A Strange Commonplace Read Online Free PDF

whiskey and felt it blaze into her head in a rush. The kitchen looked bright, clear, the weird orange dressing on the salad cheery, everything looked wonderful. That’s good. That would be very good. She took twenty-three dollars in fives and singles from Joy of Cooking that her battle-ax mother-in-law had given her as a hint, the old bitch, and put the money in her bag, then locked the back door just as the boy was turning the knob. She looked out at him, standing in the near-darkness, mucus running down his upper lip from both nostrils, his face blank and stupid, yet resolute, determined. He tried the knob again and again, a robot. She couldn’t do this any more. She walked through the house, knocking the black teapot with the disgusting dragon on it to the floor: a bad-luck gift, an evil-eye gift from her mother on their first anniversary. She heard it break and smiled, then staggered and almost lost her balance. She opened the front door to walk, very carefully, down the three brick steps to the street, those wonderful brick steps. She could go anywhere, she’d get another drink in someplace respectable where ladies were not allowed at the bar but were welcome in the tap room, in the restaurant. She still looked good at thirty-two, and she could do whatever she wanted to do. She was free, white, and twenty-one, and had always been full of fun. Everybody said so.

Pearl Gray Homburg
    T HE OLD MAN WEARS A PEARL GRAY HOMBURG, BRAND new from the looks of it. He opens the apartment door and enters the long dim hallway, then leans heavily against the wall and bangs the door shut. He sighs deeply, the sigh, in a practiced glissando, becoming a pathetic moan, which, however, ceases abruptly. For he remembers, as he remembers every night, although he tries not to remember, that there is nobody in the apartment to hear his sighs and moans, to ask him if he is all right. His goddamned wife is dead, his brothers are dead, his daughter is dead, his son is somewhere at sea or in the Army, who cares where he is, and Claire, his niece Claire, has been dead for so long that he hardly thinks of her any longer. But her beautiful face does come to him on occasion, in dreams, as they say, or daydreams. He takes off his homburg. Pearl gray is the only proper shade for a homburg. He walks down the hallway, the old floor creaking under the worn runner. Claire would be about sixty-five had she not died. Whore that she was, he has nothing to reproach himself for, never did. His pearl gray homburg is the proof of that. His oxford gray shadow-stripe suit is the proof of that.

An Apartment
    H ERE IS A GROUND-FLOOR APARTMENT, THE CYNOSURE of which is a Philco floor-model radio, circa 1935. It sits between two closed windows, which look out on an empty urban street. Each window is half-covered by a dark-green roller shade, whose pulls cords move, almost imperceptibly, in a current of air that may come from underneath the door to the outer hallway. There is a studio couch in one corner of the room, covered, somewhat carelessly, with a multicolored crocheted afghan. Against the wall directly across from the radio a gleaming back-lacquered table holds the bronze figure of a lioness, her mouth open in a roar or snarl. She is looking at a black teapot, its surface covered by a gold dragon in basrelief. There is no other furniture in the room save for a floor lamp near the studio couch, its torn shade askew. At its base is a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its label smeared with what appears to be dried blood, and a pink two-way-stretch girdle. Through a door to one side of the table can be seen a small room in which an unmade single bed takes up the floor space not occupied by a small, badly worn dresser and a battered cardboard carton, sides bulging with its unknown contents. Another door, to the other side of the table, opens onto a kitchen, on whose flower-motif linoleum lies a woman of perhaps thirty, supine in a flower-print housecoat and black