Ordinary Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

lives?
    “That’s you, right, Mavis?” Al asks sleepily.
    She closes her eyes, answers yes.

Departure from Normal

    Every morning, Alice sits at the tiny kitchen table in her new apartment and reads the newspaper. She doesn’t just glance at the front page like she used to. Now she has time, and she reads every single word. She is amazed at what she has been missing. There is accidental poetry, absurdist theater. Violence and comedy are separated by advertisements featuring women wearing brassieres and work skirts.
    Alice saves the weather report for last, because she likes it best. She is intrigued by the “climate data,” the obsessive care with which someone analyzes what happened last year compared with this year. She reads that today the departure from normal is +4 degrees. The departure this year is +277. She is unsure what the meaning of all this is, but in some way the larger number thrills her.
    There are bold predictions in the weather forecast, no hemming and hawing: High today 80–85. Period. She likes that. There are childlike drawings of pointy-rayed suns and voluptuous clouds. There is a column of temperature listings for cities she’snever seen. She reads that it is ninety in New Orleans and smells chicory; she reads seventy-four in San Francisco and sees wild-haired women hanging out laundry, the sheets fragrant and unwieldy and yanking at the lines. It is raining in Paris today: baguette wrappers wilt and soften with the humidity; taxis splash onto pants legs and leather shoes.
    Alice likes to tell her story this way: First I got cancer. Then I got depressed. Then I got divorced. Then my parakeet got cancer. Then I got really depressed.
    Alice has taken time off from work because she has had a recurrence, and she needs to decide what to do about it. She can try something experimental if she wants to. “Well. I’m very sorry,” her doctors say. “Jesus,” her friends say. Or, “Oh,
Al
ice,” they say. It has been so long since things were like they used to be. When a bad diagnosis comes, it is never how you think it will be, she tells people. It’s the suddenness that’s the problem. It is you, seasoning the pasta sauce and singing along with the radio. And then the phone rings and your doctor tells you he’s gotten back some test results and can you come in to discuss them. Wait, you think. My rings still fit. My jeans. I just ate breakfast. I am thirty-six years old. In the middle, you see. The earth rotates while you speak, unmindful of the fact that you have just begun a quilt. You hang up the phone and start to learn.
    After Alice reads the paper, she uses the weather report to line the bottom of the bird’s cage. The bird is named Lucky. He is green and yellow, with tiny violet patches on his face. The violet looks the way blush does on women who can’t see anymore—it is too dark, too low, ridiculous and endearing. He doesn’t know he has cancer.
    “You’re going free today,” Alice tells him. “It’s going to be abeautiful day.” The bird cocks his head, ruffles his feathers, and raises his wing, exposing his malignancy to her. It looks like a piece of cereal stuck onto him, she thinks. It looks like something she could just pluck off. She tried, once, when she saw it for the first time. It wouldn’t come off, and the bird bit her. So she took him to the vet and the vet said it was cancer. Then he said, “Well, most birds live only six years. This one is seven.” “Uh-huh,” Alice said. She took the bird home, put a sheet around part of his cage, fed him a potato chip. She put him beside her while she lay on the sofa and looked at a magazine. She played the radio for him. Later, she let him fly around the house for hours, didn’t push him off when he rode on her glasses.
    Now she stands still, staring, fascinated by the bird’s tumor. She has never seen her own. Is this the way her breast looked on the inside? The phone rings and she stands listening to it for a