“I didn’t like him too much,” I said. “I didn’t really care.”
“He’ll fall on his face. I’m sure of that,” she said. And I didn’t say anything because I didn’t care about Glen Baxter anymore, and was happy not to talk about him. “Would you tell me something if I asked you? Would you tell me the truth?”
“Yes,” I said.
And my mother did not look at me. “Just tell the truth,” she said.
“All right,” I said.
“Do you think I’m still very feminine? I’m thirty-two years old now. You don’t know what that means. But do you think I am?”
And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings. And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide. And I said, “Yes, I do.” Because that was the truth. And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.
And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man. I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, though my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following publications in which these stories originally appeared: Esquire: “Rock Springs”, 'Winterkill”, “Fireworks” and “Sweethearts”; Anteaeus: “Communist”; The New Yorker: “Optimists” and “Children”; Granta: “Empire” and “Great Falls”; Tri-Quarterly: “Going to the Dogs”.
I wish to express my appreciation to the National Endowment for the Arts for its generous support. And I wish, aswell, to express my thanks to Gary L. Fisketjon and L. Rust Hills for their editorial advice, and for their indispensable encouragement as I wrote these stories.
RF
A Note on the Author
Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published six novels and three collections of stories, including The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, A Multitude of Sins and most recently The Lay of the Land. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction.