Before My Life Began Read Online Free PDF Page B

smashed it down on the table.
    â€œNow do you believe me?” I shouted. “Now will you stop it?”
    â€œSee?” my mother said, her voice suddenly gentle again. She came to me and got down on her knees next to my chair. She started to stroke my hair and my cheek. I couldn’t move. “See what we’re doing to the boy? Oh Davey—what are we doing to you, darling? Tell me what we’re doing to you, my baby—”
    â€œI’m not your baby,” I said, and I backed up against the icebox. “All I want is for you to just shut up. The both of you. Just shut up shut up shut up —” Once I started screaming I couldn’t ever stop myself, and even though we’d been through scenes like this before, while it was taking place and I was screaming my lungs out at them the strangest thing was I felt at the same time that I was outside the scene too, watching it all happen as if somebody else were throwing the tantrum—as if I couldn’t figure out how a boy like me could ever get so crazy.
    â€œMy poor baby,” my mother said. “My poor little Davey.”
    My mother took my father’s hands away from his face. She lifted his cigarette from his lower lip and set it down in the ashtray.
    â€œFor him, Sol,” she pleaded. “For him—it’s for him we gotta stop all this crap.”
    â€œCrap is right,” he said. “Sure, Evie. Whatever you say. Sure. So listen. I stopped already, in case you didn’t notice. Didn’t I stop? Did I stop or did I stop?”
    My mother kissed my father on his forehead, came toward me. When she smiled at me this time all I saw was her mouth, like the heart on a Valentine’s card, bright red wax and enormous, as if it were triple its regular size, with a dark opening in the middle for her tongue, and what I wanted to do more than anything in the world was to have a baseball bat in my hands—a beautiful Louisville Slugger—and to be able to swing it around and smash through her lips and teeth to the back of her skull.
    â€œMy sweet little Davey. My little baby. Your Poppa and I stopped our fighting, see? Didn’t we stop, Sol?”
    She was still smiling, and when she tried to put her hand on mine I leaned back into the windowsill, frightened that she might tell Abe about my tantrums.
    â€œStay away from me,” I said. “I’m warning you. Do you hear me? Stay away from me.”
    My father stood in the entranceway to the kitchen in his good winter coat, the soft black one that was part cashmere.
    â€œI’ll go straight to Lillian’s from work.”
    I stayed where I was, my fists opening and closing at my sides. My father pointed a finger at me again.
    â€œYou calm down and listen to your mother, do you hear? You’re only making things worse.”
    I fought to control the rasping sound that came from my chest, but I couldn’t, and I wanted to smash his head open too for switching and taking her side, for doing her dirty work for her. Didn’t he know that this only made her despise him more?
    â€œWe’ll all be away from each other the whole day, we’ll feel better,” he said. “You’ll see.”
    â€œBut do you see what we do to him? He won’t even let his own mother touch him. Remember when he was a baby and he used to hold his breath? Didn’t I tell you then?” She clucked inside her mouth. “Someday. Someday, Sol—didn’t I warn you enough times?—someday Davey’s gonna kill somebody with that temper of his and I won’t be responsible. That’s all I got to say.”
    The front door closed. I imagined the way my father would look, slouching down the stairs from landing to landing. My mother moved around the kitchen as if nothing had happened. She cleared the table and put away my father’s satchel and picked up the little white chips from the broken plate with a damp cloth, and