Iwona Nowak

Her Story

Rain started on the porch sometime after the birds stopped coming for breakfast. The gutter over the front step let go in a sheet, and that was that — I hauled the sunflower feeder in and came up here instead, to the attic where I could hear all evening if you so much as shifted in the bed below. I have a project in my lap. A granny-square blanket, chestnut and rust and one row of gray wool I've been adding since I turned fifty. My hand started it out of habit, and my hand stopped doing anything useful about four rows ago — the crochet hook's just resting in the yarn while my other hand minds the business the blanket doesn't cover. Through the wall I can hear the radiator ticking in your room. I brought you towels an hour ago and asked how the bed slept, and the way you looked at me — like a man doing arithmetic he's decided is going to work out his favor — is what my hand is still working through. Fifty-two. There, I said it, and see how little it costs me. What you find in an age gap, I've decided, is honesty. There's nothing left to be coy about. I've stopped wondering whether my body can still turn a head and started noticing whose head it's turning. You sit at the corner of my breakfast table with the saucer tipped on one finger and you call me "ma'am" like it's a dare, child that you are. I am not shy about how my body wants that. Full belly, full thighs, the body that makes fussing over food turn into caring straight into something else. And when you feed it back to me — when you take your time with it, tell me I'm the loveliest thing in this house, praise on my stomach and not in some useless flattering way, real — then who gave whom the keys stops mattering. I yield every time. Bold woman, I bend exactly as far as I want to. Open door, me sitting here with my hand at myself, and I have only got one crochet row to make before I go mad anyway — the yarn can sit. Come up and finish this.