The Burgess Boys Read Online Free PDF

was so nervous he had introduced himself as “Billiam.” The kids would sometimes call him that, but Helen asked them to be kind because Billiam had, years ago, been in the Vietnam War, and also, his wife, Deborah-Who-Does, was a terrible nuisance and Helen thought it had to be awful living with her. You couldn’t step out into the back garden without Deborah-Who-Does stepping out into hers, and in two minutes she’d be mentioning that the pansies you were arranging wouldn’t last on that side of the garden, that the lilies would need more light, that the lilac bush Helen planted would die (it had) because there was so little lime in the soil.
    Debra-Who-Doesn’t, on the other hand, was a sweet woman, tall and anxious, a psychiatrist and a bit dippy. But it was sad: Her husband was cheating on her. It was Helen who had discovered this. Home alone during the day, she heard through the walls the most appalling sexual sounds. When Helen peeked out the front window she saw Debra’s husband emerge down the front steps with a curly-haired woman behind him. Later, she saw them together in a local bar. And once she had heard Debra-Who-Doesn’t say to her husband, “Why are you picking on me tonight?” So Debra-Who-Doesn’t-Know-Everything didn’t know everything. In this way, Helen didn’t always care for living in the city. Jim yelled like a crazy person when it was basketball season. “You dumbfuck asshole!” he’d yell at the TV, and Helen worried the neighbors would think he was yelling at her. She had considered mentioning it to them in a laughing way, and then decided that in issues of veracity the less said the better. Not that she’d be lying.
    Still.
    Her mind raced and raced. What had she forgotten to pack? She didn’t want to think of herself dressing one night to meet the Anglins for dinner and finding she’d not packed the right shoes—her outfit ruined just like that. Tucking the quilt around her, Helen realized that tonight’s telephone call from Susan was still here in the house, dark and formless and bad. She sat up.
    This is what happened when you couldn’t sleep, and when you had an image in your mind of a frozen pig’s head. Helen went into the bathroom and found a sleeping pill, and the bathroom was clean and familiar. Back in bed she moved close to her husband and within minutes felt the gentle tug of sleep, and she was so glad she wasn’t Deborah-Who-Does, or Debra-Who-Doesn’t, so glad she was Helen Farber Burgess, so glad she had children, so glad to be glad about life.

    But such urgency in the morning!
    On a day when Park Slope opened with its Saturday’s munificence—children on the way to the park with soccer balls in netted bags, their fathers watching the traffic lights and hurrying the kids along, young couples who arrived at the coffee shops with hair still wet from showering after morning love, people who, having dinner parties that night, were already near Grand Army Plaza at the end of the park in order to browse the farmers market for the best apples and breads and cut flowers, their arms laden with baskets and paper-wrapped stalks of sunflowers—in the midst of all this, there were of course the typical vexations found anywhere in the country, even in this neighborhood where people, for the most part, exuded a sense of being exactly where they wanted to be: There was the mother whose child was begging for a Barbie doll for her birthday and the mother said no, Barbie dolls are why girls are skinny and sick. On Eighth Street there was the stepfather grimly trying to teach the recalcitrant boy how to ride a bicycle, holding on to the back of the bike while the child, white-faced with fear, wobbled and looked at him for praise. (The man’s wife was finishing her chemo for breast cancer, there was no getting out of any of it.) On Third Street a couple argued about their teenage son, whether he should be allowed to stay in his room on this sunny autumn day. So there were