She needed to grow up and see the world as it was.
Nothing made a man more happy than hurting a woman.
LIGHT THE DARK REACHES BY ANNE LEIGH PARRISH 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 142
Dear T, I have just read your letter. I agree, it is best that we not meet again.
Elspeth regarded the unevenness of her handwriting due not just to the railway train rocking through a downpour but her heightened emotional state. With her pen poised above the page she thought to write, “You cannot know the suffering you have caused me.”
But that was wrong. Why tell him that? Nothing made a man more happy than hurting a woman. It’s what they lived for. Every time you met one at a party and he looked into your eyes he was sizing up how to bring you to your knees.
T—Teddy had said she was dramatic and should be on the stage instead of in a law office typing letters. It was true that she had a love of theater but in the audience not as an actress.
The man in the seat opposite turned the page of his newspaper with a heavy sigh. The headlines were about troop movements, failed talks with Russia’s Joseph Stalin, Senator Joseph McCarthy accusing someone of being a communist spy.
Elspeth thought the senator and Stalin should be locked up together: Two Joe’s gotta go.
Her smile at her own cleverness drew a glance from the man with the newspaper.
Bill asked Amy when she’d be done. He needed the counter space. “I’m getting a jump on our taxes. I have to pull all this crap together for the accountant.” Bill didn’t understand what was so fascinating about the bundle of letters that they’d found under the floorboard in the bedroom after they moved in, a half-letter in one case, the paper torn mid-sentence. It was creepy, he said.
Amy imagined whole lives between the lines. She’d said more than once that this was her gift, an imagination that burned through time to light the dark reaches of the past. She would have become a historian who focused on social aspects, how people actually lived in certain times and places. Her workday at the cable company was the result of not formally accepting a coveted history scholarship. Hour after hour, as she soothed customers calling to complain that they weren’t getting the premium sports channel or that their reception continued to be poor despite a higher monthly bill, she dreamed of old books opened with gloved hands in a sterile room deep in the bowels of a stone library surrounded by trees that flowered brilliantly in spring.