Other Women Read Online Free PDF

marketed infant formula? She
     
    OTHER
    switched channels to a documentary on draught in the sub-Sahara. Her brother Howard was in Chad at that very moment with an interrelief agency. Howard had been a scrawny little boy. It made sense he’d grow up to be a famine tighter. She looked at the little children with their swollen bellies and fly-coated lips and eyes for as long as she could stand it.
    Then she turned off the TV and fell asleep.
    She dreamed she was lying in a putrid swamp surrounded by poisonous snakes, her eyes and lips covered with insects that were half bee and half leech.
    They clung to her and stung continuously. Her face throbbed and burned. Jim Jones appeared through the tangled vines and matted trees in his red robe and sunglasses. He carried a syringe and a pitcher of grape Kool-Aid. He injected her as she strugto escape. Hannah Burke appeared.
    She dismissed Jones. Then she methodically plucked the insects from Caroline’s face.
    Caroline sat up, flesh burning, hair soaked with sweat. The sheets were tangled and damp. The clock read
    3:0o
    a.m. She took several deep breaths, determined not to run upstairs to Diana. She got up and brewed chamomile tea. Sipping it in bed, she itemized the ways she’d failed that week-screaming at the boys for pasting autumn leaves all over their clothes as camouflage in their war games; throwing the blender at Arnold for climbing on the dinner table and running off with the pork roast; losing her car keys so Diana couldn’t get her car out to have dinner with Suzanne, the new young nurse on the chilward who gazed at Diana with mindless adoration. Caroline was not a nice person. She was selfish, impatient, and jealous. She was a bad mother, a worse friend, and a hopeless lover.
    Shivering, she turned on her electric blanket.
    She and Diana had generated so much warmth together that they never needed the blanket. But these last weeks it had been on nonstop.
    The house was still without the mumbling, sighing, and tossing of the sleeping boys, the growling and twitching of the dreaming puppy. Before long they’d be gone for good.
    Jackie and Jason, Diana, they’d vanish, just like Arlene and Jackson and David Michael, leaving her here alone night after night, as snow piled up outside the windows and buried her in an icy cocoon. Her stomach clenched. But what had she ever been if not alone? She must have known that even as a baby. Probably that was why she’d screamed at night. Since then she’d come
    WOMEN
    together with people for illusory moments of companionship, only to watch them fade away like cinema images as the house lights go on.
    The sky outside her window was black, but she was awake for good. She got up, put on her down bathrobe and slippers, and sat at the loom in the corner, on which she was weaving place mats in shades of brown and black. Her napkins, place mats, and tablecloths always sold best, ever since she’d started weaving in Jackson’s house in Newton. She’d done so many she was getting sick of them, but she couldn’t think what to weave instead. She could weave at night only when the boys were away because the thud of the beater woke them up. But weaving was the only thing that could stave off her despair. When her feet and hands finally found their hypnotic rhythm, she had no time or attention for her own misery.
    She’d always woven in stealth, like someone sneaking away to perform unclean acts, because pursuing a private pleasure seemed irresponsible in a world full of collective agony.
    She thought about those bizarre clinging, stinging insects in her dream. Hannah Burke had helped her remove them. But it was just a dream. Was there really any point to another appointment? What could Hannah do about the human condition? You just had to grit your teeth and make the best of it. Or bow out. She thought about the pill bottles behind her sweaters. Out of sight maybe, but not out of mind.
    Grimly she pedaled her loom and threw the shuttle