Julia made no comment.
It was Chiquita who took it up.
"My husband talks enough. In fact, he talks all the time. But if I tire
of his voice, I let myself fall asleep. He never notices. That is why
I've grown so big. Sometimes " - discontent dulled for an instant the
slow fire of her slumberous eyes - " sometimes my life seems one long
sleep. If it weren't for junior, I'd feel as if I weren't quite alive."
"Ralph talks a great deal," Peachy said listlessly, "by fits and starts,
and he takes me out when he comes home, if he happens to feel like
walking himself. He says, though, that it exhausts him having to help me
along. But it isn't that I want particularly. Often I want to go out
alone. I want to soar. The earth has never satisfied me. I want to
explore the heights. I want to explore them alone, and I want to explore
them when the mood seizes me. And I want to feel when I come back that I
can talk about it or keep silent as he does. But I must make my
discoveries and explorations in my own way. Ralph sometimes gives me
long talks about astronomy - he seems to think that studying about the
stars will quiet me. One little flight straight up would mean more to me
than all that talk. Ralph does not understand it in me, and I cannot
explain it to him. And yet he feels exactly that way himself - he's
always going off by himself through unexplored trails on the island. But
he cannot comprehend how I, being a woman, should have the same desire.
Do you remember when our wings first began to grow strong and our people
kept us confined, how we beat our wings against the wall - beat and beat
and beat? At times now, I feel exactly like that. Why, sometimes I envy
little Angela her wings."
The five women reclined on long, low rustic couches in the big, cleared
half-oval that was the Playground for their children. It began - this
half-oval - in high land among the trees and spread down over a beach to
the waters of a tiny cove. Between the high tapering boles of the pines
at their back the sky dropped a curtain of purple. Between the long
ledges of tawny rock in front the sea stretched a carpet of turquoise.
And between pines and sea lay first a rusty mat of pine-needles, then a,
ribbon of purple stones, then a band of glittering sand. In the air the
resinous smell of the pines competed with the salty tang of the ocean.
High up, silver-winged gulls curved and dipped and called their creaking
signals.