Carry the One Read Online Free PDF

complex; Maude would need to get away to sort things out, or breathe some uncomplicated air. For Alice, unfortunately, the air was always uncomplicated. She only ever loved Maude. That was where she was every day. And so she could only stand still and breathe shallowly and brace herself through Maude’s tremors and vacillations. Bad weather that would pass.
    Today, a Saturday, Maude was sleeping in, dozing on her stomach and Alice lazily traced the edges of her shoulder blades, thinking what she knew was a fatuous lover’s thought—that they look like the place where wings would be attached on angels. And then suddenly this moment was zapped by the door buzzer.
    “Oh shit. I forgot,” Alice said, looking at the clock. “Carmen and Gabe.” It was one p.m. on the dot. Carmen was always on time.
    “Did we interrupt anything?” Carmen said coming out of the elevator, probably sniffing sex in the air. Carmen didn’t much care for Maude. Alice wasn’t sure why, but was certain this would smooth out with time.
    “Hey big guy,” she said to Gabe, and set him up with paper and finger paints, then got Carmen and Maude moving. “Let’s hang some paintings.”
    “Over a little more,” Alice gestured at Maude and Carmen with a freshly lit cigarette. They were each holding on to a side of the painting’s stretcher, and made an odd pair of helpers. Maude in threadbare cords and a Superman T-shirt, yellow leather Moroccan slippers; Carmen coordinated in burgundy wool slacks and a peach sweater. She was wearing makeup. Her hair was, as always, perfect—heavy and dark, spilling lustrously (but in an organized way) over her shoulders.
    Everything about Carmen was organized. She kept an appointment book and a little wipe-off marker board on her refrigerator door to keep track of her days on at the shelter, her pickup times for Gabe at day care. She was in possession of a schedule, a child, and a husband. Carbon steel kitchen knives and a new sofa—as opposed to Alice’s sprung red velvet junker brought down from the co-op. She had a serious approach to every aspect of life—motherhood, her job, her political work. Still a ways shy of thirty, Carmen had Alice beat hands-down in the race to adulthood. Coming at life as Alice did, from a more oblique angle—a lack of any real plan at all, a tenuous relationship, a line of work that yielded no security of any kind—it would be easy for her to ridicule Carmen as a tight-ass, but she didn’t, ever. Their alliance was deep, formed in the trenches of childhood where they were each other’s landsmen, comrades in strategy and survival, in warding off the contempt of their parents, and in protecting their brother. These positions had been set up early and were not subject to realignment. So she and Carmen always approached each other carefully, with respect—minor diplomats, one from an arctic, the other from an equatorial nation, attempting to understand each other’s customs, participate in each other’s holidays.
    Crushing out her cigarette, Alice headed over with pencil, hammer, and nails. This was the last and largest canvas for the show, which was to start Friday—a group project of the artists who had studios in this old laundry. They were getting write-ups in the Reader and Newcity . They might get some real traffic through here.
    “I see hordes descending,” Maude said. “I hear hoof beats.” She was always encouraging about Alice’s work.
    Alice said, “There might be people, but they could just be cheese-seekers. There. Perfect. Don’t move.”
    “It doesn’t matter if they come for the cheese,” Carmen said, leaning against the wall a little dreamily, filling in the blank of Alice’s future for her while Alice pounded in a nail. “The more people, the larger presence you have on the scene. You’re entering the marketplace.”
    “Maybe,” Alice said, but really she was happy for her sister’s belief in her, to hear her use words like “presence”