Sylvia: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

nice.
    Barely five feet tall and always cooking, cleaning, shopping, sewing. To criticize “the Mommy”—my father’s expression—was, even if correct, incorrect in the eyes ofGod. It was close to evil. In the background with his cigar, watching television, brooding, he made gloomy, silent judgments. (“That’s how you talk to the Mommy? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know better?”)
    I rode the F train to West Fourth Street, then hurried through the garish carnival of MacDougal Street, where tourists came nightly from all over the city to sit in neighborhood coffee shops like Cafe Bizarre, Cafe Wha?, Take Three, Cock and Bull, and Cafe Figaro, where they could listen to somebody strum a guitar and sing through his sinuses like a hillbilly. I entered our building and, without getting winded, though I smoked plenty, I ran up six flights of stairs. Lying in the dark land of the
cucarachas
, her Latin and Greek grammars flung into chaos, radio playing softly, my Sylvia waited, seething.
    “I brought fried chicken, pickles, potato latkes, and mandel bread. Turn on the light. Sit up. My mother also knit a sweater for you.” I always brought food back to MacDougal Street. Sylvia would eat.
    Once, when I was at my parents’ apartment, Sylvia phoned to say that she’d slit her wrists. She hadn’t wanted me to go alone to visit my parents for a few hours, and she had refused to come with me.
    I picked up the phone and said, “Hello, Sylvia?”
    A tiny voice said, “I just slit my wrists.”

    I left my parents’ apartment, but not before my mother had packed a bag with a dozen bagels, two jars of gefilte fish, and a salad she made of onions and radishes.
    I didn’t want to go rushing back to MacDougal Street, intimidated by Sylvia’s threats of self-destruction or her announcement of the fait accompli. I didn’t believe she had slit her wrists. But I couldn’t be certain. (She had a small, fine, nearly imperceptible scar on one wrist, and claimed she’d once tried to kill herself.) In my frustration—refusing to be intimidated, yet feeling terrified—I became angry at my mother for detaining me as she packed food. She suspected things were bad on MacDougal Street, but if I left without the food she’d know they were very bad. I was ashamed and didn’t want her to know how Sylvia and I lived, but I didn’t want Sylvia to bleed to death. I waited for the food, then ran to the subway, then ran from the subway to MacDougal Street, through the crowds, up the six flights of stairs to our apartment, and I burst in hot and wild, the bag of food in my arms, shouting, “I don’t give a damn if you slashed your neck.”
    She had sliced her wrists very superficially. Having done it before, she was good at it. There was almost no bleeding. There’d be no scars. She began picking at the food. She liked gefilte fish. It pleased me to see her eat. There was hope if Sylvia ate gefilte fish, homemade, delicious, nothing to fight about. She ate as if she were doing me a favor I didn’t deserve.

    Sylvia never read a newspaper. I told her what was happening. She didn’t care one bit. I told her anyhow. She listened suspiciously, as if I had some dubious motive for obliging her to hear what I read in the newspaper. Mainly it was innocent chatter, but I admit I had a vague notion that mental health is more or less proportional to the attention you give to matters outside your head. It couldn’t be bad for her to hear about politics, scientific developments, sports, art, fashion, crime, various disasters, etc. The worst news—if it’s in a newspaper—probably didn’t happen to you, and it offers a reassuringly normal connection to daily life. The world goes on. Earthquakes, fires, airplane crashes, murders—whatever else they may be—are news, part of the flow of days, weeks, eras.
    I told Sylvia that Russian scientists said the core of the earth is pure iron, and the temperature, 1,800 miles down, is about