The Bride of Catastrophe Read Online Free PDF Page A

flick our little boat over with its tail. He went to Agway for chickenfeed. She rocked back and forth on a kitchen chair, biting her knuckle to keep herself from sobbing.
    She was pregnant again and again, and so came Sylvie, Dolly, and finally Ted, our parents’ folie à deux becoming folie à trois , quatre , cinque , six  … Pop faded, grew dim, and Ma intensified, like a storm. She was always pregnant—there was the one too vigorous who tore the placenta away and starved, the one born months early. We could have named her Sadness, this fragile sister; she was the incarnation of our wistful parents’ wishes, curled translucent under the incubator lamp, sucking the bud of her thumb through her few hours of life.
    Ma’s head ached and ached; we tiptoed around, hoping to avoid the invisible tripwires that seemed to set those headaches off. I’d drawn with crayon in my copy of Goodnight Moon : how could it be, that a child of hers could do such a thing? She gathered the books in her arms, took them out to the trash barrel behind the barn and set them on fire. Books were sacred, sacred: Did I understand? Her grandmother’s poems, bound in cloth printed with violets, were kept face out on the shelf, a reminder of the high place from which her family had fallen. They’d been literary, way back, far above my father’s common moneymaking sort of people. When Ma was twelve, she won a medal for reciting more Shakespeare from memory than any other twelve-year-old on Staten Island—it was made of real gold. Did I understand? In her high school yearbook, her quotation was: “Nobody understands me.” And looking into the eyes of that smouldering girl, it was hard to tell whether this was a lament or a boast.
    He, our father, was away, on some kind of business (we didn’t ask what kind; it was frightening to see him search for the answer as if he himself didn’t exactly know), and she didn’t trust the car, was sure it would burst into flames when she was driving. She would only use it in an emergency, so we were always at home, becoming strange together, contorting ourselves to fit each other and keep the rest of the world at bay. We were not suited to the work of farming—it meant doing the same thing day after day, with no immediate result, and thus it could not pull our attention away from our own drama. We took naps, we wandered up and down the stairs looking for a lost pencil, we sat at the window and stared. When the phone rang a terror gripped us and we cried, “Answer it, answer it!” as if it had come alive suddenly and would have to be slain.
    Some days, though, we managed to seem like the characters in her childhood book, the book that had gotten us into this trouble. Braving the musky darkness of the coop, I’d go along hen by hen, thrusting a hand in beneath each one to bring out a warm, shit-spattered egg, carrying them down the hill in a tin pail, knowing that my reward would be the feeling that I was a farm girl, part of the beautiful scene in my parents’ imagination, which was the one thing they really shared. I’d climb into the willow tree to sit all afternoon, reading, watching the brook swirl over the stones beneath. Did I love to read? To hear the water? God knows. I loved knowing that Ma would look out the bedroom window when the headache let up, and see me. And soon she’d be leaning in the front door, all gentleness and hope, so beautiful you couldn’t take your eyes off her, her soft smile showing mostly amazement, that her life had come out like this, her land stretching in front of her, her children reading in the trees..
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    RECALLING IT for Philippa, I remembered only that—how beautiful it was. The place, the people, were far away, unable to barge into my vision with all their ungainly wants and rages. Oh, I missed them, I missed the immense love I’d borne them as I sat on