The Bride of Catastrophe Read Online Free PDF Page B

home. I was on an errand whose great if unnameable purpose I felt every minute, and I had no idea how to go about this except to go—fervently—to school. And Miss McGinty had noticed my nearsightedness; I had glasses now and knew that trees were made up of individual leaves.
    Sylvie understood (this was her genius). “I have a little cough,” she said, and Ma’s hand went to her forehead and finding no fever, smoothed her fine hair back and kissed her brow.
    â€œ We’ll bake bread,” she said, closing me, the faithless, out of the family circle. “Cinnamon swirl.”
    Let them stay then, I thought, hating them, wondering why I was so mean. By the time I was in fourth grade and some financial misfortune had dashed me down from Olympus back to public school, we were used to the idea that I was bent on fulfilling my own ambition, while Sylvie was so kind and gentle that she wanted to stay home and help. They stood at the end of the driveway to watch me off to the bus, Sylvie holding Dolly by the hand—it was September, the chicory and goldenrod bloomed on the roadside and I startled redwings out of the marsh grass as I ran, heart tearing, up the dirt road. Our life was so beautiful, it must be as Ma said, that it was more authentic, more fine and true than other lives.
    The bus was full of kids from real farms, who reeked of manure from their morning chores. In the valley, where the blacktop crossed the line (into the state of New York, also the state of sinful fantasy for me), it stopped in front of the autobody shop to pick up Butchy and Donna Savione; then we got back into Connecticut and girls named Debby and Lisa would get on with their stables of plastic horses, and the bus picked up speed as we passed the Armbrusters’ and the other great houses along Main Street, heading toward the state of perfect receptivity, not to a subject, but a teacher, whoever he or she was that year—the live being whose magnetism would pull all my loose, mad atoms into alliance and lift me away from my family into the world I was going to conquer for them.
    Vietnam was on the news every night, but it had no more to do with us than the antacid commercials that interrupted it. Our reality was there in that house. The essential news we took from the tension in Ma’s voice each morning. Waking up, I listened to hear her in the next room, to guess whether she would adore or despise me that day.
    This depended, mysteriously, on my father. He was away on his vague businesses and when he was coming home, she’d clean the house with a blind fervor and prepare herself as carefully as for that first date. Clouds of scented steam billowed from the shower stall where a few hours earlier mushrooms had been sprouting—now it was spotless and she stood with bowed head against the water, swaying like a woman at prayer. She emerged healed somehow, shining with physical pride, her ironing scar an angry Gothic arch over her left breast. All her doubts were behind her and she strode in magnificent nakedness downstairs to get a pair of her wretched panties (she would not spend money on panties, she’d have counted it impure).
    She unnerved him—she was so hungry, she might eat him alive. Her breasts were beautiful, but he couldn’t help remembering that heart beneath. Hearts must be compared to fists for a reason, and hers was fearfully strong. So he kept his distance, kissing her in a way she said was typical of the passionlessness of the upper classes. He felt he’d married beneath himself, did he? She was quite sure he did, though as always he was wrong.
    â€œPearls before swine,” she said, when I wrote a little poem for him. Well, she was going to drag me and my poems up from the pig wallow, or die trying. After all, he was a Nazi (yes, she had filed away those early confessions, so she’d know where to attack). This, obviously, was why she had dreamt the SS were chasing her