The Bride of Catastrophe Read Online Free PDF

the hillside in the evenings, having edged away from the table and its enduring argument, turning the screen-door catch with my hand to silence it so I could escape unnoticed, to look down at the warm light beaming from the windows, all of it more dear to me the more I was estranged.
    â€œUntouched by the outside world,” I said, tears of nostalgia stinging.
    â€œWell, they had to send you to school,” Philippa said, with swift professorial authority, through which, suddenly, shot a spark of doubt. “Right?”
    â€œOn and off,” I answered. “You know, when the mood struck.” I laughed, with a little edge of danger—which she caught and reflected in her own laugh, making me tipsy. No one had ever seen danger in me before.
    â€œThe school question had to run the rapids between Ma’s contradictions, like everything else,” I said, with a little swagger, having transformed my poor mother to granite with the turn of a phrase. Her ambitions for me had been boundless, but she hardly expected any mortal teacher could help me fulfill them. Teachers were small and ordinary people like my father, who would only want to shrink me, to show me limits instead of possibilities. And there must be no limits, because I was going to grow immense and all-seeing, become a sorceress and save her soul. After three days of kindergarten, she’d had enough of public school and blazed into the headmistress’s office at Northwest Country Day to declare my genius. I hung behind her, avoiding the woman’s eyes while greedily taking in the details of her presence—tweed suit, gray pincurls, a perfume whose fragrance would come to represent constancy to me, so that each afternoon, as I shook her hand before running out into whatever maelstrom my family was suffering that day, I’d breath deep, hoping to carry a whiff of her away with me. My mother’s pride—which had to be immense so as to wrestle down her shame—made her seem at least twice the headmistress’s size. I edged a little further behind her, wanting more than anything to just go home.
    Or not quite “more than anything.” More than anything, I wanted to be good, which meant only that I must make amazing accomplishments and love my mother best. I had to see that smile in which all her furies were resolved, everything calmed and completed by … me. The school terrified me—my classmates were Miles Armbruster III, Eliza Anne Cornwell, etc., children who spoke with the commanding voices they learned from their riding teachers, and whose chauffeurs delivered them to school because their parents were occupied in the manner of normal people, whatever that was. I barely dared move for fear the secret stigma of our lives would somehow be revealed to these people; I couldn’t possibly raise my hand and ask to use the girls’ room. Which left me hearing the unfortunate—“Miss McGinty? Beatrice wet herself again,” from Eliza Anne, and receiving the kind loan of a pair of Miles Armbruster’s mittens to replace my drenched socks.
    Years later: Ma and I were watching Reagan’s Inaugural Ball on TV and Miles Armbruster danced by. “Do you remember when he lent you his mittens for socks?” she asked. “ That’s what you call a connection, Bea.” Another of the gifts Ma had given me. But every school morning, she had stood bereft in the kitchen doorway as if I betrayed her by leaving, and looking back at her I would feel something blur in my heart. She loved me so, loved to take me up into the woods to read stories in a glade we’d found where bright green grass grew under a canopy of laurel, loved to sing to me while she hung up the laundry and I ran back and forth under the blowing sheet. She loved me and I abandoned her, that was just the way her life always went.
    Sylvie would try to catch my eye, to keep me there, but I wouldn’t, I couldn’t stay