vet clinic, where Ruth was working part-time as an assistant for the summer before she started teachers’ college. Their relationship had been companionable enough—in her view sorely lacking in the tempestuous ill will she associated with passion. Dinners followed by polite kisses followed by dinners followed by impolite kisses: she was certain that love ought not to develop so functionally. Their first visit to her mother’s house became their true beginning, in spite of—indeed because of—the fact that it was almost the end of them.
    Ruth’s parents had bought one of the Playter estates in Greektown before they were fashionable and before they were called estates. Although widowed, Ruth’s mother, Antonia, had continued to rattle around in the roomy three-storey Edwardian house. Ruth and Richard were removing their shoes in the octagon of the entryway when Antonia, a slim and elegant woman who still managed to look like she could beat Richard at an arm wrestle, materialized in the doorway to the kitchen, running her hands upwards through her short white hair like a child waking from a nap. “So sorry,” she said. “I was just outside watching the dust in the sunlight.” So began a monologue that ranged in subject from the lawyers across the street who wanted to buy her latest series of photographs (in which the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus was variously depicted in nighttime scenes from her recent trip to Brazil) to the cat across the street who had a crush on her golden retriever, and that included no one in particular, least of all Richard, who, by the time the roast chicken was served, sat in the stifling heat of the dining room dabbing at his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief, staring blankly at his wine glass.
    If Ruth had thought nothing could ruin an evening more than her mother’s determination to prove how delightful she was, that was because she hadn’t yet experienced Richard countering Antonia’s posturing with humourlessness so impossibly extreme that Ruth wondered if it were a form of deep irony too sophisticated for her to understand. She gave him chances to prove that he was just being rebellious. She repeatedly let her leg fall against his under the table, offering opportunities for stealthy groping, but Richard kept his hands well ordered on his lap or occupied with his utensils. She went into the kitchen to fill the glass pitcher with fresh water and lemon slices, hoping that he would follow her in and accost her at the refrigerator, or at least touch her breast. To Antonia’s story about moving into the neighbourhood long before gentrification was even a consideration, Richard replied that it must have been the last thing the architects had in mind, Greek immigrants right off the boat buying these grand houses. As Antonia used her fork to feed the dogs chicken scraps, Richard volunteered that his advice, as a veterinarian, was never to feed animals from the table, particularly when the dogs are already overweight.
    Ruth excused herself immediately after dinner and went upstairs to her mother’s room to consider