Darling Clementine Read Online Free PDF Page B

the ladder again and slammed my head again; then I just lifted my head and slammed it. Christ.
    Later on—I mean, years later, when I was fifteen, and I came home late from school, and she knew, I don’t know how she knew, that I had done it, that Michael and I had gone to bed together though I don’t think she could have known how miserably, how painfully, how joylessly, stupidly, bloodily we had accomplished our mission with Michael following his erection as if it were a rocket tied to his groin, dragging him along with hands over his eyes and me believing, oh, I don’t know, that I had a soul, maybe, that the full, rounded breasts I had not asked for, the gaping, oozing scar between my legs, the curve of my legs, all of it, was not me somehow, when it was, it was all along, all of me, and whatever soul I had was not disconnected from it, but part of it, composed of it, so that when Michael, of the denims, the toughness, the sad, ridiculous burden of teen-aged masculinity broke the membrane finally after his knees were torn to pieces by the buttons of his mattress, when he jammed into me, was jamming into me , lying on top of me like a fallen building, pumping and gasping, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” while I tried to fight him off because I thought he was killing me and all my mother knew was that we had “done it” whatever that meant to her, whatever part of “it” meant to her that she was weakened somehow, that I had put one over on her, become part of the Big Cheat which surrounded her rosewood chair like an aura, which could only be avoided, placated, by absolute stillness, motionlessness, and here her own daughter … She said to me: “When you go to sleep tonight, I am going to come into your room with a pair of scissors and cut off all your hair.” Black jack on red queen. Hi, Mom, I’m home. What’s for dinner?
    She didn’t do it, though I didn’t sleep for a couple of nights. I suppose she was half mad by then between menopause and the smell of perfume that my father could never quite get off his clothing, poor man. Her own father had deserted her mother for another woman. Her mother had had to go to jail once—just for a night before my great-uncle bailed her out—because she refused to pay off her husband’s debts with money she considered hers. Maybe I should forgive her in the name of history, for the way history has of appearing to us like a series of photographs in a row or a movie but being really one frame, one picture that has been exposed and exposed and exposed again by a shutter that never closes.
    But verily, verily, I say unto you: My hair is auburn and cascades aver my shoulders like a river of honeyed wine. There is no other color on earth like the color of my hair.
    God is not without something to say on this subject, though what the subject is I’m not too sure. The second time he called me was about two weeks after the first so it was still summer. I picked up the phone with my usual soft, deep, earnest, caring, “Lifeline,” and he says: “Get fucked.”
    â€œIf you are going to be abusive, I am going to have to hang up,” I say, which is what I’ve been taught to say in training.
    â€œThis is God,” he says sheepishly, by way of explanation, and I figure, oh well, if it’s the Almighty, I’ll take a little abuse. “I just don’t want you to be too serene about this, and superior.”
    â€œGot it,” I say. “I’m agitated and groveling, go on.”
    â€œNo, I mean: you are a woman. You’re supposed to like getting fucked, but it’s an insult. You shoot someone the bird, it’s an insult, but you’re supposed to like getting the bird. If you act tough, someone says, ‘You’ve got balls.’ If you act tender, no one ever says, ‘Hey, you got real breasts, lady. You’re what I call a cunt.’”
    I