Free B0042JSO2G EBOK by Susan Minot

enough. She smiled.
    Don’t say that.
    I can say anything. That’s one thing about this. I can say anything now.
    And you couldn’t before? Were you so careful?
    I didn’t think so, she said. But it looks as if I was more careful than I thought.
    He did not speak.
    One thing though, everyone suddenly looks so brave.
    Do they?
    Yes. They know it doesn’t last and yet …
    And yet what?
    They all carry on as if it did.

     
    She removed the sharp black teeth imbedded in her side. It’s where the cancer was.
    She’d not had a great deal of physical pain in her life, it had been saved up for the end. Childbirth had been overwhelming and like nothing else but she got the babies out of it, the babies who looked at her with a complete look, rolling on the grass slightly damp with spring, lying across her chest like a prize. She felt their tiny heartbeats, their fine hair against her lips, rubbing their fingers going a little cold, closing her eyes to the sun bright on her eyelids.
    But the worst of it was
where is the water
what the weakness did to her thoughts
help me God
she could not push it away
God
. She had always been sure there was a God, she’d been taught by nuns, went to church, she used to go more. She did not doubt God, nor wanted to. Well she would find out in not too long a time. Had she been good enough in her life? Her fingers lay on the bedspread looking longer and thinner than they ever had. It was not a question she wanted to ask herself. It did not make the pain go away.
    A door slammed in the draft down the hall, rattling the bottles on the bedside table. Ted’s footsteps used to shake the floor from downstairs, rattling things, rattling things in her, she braced herselffor his coming up. So much of life was bracing oneself
make it go away
she was not as she once was
I can’t begin to explain
the old way was not working, she was apart behind a glass pane, her thoughts were splintered in her cheek, she was not gone yet
wait wait there’s something
she wanted to be scattered she told them that, she thought dizzyingly of all the lives which had disappeared before her and how vast that was, she mustn’t think of it, it was too tremendous to think of, too tremendous and awful, she tried folding herself back, a tune played in her head
don’t get around much anymore
she just wanted it to go away
spring will be a little late this year
the light came in the window
let’s just say you won’t see the leaves
it was dark around her ankles, he was braiding her hair into the wet grass, it was still out of sight, the end of the road, the disappearance of herself, it was out of sight, she could not picture it, her imagination could not find it, herself not there
I’ll never get out now
she thought
I’ll never get back down those stairs
a moth batted against the ceiling against the ceiling against the ceiling
    She sat at the dressing table in a white slip, screwed on pearl earrings, plucked her eyebrows. She blotted fuchsia lipstick, crossed the carpet in stocking feet. The girls were folding themselves into the closet mirrors. Phil was gone, they’d just gotten Abbott, they were living in Elsie Roland’s carriage house.
Where are you going Mummy? Why are you always going out? When are you coming back?
There was someone the Rolands wanted her to meet. His name was Bill somebody. But Bill had brought a friend—Ted Stackpole. I’m going to marry that girl, Ted Stackpole said to the Rolands when Ann Katz left the room. He was big, filling his armchair, and rich. He did not need to work. Ted Stackpole liked to play games. Two weeks later he was carrying her off a porch away from the music. I have decided, he told her. Was it too soon? Don’t think, said her friends, just do it. They took a honeymoon. The girls stood in the hall affronted watching her count her bags. Abbott lured them back into the kitchen.
We can make fudge!
In Mexicothe gondolas were covered with flowers. They went through the tunnel twice.