[43] We can only conquer ourselves

I did it, twenty-two days after our return. I admitted to myself what I had no choice about. I took the lift down to the carriage hallway and Johnny-walked two doors to the Swan for the afternoon and drank a row of long pulls and played bouncy with the lad through an afternoon. Then I choked back a moment of sadness and asked Josette. The next morning, early but while Paul was in the studio, a little old Moravian lady in a plum baboushka knocked on our door wearing a white apron over a grey house dress and knitted black wool socks and carrying a mop and broom. Josette’s dishwasher’s mother (always ask someone you know) and a good neighbour of grandfather’s, it turns out later. Czech is good – that one’s a bonus. Paul will have fun with that, after I tell him about her, and I’ll improve on the twenty-six hundred words I already know. I can’t tell Paul why, or anyone yet. First I have to find a way to tell myself, but it isn’t good and I have to get over the shame before I can think clearly about it. Shame, why, Emma you? For once, this is something I didn’t do to myself. I’m free there, this is one circumstance that I didn’t seek or bring forward out of meanness to myself, and that wasn’t brought on me by the usual powers, yet I’m having to tell myself that. I’m having to will myself not to try to ignore it, no matter how worried it makes me. No, better if I let this knowledge perch on my shoulder, where I can learn to make it behave. One day, when I sit down, will I need help to rise again? I don’t know, but I’m beginning to, with this body starting to insist I ask. Now that I’m alive for sure, I have no choice but to worry about how I’m feeling some afternoons and about the sleep I sometimes can’t find that I’m afraid to find. The woman at the door, she is what the question is going to look like until I know the answer. She’s the words I have to learn to read. She heads straight for Johnny and clucks and coos and hands him to me, and starts washing the parlour windows. Five mornings a week, I’ll get to be as tired as I have to be.