I kissed Alice for the first time later that afternoon as she wrestled with the wringer washer in the laundry nook off the kitchen. It was easy to feel free in this laundry nook, with its straightforward purpose, no frills or knickknacks, only the gleam and thump of the metal tub with its soapy churn. I admired the gentle pulse at Alice’s throat and her dark hair threaded with white, and it came over me that I should kiss her. But when I put my hand on her waist, she startled and exclaimed, I thought you were my husband’s ghost and it gave me quite a start!
That was not worth hearing—I did not like it whatsoever—and so I kissed her to make us both forget it. At first her lips were firm, but warmed and softened as she kissed me back. Also she laughed, laughter that was deep and throaty and with a liveliness in it. This laugh was her true self.
Before I left, Alice invited me to meet her for a swim the next day, at the old reservoir that had been a favorite place of hers since she was a child. Most years growing up, she told me, she had two dresses and wore each one three days in a row. In summer evenings she walked to the reservoir to scrub out whichever dress needed washing. Other girls had only one dress, and they crouched at the reservoir’s edge in their underthings, washed their lone dress, and wore it home wet. Alice thought this practical, but her mother forbade her to wash both her dresses at the same time, for fear that anyone seeing her in a wet dress might think she was the possessor of only one.
Alice said that she would walk to the reservoir because a walk was one of the dearest things in life to her. Never a day passed where she did not embark on one or two. Would you like to walk there with me? she asked.
But I shook my head. I’d run away from home at the age of thirteen, drifted through many parts of this country and walked more miles than I ever care to again. I had no wish to revisit what was a necessity of my youth and an activity that I associate with hardship. I’ll meet you there, I said, and I won’t be late. She blushed when I took her hand. I could feel this lovely blush in her fingers, which pinked and grew damp in my own.
I wanted no engine sputters or exhaust fumes or stirring up of dust to ruin whatever pleasing atmosphere might be possible upon my arrival to the reservoir. By this I mean I had hopes. So I drove in my pickup until in the near distance I saw the dark smudge of trees that marked out the water, and then I walked the rest of the way.
Everywhere was the jump and whir of grasshoppers. I carried a treat in a small burlap sack, and I thought of Alice as I walked. She’d said her childhood home had been nearby but burned down in a lightning strike years ago. Later she would take me there and show me a crumbling outline of blackened bricks. Here was the kitchen, here was the room where the seven of us slept, she said. Here was where we kept the rabbits for meat, I never tasted steak until I was grown. She held my hand in the dry yellow valley ringed with blue mountains, and we listened to its quiet.
The sagebrush hid the reservoir from view until I came upon it. I took off my boots and sat in the shade of a willow tree that trailed its branches into the water. I imagined Alice as a young girl: the cooling evening, her slender wrists dipping into the water to scrub her dress, her mother’s impractical pride. Also I thought of myself at the same moment in time, when women gave me odd jobs in exchange for a meal and afterward watched from the porch to be sure I went on my way. I once snuck into a schoolhouse and searched through the lunch pails, my heart twisting at the sound of the children playing outside, their whooping cries moving through me like colorful birds.
Alice pushed through the sagebrush and stepped out of her shoes. She’d brought cornbread wrapped in a cloth and pushed a jar of milk into the mud to keep it cool. The swing of her dress was close enough to touch. But when I reached out my hand, she hesitated and turned away.
We stripped down, she to her underthings and me to my entirety. The reservoir folded up around us as we glided in, our movements making gentle waves that lapped back and forth between us. I felt these waves as a signal of some kind.
Alice dipped her head back briefly so that her hair was wet. Were you ever married? she asked.
Not me.
You never wanted to be? I never wanted to be.
I did want to be, she said.
The night of her fifteenth birthday Alice quietly took her older sister’s Sunday dress off its hook. She put the dress on in the dark and slipped outside, followed a deep arroyo that snaked a mile in the dark. As she walked she gathered the dress in her hands to keep off the dust. Her soon-to-be husband waited for her where the arroyo opened to the road. He held a bouquet of white daisies, their petals luminous under the moon. But the pickup broke down on the road to Santa Fe, and so there was no quiet motel, no soft bed. Instead he carried her from the front seat to the flatbed, and in the night her sister’s dress was spoiled and Alice cried; the sky had gone black with no stars. Next morning a car stopped to offer help with the engine, and they made it to the magistrate by noon, before her mother had a say in any of it.
I thought he was a gentleman, she said, but I wasn’t right about that. It’s a sadness to me. I suppose it might have been nice at times, but I can’t remember those parts anymore. Now that he has passed, I am trying to forget him. In my head I am trying to be free.
Then she nodded at me, as if wanting a story in return.
I told her how at sixteen I met Ma Binney and her widows on the road to Wichita. When Ma Binney saw me she held up a hand and all the widows quieted behind her. These widows were little sparrows and Ma Binney a hawk, her hair long and cloud white with the end of her braid coiled into the breast pocket of her jacket. But her face was young and at that time she was not yet twenty-five. No widow had fewer years than Ma Binney, but still she was the greatest in age among them, it was something in her very bones.
Ma Binney inspected me as the widows twittered behind her. You better come along with us, she finally said, as you sure look hungry, and we’ll have supper in a while.
At night they sang and passed a hat in the pickers’ camps. They kept to hymns. No love songs, Ma Binney said, because I’m not in the business of making folks cry. I held a handkerchief so she could wipe her forehead in the heat. She stood very straight while singing but between songs slouched slightly and ran her fingers idly up and down her braid. She looked over at me boldly, her eyes like flames.
When the singing was done Ma Binney brought me back to her tent and cut up a tomato, put it between two slices of bread, and served it to me on a china plate taken from a wooden chest next to her bed-roll. Eat up, sweetheart, she said. Her words recalled to me a forgotten place, and I cleaned my plate without a word. Afterward she wiped the plate on her shirttail and put it back in the wooden chest. I asked, Did your hair turn white from losing your husband? She laughed long and loud at that. I was breathless to be so near to her.
She invited me to sleep on the bedroll with her, and in the dim of night her face was a craggy mountain beneath a snowy nightcap. She turned toward me, propped her head in one hand. Where do you come from? she asked. But I wouldn’t say because I had grown more watchful in my time alone and didn’t believe in giving things away.
What do we do now? I asked her instead.
She touched my cheek. She said that I should look only at her and never away, that a river existed inside me, full of power, and she would set it free. I was only briefly surprised when everything she said proved true, as I had already dreamed of its existence. Afterward she pulled a rough blanket over us and fell asleep, but not before boasting that I would never forget her. I lay in the dark with my heart now beating strongly, and my true life with it.
Some of the widows had feelings for Ma Binney, while others turned to me. When we were quiet together the widows told me about men they loved who left, about men who stayed when they weren’t wanted, also about children who died or grew up ungrateful. I saw that they were happiest when they could weep, so I did not comfort them. I sketched their portraits in exchange for butterscotch candy, pieces of soap, or darned socks, and once a frayed silk camisole that I traded away for a man’s undershirt. The widows swapped these portraits like valentines, and never since have I enjoyed such satisfaction in the market for my work.
In Nebraska Ma Binney presented me with a banged-up tin case of watercolor paints, the colors cracked like dried-up rouge. Go on now, paint me something, she said, and by something she meant herself. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t know their good side, and Ma Binney offered me her left one straight off. But I closed the tin and turned away because I knew by the feeling inside me that painting her wasn’t in me to do. I drew when it humored me, when I had a pencil and a bit of paper, and at the time it was never more than that.
At a revival tent near Lincoln, I saw a dark-haired girl in a blue dress who rang the bell for the start of the meeting. I discovered that two people can look at each other and right away understand they want something. We met at night in a grassy hollow at the edge of a pasture, and her skin lit up like prairie fire when I touched her. Afterward we lay on our backs and I pointed out the fingernail moon. She said, That woman whose thumb you’re under looks rough.
I’m under no one’s thumb, I said, surprised.
The girl was disbelieving. Why it’s clear as day you are.
As she spoke those words I knew that she was right, and I did not like it.
Where you been? Ma Binney asked crossly when I slipped back into her bed, but I wouldn’t answer, because all my thoughts had turned against her.
The next day the revival tent was gone, along with the dark-haired girl. By suppertime I had decided I was done with Ma Binney and her widows. When I said goodbye, Ma Binney hauled off and slapped me. The widows held her back and also gave me boiled sweets to take along. I didn’t ration them as advised but sucked on one after another until it was all behind me.
Alice was thoughtful, then asked the only question that truly mattered to her. But did you ever love her, this Ma Binney?
No.
Who have you loved then, as a sweetheart?
I searched back in my life but could only shake my head.
Alice was silent for a moment, then said in a voice full of doubt, Your Ma Binney sounds like quite a character.
The banality of her words about Ma Binney was terrible. I dove under the water and held my breath as long as I could. Looking up, I saw the slow suspended flutter of Alice’s hair, floating out in all directions and spangled from the sun above. I reminded myself that I could not guess all the reasons a person might say a thing so poorly, and I remembered the tenderness that presented itself when I’d pinned the brooch on Alice’s collar. When I kicked back up to the surface, it was toward that feeling, to take it in my hands.
But as I wiped the water from my eyes, I saw that Alice was now uncertain. She got out of the reservoir and put her slip back on. I also got out but didn’t fuss over clothes, only reached into my sack and held up a sweet mandarin. We sat down together, and she watched my fingers as I peeled it gently into one long strip of orange. I gave the naked fruit to her and she split it down the middle and gave me half. I pulled another mandarin from the bag and we ate that too, and after that another.
We didn’t speak, the only sound a rising buzz of insects as the day grew hotter. My limbs stilled and grew heavy in the heat, but Alice jiggled her knees up and down, bursting out with short spurts of conversation that weighed against the beauty of our silence. I let her words fall without trying to lift them up, because I saw how she was flickering inside, and I could be patient.
At last she quieted. She stared at me as if trying to decide. Then she stood and pulled her slip off over her head so that there was nothing covering her at all. I also stood. There we were, under the sun. She smiled fleetingly as if to please me. But I did not want false expressions of pleasure, and so I waited. She turned her head and looked at the land all around and beyond me—the sage and mesquite, the rabbits scattering across the red dirt—and finally up at the sky, its deep wide blue. A slight breeze cooled us.
At last she looked back at me. A muscle rippled near her collarbone as if a small animal were loose inside her, and I touched the place to soothe it. She stepped forward and put her naked self against my own. I did not turn my eyes away from her.
Afterward we unwrapped the cornbread and pulled the jar of milk from the mud. Under the willow tree our feet tangled together like pale fish and we laughed at the sight of them. We helped each other with our clothes, and once back in her dress she was shyer than without it. I watched her walk away through sagebrush glowing purple in the late sun. Glancing down, I saw that she had buttoned my shirt up wrong but I didn’t care to correct it, only whistled all the way to my pickup.
The important things are often bodiless. To render into the world a thing with no material qualities is a trick that requires bravery and luck, and is akin to art, which in the making can be uncertain and uncomfortable but in other moments sublime. At that time Alice was whole in her mind and was so for four years more.
*
We had many outdoor times. Often we arranged to meet overnight along her walks, and I drove ahead to set up camp, a fire and supper warmed from a can and potatoes wrapped in foil, two bedrolls laid out as one but never a tent because she would not have it. Always she arrived dusty and smiling, ate all the supper and combed her hair in the pickup’s rearview mirror. At night by the campfire I coaxed her into singing, and like Ma Binney she could sing fiercely, which I had not expected; but also she could sing another way, which was in a tender vein. In most ways she was either very strong or very soft, and I have never known a person with so little of anything in between.
In the mornings she set off walking for home, and once there she never sang at all. I could not understand it, this endless desire to return to such a place. I did not see why we would not go on camping forever. But it’s true that over time what exists is no longer that which was first created. Though I love the old things about Alice, why hide them? It would be like hiding my own self. I love the crepe at her knee and elbow, the growing softness at her waist, her voice gone veil and shadow. Her hair is now gray at the roots but artificial brown in the length, a bid for youth that signals her regret at growing old, or perhaps other people’s regret at her growing old. She lays her beautiful neck on the edge of the sink and submits to it. These attempts to mollify other people exasperate me. She is not afraid to assert herself to do the useless things that others think she should. It is the assertion of personal, more important things that stump her from time to time.
In old family photographs she is never alone. There is no record of her entire self without a part of it obscured by the parts of others. And now these people, these people who have loved her longest, they are conspiring against her! They believe her change is a diminishing, and they are afraid of it. They want to forget who she has become and remember only who she has been, and that is not a thing I believe in. It is not possible to solve every problem. But some solutions are obvious. For example the problem of Alice’s house, which lately is falling down around her. The roof flakes, the porch sags. Inside is a terrible clutter, dirty towels and stacks of old magazines, which makes it difficult to breathe and painful to think. I don’t say these things to hurt her feelings, but the fact is that her house is made of little more than rotting tar paper and only the occasional wood beam.
Whereas my house up on Mesa Portales is a real and solid construction, every adobe brick mixed and made by me. My house looks west out over a canyon that although far from any ocean whatsoever yet resembles one in scope and light. This ocean canyon heaves waves of shale and basalt, quartz and silt. Cloud shadows flit across its rock floor like ghost boats.
There is no other place on Earth like Mesa Portales. I have traveled to many places, so mine is not an uninformed opinion. The truth is that there is a hierarchy. Some places are objectively better, just as some people are objectively better than others. I want to bring an objectively better person to an objectively better place. I want to bring Alice to Mesa Portales.
When I told my gallerist Fitz that I planned to move her up there with me, he was aghast. How will you do any work? You don’t like people.
But I haven’t done any work for some time now, and maybe for the first time I need the company more.
Alice knows it is right that she should go to Mesa Portales with me. She knows this. She nods her head when I make it all clear to her. Yet she will not go!
No, she says, because what will happen to Lorna?
It is utterly strange to me when a person recognizes what is right and yet refuses to heed it. I myself find it easy to go along with what is right, once one can divine its direction. It is freeing and releases one from all sorts of obligations that might otherwise drag one down. But not everyone sees things as clearly as I do, and so I have devised a solution to the problem of Lorna.
This solution is unusual, also irregular. But who are we if not irregular people?
Yesterday I chose an hour very dear to me, summer afternoon. Alice rested in the chair facing Lorna’s grave. I sat down next to her.
Alice, I said.
I took her hand. Alice.
She turned her lovely eyes to me.
I explained it so she would understand. I included important details: my pickup’s flatbed, my strong arms and sturdy shovel, the perfect spot not far from the ledge at Mesa Portales, so that Lorna will still be near.
Come live with me and be my love, I said. No one will think it of us two old birds.
She smiled and squeezed my hand.
I squeezed her hand in return, relieved.
Yet again she shook her head! No, she said, because what will happen to Lorna?
Always her mind loops back to the problem of Lorna, which she views as irrevocable. And it’s true that in the most important way the problem is irrevocable, no matter how many wild violets Alice plants in hopes of their roots reaching down to Lorna’s heart. But anyone would agree that sometimes we must do things for the people we love, even when they don’t understand and even when they argue against us.
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From I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
