PARTISAN REVIEW
447
by my face. My hair
is
long, to my
shoulders, sleek and brown and obedient.
My eyes are brown and obedient. He
does not love me but he loves
IDs
reflec–
tion
in me, as
if
I were a screen in
which he could view himself endlessly,
admire
himself,
IDs
words,
his
language,
the magic of
his
manliness,
his
im–
mortality. He loves me. And yet, as he
talks, I am thinking of the school books
and the bag of gym clothes and my
purse held up against my chest, I am
thinking of the walk home from school,
the front steps, the advertisements
stuck
in the mailbox, the silence of the house
. . . I am thinking of the trail of blood–
stains. . .. Vince bends to pick a wood.
It has little green buds where flowers
would have been.
The
buds are very
small, not even green; they are white.
They are bloodless, tiny, tight, turned
in upon themselves as
if
in an agony of
dreaming. Vince makes a bow, he pre–
sents me with the "flower." "Do you
love me a little?" he says, as a joke. I
take the flower from
him.
It
is
not a
flower, and it
will
never be a flower,
now. "Yes. I
think
so," I tell
him.
He seems satisfied.
Joyce Carol Oates
