Sweet Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

voice talking about the Yankees. I sat against the headboard, dragging the sheet up around me.
    After a while I began to get dressed, gathering my bra and underwear and large brass earrings, which were scattered around the room. In the smattering of light from the window, I groped for theblack dress and slingbacks I wore to work, then shook my hair over my head, combing through the tangles with my fingers. I wiped the mascara from under my eyes. Trembling a little, I went down the hall to the living room.
    “Is three weeks’ notice enough?” I asked Adam’s back.
    He kept his eyes on the TV, now tuned to
Jeopardy.
    “Hollywood Romance for six hundred, Alex.”
    “This famous couple’s romance ended tragically when she died in a plane crash in 1942.”
    “Gable and Lombard,” Adam said.
    “Who are Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier?” said the contestant.
    After a few moments an ad for dishwashing detergent came on. “I assume you can let yourself out,” Adam said.
    I paused for a second, examining the front door. “Actually, I never did figure out how to undo all these locks.”
    He stood up, as if with great effort, still watching the television. Without looking at me, he handed me the bottle of beer he was holding. He released the column of locks with a series of clipped, intricate maneuvers. “Sayonara,” he said.
    “Please.”
    “What?” He held up his hands.
    “Come on, Adam. Give me a break. Don’t make this so difficult.”
    He shrugged, looking over my head. The game show was on again.
    “A hunchback, this nineteenth-century French painter immortalized cancan dancers.”
    Adam murmured, “Toulouse-Lautrec.”
    “It doesn’t have to be this way,” I said.
    “Who is Toulouse-Lautrec?” said the contestant.
    He looked at me without focusing, and after a second the brown of his eyes darkened and he looked down. “Just leave, Cassandra,” he said, stepping back. “I’m tired.”
    The elevator opened on the ground floor. As I left the gloomy lobby, I felt light-headed, as if I might faint. I stood against the side ofthe building, my back and arms touching the cool brick, and I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. I put my hands over my face, hot tears squeezing out between my fingers, my shoulders shaking; and then I cried even harder, angry at myself for crying at all.
    After a few minutes I straightened up, wiped my face with my hands, and reached into my bag for a tissue. I took one deep breath and then another, adjusted the bag, and started down the street.
    Out in the open, the summer air was warm and solid. As I crossed to the other side I glanced back at the red-brick building, up the four flights to Adam’s bedroom window. I could see a light shining inside, probably just the dull glow from the television reflected down the narrow hall.

H er hair was long and black, and her neck was the color of sand on a beach, of wheat bread rising. Her eyes were as dark and bright as a crow’s. She wore the newest styles of dresses in colors the rest of us were too well-bred to try—whorehouse vermilion, firetruck red, sunburst gold—and lipstick to match. Nobody else wore lipstick; we were all married and living in the country. We couldn’t see what for.
    Bryce once said, confidentially, that she’d never really been friends with a woman as attractive and strong as she was before, not one-on-one. She said she thought it was a competition problem. Then she smiled her wide, wine-lipped smile and reached over and squeezed my hand.
    “We’re alike, you and I,” she said. “We’ve got the same goals.” “How’s that?”
    She patted her hair, tucking strands into the loose twist on her head, and then she looked me over slowly. “We’re not going to sit here for the next fifty years and go crazy, ringing the bell for breakfast and lunch and supper, marking time by what’s on the table. We’re not cut out for sitting at home while the world goes marching by without us.”
    “What do you