Storm Glass by Jane Urquhart Page B

survival ignores my silent call. He simply cannot stop to answer it. No gesture, no transformation can disturb the burden of his flesh as he moves beneath it. Passing me by.
    But later tonight, when I leave the house to move out to the stars, the dogs will be waiting in the darkness, just beyond my doorway.

Her Golden Curls
    ENVY
    A my Jefferson had seven different dresses, all with puffed sleeves, each a different pastel shade. She had a dog called Rags who was smaller than most farm dogs and who was allowed to sleep, like a soft round pillow, on the parlour furniture. She had boots made of Spanish leather and four china dolls. When she described her room to me I associated it with birthday cake. There were, she said, pink quilts, satin pillows, muslin curtains and a dressing table trimmed with eyelet lace. And it was her room. She had no brothers or sisters with whom she might have had to share.
    We were both eight years old. The road from her farm to ours was fourteen miles long. A great distance. But not for Amy Jefferson who arrived in her father’s motor car, her lovely dress covered with a fine powder of dust from the road. My mother would run to get the clothes brush for Amy and my sisters would run to the drive to get a better look at the motor car. My father, prouder, would attempt to discuss crops with Amy’s father while he secretly eyed the wealthier man’s glorious machine.
    Amy and I were to play, but it seemed that we never did much of that. Sometimes we fooled around with an incomplete deck of cards that were kept in the kitchen drawer. Occasionally we threw a ball back and forth in the yard. But mostly those afternoons were spent as a kind of inquisition on my part and a kind of confession on hers. I barely gave her time to answer one question before I moved on to the next.
Please tell me again about the big doll, the one from France
, or
Does your bed really have a mauve satin comforter as well as a pink spread? Have you really been to the National Exhibition and did you go there in the motor car? Do you have books with coloured pictures? How many toys do you have that move by themselves?
I don’t know whether I loved her or hated her, whether I was pleased or enraged by her answers. I only know that Amy Jefferson and her possessions became a kind of addiction for me. And even though I was angered by my sisters’ accusations
(Trevor has a girlfriend)
, I simply couldn’t get enough.
    It was as though that summer had
become
Amy Jefferson. When she was not there, the details that made up the fabric of experience seemed to be missing as well. I would pass the days between her visits lying on the grass watching cumulus clouds move across the sky. Even they were connected to Amy Jefferson, assuming the shapes of her worldly goods; satin bows and puffed sleeves, beautiful, unobtainable clothing fourteen miles beyond my grasp. Sometimes Amy Jefferson’s satin comforter sailed by or one of her muslin curtains. Once I even thought I saw Rags up there, though at the time I had absolutely no idea what he looked like. Once I thought I saw Amy herself with her long golden hair, stretched out by wind, across the sky.
    Amy Jefferson’s mother was dead; something I found quite horrifying yet vaguely appealing at the same time. This meantthat Amy’s home was equipped with a housekeeper whose main function was to look after the motherless little girl (iron her pretty dresses, make her down-filled bed). And, of course, her father doted on her, called her his
princess
or
my little lady
. He read to her from all those books with the coloured pictures, and he took her for hundreds of rides in the motor car, even allowing her to honk the alarming horn.
    I, on the other hand, was looked after by several females whose attentions were affectionate but terse. Until Amy, I’d never really felt there was any room for complaint. But now when my mother filled my dresser drawers with drab corduroys and denims or when my oldest