Miss Lizzie Read Online Free PDF Page B

little bastard .” Next to him now, she slapped him viciously across the face. In the tiny kitchen the sound was as loud as an explosion. I heard Mrs. Mortimer gasp. William shut his eyes and his fingers clutched at his forearms, knuckles turning white.
    She hit him again. “ Bastard ! I’m not good enough for you, I was never good enough for you, I’m just fat old Audrey, stupid old Audrey .” She hit him again, backhanded. “ You bastard, you bastard, you bastard .”
    William stood up. He towered over her and still she hit at him. He turned and, without a word, moved toward the rear entrance to the house. She stayed close behind, hitting at him with both hands now, left, right, smacking at him. I stood up and followed them. I was afraid that William might strike back at her—strong as he was, he might have killed her. I think I believed that I could stop him.
    Out on the back porch, her arms still flailing at him, he opened the screen door. He turned to her. She stepped back—suddenly afraid, perhaps, that at last he would strike back: He said, “You’ll be sorry, Audrey,” and then he went down the steps, closing the door behind him.
    She slammed the door open and went down the steps, stopped at the bottom and called out after him: “You bastard !”
    Without turning back, walking slowly, in no hurry, he disappeared behind the hedges. Then my stepmother turned and saw me standing there in the doorway.
    For a moment, I think, she was going to hit me. Her eyes narrowed and her body tautened. But she hesitated. Perhaps she considered how Father might have reacted if he learned of it.
    She took a deep breath, exhaled, and snapped at me, “Get out of my way.”
    I stepped back, and she tramped up the stairs and passed me.
    Mrs. Mortimer was almost at the front door. My stepmother called out to her, “Esther!”
    I stepped into the kitchen. Quickly, I sneaked a gulp of coffee from her cup: I would get something for myself, despite all this melodrama. Then I left the kitchen and ran up the back stairs to my bedroom. I locked the door behind me.
    I pulled open the bottom right-hand drawer of the dresser. The two decks, a stripper deck and a marked deck, had been underneath a box of stationery. The box looked untouched. She must have come up here last night, while I was reading in the parlor. Which meant that she had probably known for some time that the cards were there. For how long?
    I felt as though I had been violated. The woman had no right to go through my things, no right to take the cards.
    I shut the drawer, crossed the room, flounced onto the bed. What would Father say when he learned that I had been going over to Miss Lizzie’s nearly every day?
    I heard the front door shut, heard my stepmother moving around downstairs. She was alone.
    From the bottom of the stairs she called out my name. I did not answer. For a few moments I was afraid that she would come upstairs; but she did not.
    What was it that William had done with Marge Grady? What was it that Marge had done that made her a slut? And what was in the package that my stepmother had thrown to the table? What did it have to do with him “sticking it in her”? What had my stepmother meant by that? And why had the woman been so incensed?
    It was as though all these questions were too much for me. After a while, lying there, I fell asleep.

    I awoke out of a dream, one I can no longer remember. But it had been one of those dreams—we all have them, I think—which seem so foreign that they might have been dreamed by someone else, with us acting only as a means, a medium. And, because shreds and wisps of the other still cling to the wisps and shreds of ourselves, we are appalled and frightened at how frail a thing our personalities, our identities, truly are. (After we regain ourselves, of course, we forget the truth and dream, once again, that we are immutable.)
    I looked at the