Hellgoing Read Online Free PDF Page B

has.”
    Ricky saw what a motherless future might hold and, by God, he took the helm. Yes, he moved in with a parent, but at least he didn’t wear a ball cap anymore. (He must have looked in the mirror one day and thought: This is ridiculous. The hair is gone and everyone knows it.) And he hired a housekeeper to come in once a week — a masterstroke. And the housekeeper, she laundered the flowered armchair covers Theresa’s mother had sewn years ago precisely in response to her husband’s habit of wiping his food-smeared hands on the arms of the chair. It all meant that clean, orderly adulthood continued apace on Ricky’s watch, with or without a mother on hand. Theresa had been fully braced for everything in her childhood home, including the dregs of her family (because what was her mother if not the best of their family, the cream, and what were Ricky, her father and Theresa herself if not the grounds at the bottom of the cup), to have gone completely to hell. But things had not gone to hell.
    â€œAhem,” said Ricky, as they walked together down the dirt road to check the mailbox. “You don’t have to sound, you know, quite so astounded.”
    She didn’t tell this part to her friends — what she did to Ricky after what her father did to her. They walked down the road together, Theresa still vibrating. She’d been mugged, once, in Miami while taking a smoke break outside the hotel where her conference was being held, and she’d vibrated like this, exactly like this, after having her bag wrenched out of her hands by a scabbed meth-head who’d called her cunt box . “Cunt box?” Theresa had repeated in disbelief, trying to catch the meth-head’s eye as they struggled — and that’s when she lost her bag, because she’d been more focused on trying to prompt the scabbed man to elaborate than on maintaining her grip.
    She was forty-four. I am forty-four! she’d sputtered at her father. She had had babies. I have had babies! Put on some pounds? I’ve put on some pounds?
    Theresa had jumped out of her chair so fast it fell over. Goosed by insult — the shock of the insult, the unexpectedness of the attack. Her father sat there looking affrontedly at the overturned chair as Ricky ran a hand over his bristled head, maybe wishing for his ball cap, wishing for a brim with which to fiddle. The truth is, Theresa wanted to run across the yard into the wall of pines at the edge of her father’s property, there to hide and cry.
    She was the Assistant Chair of her department. She had a paper coming out in Hypatia . She was flying to Innsbruck, Austria, in the spring to deliver that very paper. There would be another conference in Santa Cruz a few months later where she was the keynote motherfucking speaker. She was being flown down there. I am being flown down , she’d hacked, asphyxiating on the rest of the sentence.
    â€œHowever,” Theresa narrated to her friends, “who gives a shit about any of that, right? The important thing I need to know is I’m a fat piece of crap.”
    â€œDon’t say that,” pleaded Ruth. “Don’t say ‘I’m fat,’ because then it’s like you’re agreeing with him, you’re affirming it on some level.”
    Dana leaned forward. “Did you have an eating disorder when you were a kid?”
    â€œ Of course I had an eating disorder,” yelled Theresa. “Who didn’t have an eating disorder?”
    â€œThey push our buttons,” said Jenn. “The buttons are installed at puberty and they can push them whenever they want.”
    â€œI didn’t think I had the buttons anymore,” said Theresa.
    â€œWe always have the buttons,” said Dana.
    â€œ They fuck you up, your mom and dad ,” quoted Jenn.
    It was an obvious quote, there was no other quote in the world more appropriate to quote at that moment, but Ruth jerked around,