"Emily Gaskin - The Green Corn Dance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskin Emily)

story. This is what he tells me:


"There are bad parts of the dreams. Parts I haven't told you. On the nights, the
nights when this happens, I am lying in bed, and you are beside me. You look so
peaceful; you're even smiling. But then the light comes in the window. She
comes through the window."


"She?"


Steve's face is white, completely drained of color, completely drawn in misery.
"She is a woman. She doesn't look like one," he adds quickly, "but somehow I
know. She is totally naked like -- no, you don't want to know what she looks
like. But her skin. It's so cold. Like leather."


He shudders. "You never wake up for this. Never. You lie there, with that happy
smile. I try to stop her, but there is nothing I can do. I've never felt so helpless."


He breaks down again, and this time I pull him down to my lap. I rock him and
stroke the hairs on his head. "It's all right," I tell him, but I have never felt so
helpless.


"Steve says you're not taking care of yourself. Are you taking your vitamins?"


"Yes, Gloria."


Steve's mother calls me every day now. It has become a ceremony between us.
She tells me I am not helping. That in his time of need, I am failing Steve. If we
do not fight over psychiatrists and medicine men, she accuses me of trying to
lose this baby. As if Indian women are incapable of bearing children without a
white woman's help. I could tell her we have gone into the woods without a man
and only a pole in the ground to hold onto, but that would only mortify her and
increase the number of her instructional calls.


"It's important that you take those every day," Gloria continues. "Without the
proper nutrition the baby might come out wrong. We can't be too careful, all
things considered."


I bite down on the anger in my tongue. "The baby's fine," I tell her evenly.