Holland Suggestions Read Online Free PDF Page A

been one of your finest traits, but you look just like her and you know it, okay? Let’s get on with it; we’ve got a lot to cover.”
    My words excited her. They excited me too, in a different way. “Any questions?”
    “A few.”
    “Yes?”
    “Why is she looking away like that? It’s really a pretty bad picture. Do you have anything showing her full face?”
    “She didn’t like pictures; I had to shoot this one with Robert’s camera on the sly. It might have come out better if I’d been able to use flash. But as far as I know there are no other pictures of her anywhere.”
    “Was that a superstition or what?”
    “I don’t know what it was. Probably a superstition. Yes, I guess that must have been it; a superstition.”
    “Where were you living then?”
    “In a little town not far from Richmond. I was a student at William Schuster U; that’s a small college for kids who can’t make it at William and Mary for one reason or another. In fact, I think it’s closed now. I used to get propositioned all the time for money, but I haven’t had anything from them now in five or six years. Anyway, your mother and I, we took this place because it was cheap and we were broke. My parents were trying to help me through school, but they didn’t have much money either. That year I had to drop out. Vivian was working in a department store and it was near Christmas, like now—yes, it was this same time of year. I dropped out at midterm because we just couldn’t make it. She was making forty dollars a week.”
    I stopped there, lost in some irrelevancy, and it might have been several minutes later when I looked up and saw Judy waiting expectantly. “You want to hear all of this?”
    “As much of it as you want to tell me.”
    “A lot of it’s just junk. It doesn’t matter to anyone now.”
    “Why not…get it all out?…see what matters?”
    I swallowed some Scotch, said, “Good idea,” and forced my mind back to that Christmas. “She was making forty dollars a week. I remember she was very bitter about that. Let me tell you, your mother had a fine mind, like yours; she really resented making forty dollars a week. She hated her work, thought it was demeaning; but jobs were tight then and we had to take what we could get. I took a job in a gas station. That’s almost a cliché today—everyone who’s poor goes to work in a gas station—but I really did. So we were making eighty dollars between us.”
    “But you were just starting out.”
    “Yes, I was, but there wasn’t any room in Vivian’s mind for that kind of thinking. She wasn’t interested in potential, only results. She was impatient with change; everything moved too slowly for her. I don’t think she ever worried about next year or last year, only now. In a lot of ways I guess she was really practical.”
    I went into the kitchen and refilled my glass. “Besides,” I called through the hallway, “we were horribly mismatched.” I came back to the den and deposited the Scotch bottle and the ice bucket on the desk. “I guess that comes out a criticism of her from my viewpoint, but she isn’t here to defend herself, and I guess you’ll have to take all this with a grain of salt. I mean, I keep wanting to say things like bitch and whore, and that’s not credible at all, is it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I really learned to hate her. After she left me, when she was gone for five or six months and I knew she wasn’t ever coming back, I began to methodically destroy her in my mind. I must have cursed her name a thousand times, maybe more. It seems silly to me now, but I believed then that it was the only way I could make it. I do know that it was the worst period of my life, no question about it, and it lasted two years. By then I had distorted her image so that I didn’t have any real grasp of her anymore. Then I forgot about her, or thought I did. I guess my subconscious never did let me forget, though, did it?”
She married me to get