Ordinary Life Read Online Free PDF

to call them hoo-hoos,” Mavis remembers Eileen saying. Eileen was in the hospital, one day after the surgery that took her breasts.
    “Oh, I never did, either,” Mavis said.
    “You did too!” Eileen had raised herself up on one elbow, leaned toward Mavis to speak in a low voice. “You were five years old and we were in the bathtub together. And you were looking down at your chest, at your little boobs, pointing at them, and you said, ‘This is my hoo-hoos.’ And I started laughing, and you said, ‘Well, what
do
you call them?’ and I told you, ‘Breasts.’ ” She’d taken a drink of water, then rearranged herself carefully against the pillows.
    “Wait,” Mavis said. “I do remember. Yes. You said it like this, real snotty: ‘They are
called
breasts.
B-r-e-a-s-t-s
.’ ” And then she and Eileen had both started crying, Mavis a little harder than Eileen.
    “You are not your breasts, you know,” Mavis had said, reaching for Eileen’s hand. “You’re still you.”
    “I know,” Eileen had said, her voice so small.
    On her last night, Mavis puts the magazines in the garbage. She didn’t read too much after all. She’s written nothing other than the beginning of the letter to Eileen. She sits on the floor, back against the wall, drinks the last Orangina. She doesn’t think she ever wants another one. When she comes out tomorrow and she and Al are sitting eating dinner, what can she tell him? How can she explain?
    Al. Once, angry at him, she vowed to make a list of everything he did wrong. When it was long enough, she’d confront him. “Forty minutes late for dinner with not a word of apology,” she’d written. “Spent our movie money on cigars.” And then, when she was looking for a place in their desk to hide her list, she’d come across Al’s will. “I am married to …, ” the will had said, and there was a blank for him to fill in. “Mavis Elaine McPherson,” he hadwritten, in black penmanship far more careful than his usual. And she had regretted herself, had ripped the list up and flushed it down the toilet. Down this very toilet.
    She stands, yawns, stretches. Well. What she wanted in here, she got. Uninterrupted time, to let thought lead to thought. She has enjoyed a rich kind of daytime dreaming that could only have come with the profound relaxation she has known here, she’s sure of that. Something inside her has strengthened, too, though even now she cannot say exactly what it is.
    She puts the empty bottle of Orangina in the case, stands to take off her dress and pull her nightgown over her head. She bends over the sink to wash, then looks up at herself in the mirror. Small drops of water cling to her face, and they seem beautiful to her. She dries off with the new pink towel Al brought her yesterday, thinking she’d appreciate a pretty one. “I am seventy-nine years old,” she says, into the towel. And then, into the mirror, “And I have done everything right. And so did you, Eileen.”
    She turns out the light and starts for the tub, but then stops, goes instead out the door, down the hall, and into the bedroom. She can’t see him at first, but feels his sleeping presence. She goes to her side of the bed, lifts the covers to slide in quietly beside him. She is thinking that all of life is accidental: the pink smudge of dawn, the depth of the oceans, the turning of the earth; everything, because everything that
started
everything was an accident, wasn’t it? That’s what they said. And so, one’s own small life. What could you make of it? Who knew whom you would be born to, befriend, live out your life with? Those were accidents too, weren’t they? Completely arbitrary things, barely noticed, most often. And yet.
    She moves closer to Al, turns onto her side to put her arm around his wide middle. Couldn’t there be just a bit of a grand plan, she wonders, maybe just a touch here and there; couldn’t there be some benevolent intention that graced some