Her Body Room she would call it. Though other rooms in her apartment were that, too. Body Room. Renamed by the times through which we swing, celebrated by Grace, obscure like Mayn, and turned into her "Body Room" through being emptied by the wide load of her trip, her once violent motion away from an old home far away to a new. And as for the family furniture back there in that old home in the exact Middle West, forget it: for like that legendary legal Wide Load of our highways it held firm at that moment of launch yet with this difference: its inertia instantly forgot she’d blasted off when she’d moved that inner landscape of her life without furniture of her family from one of America’s middles to New York once upon a time.
But we already forget her marriage that came in between and filled if not New York her apartment there with modern furniture; she had tried to go the straightest route, do everything right, but this time far from home; later, in a dream she grasped her marriage as if, in the memory, it was the water or semi-precious stone the light came through, and had taken place not in the city of New York but in her hometown (read small city) where you could be owned and never know it till you were being carried to your grave reduced to a sign or an undeliverable message (read literally massage) and her father came home from work and was Dad and called her Gracie and never quite, it one day came to her, asked her anything about herself (except the nearly timeless "Where’d you go?" — just now? today? the last few years!). But this is only what we know she felt. Was he dull? This is but the beginning. She would find him in the living room annexed to the space near the dining-room door, fixed among her poor mother’s furniture like a passenger in a train and out the window the countryside is moving at pretty much same speed same direction you are.
Therefore, a later New York Body Room emptied itself of her dad’s powerful overstuffed low square armchair that if in the old days where she grew up you were coming from kitchen and dining room you have to pass to get into all the other furniture in that parlor, the Grand Rapids pair of lyre-backed straight chairs, and the green chair and the red chair, the gray davenport that didn’t open out and, facing it, the new blue that did, the tables you could rarely go under but had to go around, the magazine stand with its V-trough "hung" between small, narrow tabletop and same-size bottom shelf; a brass-buttoned brown leather armchair that felt cool on a summer afternoon when the heat from the miles — or as the Browning Club’s visiting lecturer from Chicago called them, the versts — of fields outside of town flattened the town and its colors and rose like a real, low flood around the houses until twenty years later when she was so long gone that she had returned from New York to pay her parents and then her mother several visits, the flood loaded all the circuits of the air conditioners and the electricity might go off in one whole block at four in the afternoon so suddenly you were aware of the still grass outside. Grace had emptied her prospective Body Room in her adopted New York also of — hadn’t she? — a gap that habited that old living space halfway across America where, with one thirty-second of Pawnee blood, she’d come from, where her father in the low armchair sat in almost any weather with a brown bottle of beer or with a tapered old-fashioned glass of blended whiskey held constant in his hand until one year a TV set materialized, or took its place blindly on the table at his elbow so it need never be looked at nor the local newspaper necessarily looked away from until the glass became the drinker’s magnified substitute nose upon being drained and this was Decision Time — just as Dad need never breathe ("breathe," she said to a man in argyles some years later whom she married); and yet her father sang, audibly in the bathtub, irritably in the dark garage; sang an instant American favorite "Oh what a beautiful morning… the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye," having driven the family through seventy-five miles of wheat fields to see a road show of the musical Oklahoma! which was a neighboring state. But he didn’t sing in the living room, where there was a piano, in that power vacuum she only half named that was in the whole house, was it he or the room? one name or another, for years, from memory plowing through all her mother’s parlor furniture to get to her father who wasn’t really there at the far end especially since to get into that tableau where you would not exactly cut a rug, you didn’t so much finish with him as start, start as you came out of the dining room by getting past Dad and his unforeseeable silences and the soft brown-and-red-diamond argyles she had completed for him one Christmas as, with her one marriage and except for her two pregnancies (depending on our point of view), she completed everything she started — one of two pairs of socks she ever knitted apart from craft experiments in the rapid seventies.
Largish town. "City Limits," signs said. Do things one by one, her mother said, this one and then the next; there’s time for everything. Her mother said all this, seated very straight at the kitchen table that had a metal top painted white. Her father changed the oil in the car. His beer can by the front tire, his backside in the air as he dragged the full drip pan out from under, he then on his knees took a drink of beer, got down on his back and worked his way under again to screw back the cap. It was this doing things one by one in their time, she couldn’t always think about it except to know she had to find a way to not do things in order but bypass as one day many hundreds of women knew of her through bits and multiples of her story like Eleanor Roosevelt or Helen Keller. Like Curie, for cures she always knew meant danger. (Always, Grace? even in high school, even at the sink with some boyfriend, even swimming at night in the Middle West before New York?) Like legendary Owl Woman whom a dynamite social-studies teacher named Ruby Foote in Grace’s old high school had said healed people of the southwestern desert with earth matter and a magic of understanding (that’s all magic is!) and with words of song that often went on in the absence of their singer and composer (Owl Woman) who would reduce herself to a tiny cactus owl as easily as expand the time you spent with her, according to Ruby Foote, herself some lone missionary type from the southeast coastal region, North Carolina way (where she’d been once married); now in the true Midwest a fast driver at age sixty of an aging Cadillac (she called it); a strong midnight swimmer, student of Indians (what Indians there were), and philosopher of rape as early as 1950—yes, like Owl Woman, whom Grace thought about and thought about until one day years later she thought Owl Woman into a promise protecting a future when Owl Woman would pop up like a reincarnate double.
A woman-model anyway and Grace knew the way would partly come to her. She relocated to magical Manhattan — and swam in a pool; met "her husband" (as she and an interviewer later identified him with backward prophecy) and he had RR on his combination-lock attaché case (before self-destruct optional became a standard item); who swam fast laps his head down watching his lane painted on the tiles of the pool bottom but sometime veered all over the joint like a motor without a boat; he was in the market, he (no) he was in market research, that was how he got off, and he could and would sell— read travel—and weekends was training to be a Long Island realtor; but market research, he was good; she knew it; she was sure, and she was right as always in her time.