Darling? Read Online Free PDF

trying … for a baby, I mean,” I told Etta the next night, thinking that if I could hit on a subject she had feeling for I’d bring some color to her cheeks.
    “That’s wonderful,” she said, without turning from the sink. “I didn’t know you wanted children.” Then, to herself really, as if she could speak freely since no one ever heard her: “You wanted me to kill mine.”
    “What?”
    A terrible look crossed her face, but then a spark jumped and she turned to look me in the eye. “You told me to have an abortion,” she said. “You killed my art, you’d have killed my marriage, you told me to kill my baby, and you painted that portrait that looks as if I’m dead already, because you wish I was. You gave me a cookbook  … out of all you have to give.”
    “I … Etta, I…,” I said, thinking: Yes, I wanted to be free of you, I didn’t have the strength to drag you any further. At least I’m sick with guilt about it, isn’t that enough? “I didn’t want you condemned to an unhappy marriage,” I heard myself saying, and was surprised to remember this was true—I wasn’t entirely a gorgon. With that a geyser of bile erupted, and I wanted to ask her how she’d liked lying around cozy at home while I banged my head on the doors of the world so she could float through them in my wake. Not to mention my coloring book that she’d filled up every page of thirty years ago, insisting she was entitled to every single thing I owned—
    She saved me, snapping, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and calling angrily for Gino.
    Garrett came instead—“He took the kids to Marco’s,” he said. “Can I do something?”
    “No, no, it’s just that we’re having a special dinner,” she said. “Polenta, and … Well, it’s a surprise, really—Gino’s favorite … real Italian … We almost never have them, but they were in the market this morning … You’ll see.”
    “The suspense, the intrigue!” I said, pushing away from the argument, and she laughed. There, I thought, she’s got out the venom, and there’s something left, something real. Here we were in the kitchen together like when we young, the only difference being that we weren’t lip-synching to the Supremes. She turned on the broiler and handed me the dripping chicory head to tear up for salad. There was the smell of onions in olive oil and Etta sifted the cornmeal over the pot with one hand, stirring with the other in a quiet, consoling rhythm. The boys came back with Gino and pulled me out with them to see the lizards dart along the outside wall.
    Then, “Come, come, don’t let it cool!” she was calling, and we sat down around a platter heaped with polenta, strewn with …
    “Songbirds!” Etta said. Charred corpses, sparrows or finches once, scattered as over a battlefield, their little beaks open, feet splayed upward, curled by the flames.
    Gino laughed. “Something different, eh? We used to have songbirds all the time when I was a boy. My father caught them and put them in the cage and when we had enough…”
    “Songbirds!” Garrett said with a smile playing at the corners of his mouth and a quick glance at me—here it was, history on toast. And here were we, appalled and amused together, as always, in absolute communication without saying a word. Gino plucked the last feathers from one of the birds and popped it into his mouth whole.
    “Good,” he said thoughtfully, chewing. “She’s a good cook, Etta.”
    “A wonderful cook,” I agreed, thinking that if only I’d encouraged her painting I’d see this vision on canvas instead of having to eat it.
    “Italia!” we toasted.
    When in Rome…, I thought, though I was not practicing diplomacy but bitter sisterhood: Etta must never get the better of me. Any hesitation would be taken as an insult, so I lifted a bird between fork and spoon, trying not to damage it further. Garrett, who can’t back away from a challenge, had taken five, and I heard a skull