Lucy: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

eventually she would be able to see things that other people could not see. This was just the sort of thing my mother used to say to me when I would not eat my food, and just as I did not believe my mother, Miriam did not believe me; she ate, but it was a long, drawn-out process, just as it was a long, drawn-out process when my mother used to feed me. It was in those times when my mother used to feed me that I first began to notice her, really notice her, as if she were a specimen laid out in front of me. I was not Miriam’s mother, and, in fact, whenever I fed her and told her these stories, a sort of bribe to get her to do things my way, I always did it in a low voice, so that Mariah would not overhear. Mariah did not believe in this way of doing things. She thought that with children sincerity and straightforwardness, the truth as unvarnished as possible, was the best way. She thought fairy tales were a bad idea, especially ones involving princesses who were awakened from long sleeps upon being kissed by a prince; apparently stories like that would give the children, all girls, the wrong idea about what to expect in the world when they grew up. Her speech on fairy tales always amused me, because I had in my head a long list of things that contributed to wrong expectations in the world, and somehow fairy tales did not make an appearance on it.
    It was the beginning of summer and so we were in the house on the Great Lake, the house where Mariah had spent her summers when she was a child and where now, with her husband and children, she spent her summers as an adult. We had all come here right after the children’s holidays began. From where Miriam and I sat at the dining table, we could see Mariah standing over the kitchen sink. The dining room and kitchen were all part of the same enormous room, and we were far enough away from Mariah so that if we talked softly all she could hear was our muffled voices. She stood in front of the sink, studying some herbs she had grown in pots on the windowsill. The sun came in through the window, but only as far as the faucets, so that Mariah was in the semidark, looking at the plants in the sun. What Miriam might have seen was her beautiful golden mother pouring love over growing things, a most familiar sight to her five-year-old eyes; but what I saw was a hollow old woman, all the blood drained out of her face, her bony nose bonier than ever, her mouth collapsed as if all the muscles had been removed, as if it would never break out in a smile again. Mariah was forty years old. She kept saying it—“I am forty years old”—alternating between surprise and foreboding. I did not understand why she felt that way about her age, old and unloved; a sadness for her overcame me, and I almost started to cry—I had grown to love her so.
    But then Lewis bounded into the room. Lewis was a lawyer, and I suppose that’s why he was always reading something carefully. Now he carried in his hand a large newspaper, the pages parted to the financial section; either he had just gotten off the telephone after having a chat with his stockbroker or he would soon do so. He made a mock animal sound to Miriam and waved the newspaper at me, and he walked over to Mariah and embraced her from behind and licked the side of her neck with his tongue. She leaned her head backward and rested it on his shoulder (she was a little shorter than he, and that looked so wrong; it looks better when a woman is a little taller than her husband), and she sighed and shuddered in pleasure. The whole thing had an air of untruth about it; they didn’t mean to do what they were doing at all. It was a show—not for anyone else’s benefit, but a show for each other. And how did I know this? I just could tell—that it was a show and not something to be trusted.
    I did not feel that I knew Lewis well at all, and I did not want to. I liked him; he told me jokes, he liked to make me laugh. I think he felt sorry for me, because I was