Patricide Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lou-Lou the brave, the stout, and the reliable.
    It was for the best, Mom was saying. Her eyes were
dilated, her voice was faint and cracked. He’d all but told her—told her what to
do . . . He’d shown her how, in his new novel. How to clear the
way for an impatient husband who has fallen in love (guiltily, ecstatically)
with a younger woman . . .
    Mom was referring to Roland Marks’s newest novel Jealousy in which an unloved wife kills herself
in these circumstances and is much mourned, much regretted, even admired by
survivors for her sensitivity, generosity.
    I held my mother, waiting for the emergency medical
workers.
    I thought If I weren’t here she would die now. He would have killed her.
    Dad came to see my mother in the hospital,
repentant, remorseful, very quiet. He brought her flowers. He brought her new
books in bright paper covers, conspicuously women’s fiction of the kind Roland
Marks scorned. He took certain of her relatives, visiting the hospital, out to
dinner at a good restaurant. He spent time with my sister, my brothers and me.
And after Mom was discharged from the hospital, he filed for divorce.
    Except at court dates and incidental meetings at
family events, Roland Marks would never speak to my mother again.
    A ND YET, I loved him best. Can’t help it.
    *
    â€œMy God, what’s that? A tooth?”
    He was astonished. He was aghast. Yet you could see
that already he was formulating the terms in which he would relate the story to
his friends: how his teenaged athlete-daughter Lou-Lou was struck in the mouth
with an opponent’s hockey stick, tripped and fell on the field entangled in
opponents’ feet, yet nonetheless managed to scramble erect and grip her stick
hoping to continue in the frantic game until—at last—though it could not have
been more than a few seconds—the referee pulled her out of the game.
    â€œHell, Dad. I’m OK.”
    The athlete-daughter was me. Panting, dribbling
blood down her chin, staining her lime-green hockey-team uniform. Cursing but
laughing. The referee hadn’t seen how badly I’d been hit.
    â€œJesus, Lou-Lou! Is that a tooth ?”
    It was. A front, lower tooth, with a bloody root,
in the palm of my shaky hand.
    â€œI’ve got plenty more, Dad. It doesn’t hurt one
bit.”
    This was true. In the adrenaline-charge of the
moment, my bloodied mouth didn’t hurt. Spitting blood to keep from choking
didn’t hurt.
    Worth it, to see the aghast-admiring look in my
father’s eyes.
    Before the sheer physicality of life, Roland Marks seemed at times mesmerized,
paralyzed. His large intelligent eyes blinked and shimmered like an infant’s
eyes yearning to understand, yet overwhelmed by understanding.
    â€œDad, hey—don’t look at me like that. It’s not
like, you know—I’m some kind of fashion model, and now my career is ruined.” And
I laughed again, and spat out blood.
    I was scared, but high. No sensation like being
high on adrenaline!
    I was Roland Marks’s exemplary daughter, his
favorite daughter, but I was no beauty. Gamely my father liked to compare me to
certain classic paintings—female portraits—by Ingres, Renoir, even Whistler—but
my broad Eskimo-face, my small eyes given to irony, my fleshy sardonic mouth
resisted mythologizing. Hulking and needy, but disguising my need in robust good
spirits and a laugh that, as Dad noted, sounded like fingernails scraped upward
on a blackboard, I resisted idealization.
    I’d weighed nine pounds, twelve ounces at birth. So
I’d been told many times.
    I wanted to scare my fastidious father, a little.
He’d almost missed this game. He’d wanted to miss
this game, but I’d begged him on the phone the night before—my mother had
arranged not to come to Rye so that my father could come—and so he’d given in.
But I knew he’d resented it. He’d