The Joyce Maynard Collection Read Online Free PDF

the mothers stuffing pacifiers in their mouths. She said more too—about weather and traffic, and nuclear power plants and the danger of waves from high-voltage lines. But it was the babies that got to her most, and their mothers.
    They never pay attention, she said. It’s as if the big accomplishment was giving birth to these children, and once they had them, the whole thing was just a chore that you got through the best you could by pumping them full of soda and sitting them down in front of videos (these were just starting to get popular then). Doesn’t anyone ever talk to their children anymore? she said.
    Well, she did, all right. Too much, in my opinion. She was always home now. The only person she really had any interest in seeing now, she said, was me.
    N OW AND THEN WE’D STILL DRIVE PLACES , but instead of going in herself she’d send me with the money and stay in the car. Or she’d say why bother driving to the store when you can order from Sears? When we did go to the supermarket, she’d stock up on things like Campbell’s soup and Cap’n Andy fish dinners, peanut butter and frozen waffles, and pretty soon it was like we lived in a bomb shelter. Sears had already provided the deep freeze by this point, and it was filled with frozen dinners. A hurricane could have hit, and we’d be set for weeks, we had so many provisions stored up. Powdered milk was better for me anyway, she said. Less fat. Her parents had both suffered from high cholesterol and died young. We had to keep an eye on that.
    Then she started getting everything from mail-order catalogs—this being the days before the Internet—even things like our underwear and socks, and commenting on how much traffic there was in town now, that a person really shouldn’t even drive there anymore, especially when you considered how it contributed to pollution. I had this idea we should get a motor scooter: I’d seen a character riding one on a TV show, and I pictured how much fun it could be, the two of us buzzing around town, doing our errands.
    How many errands does a person really need to do? she said. When you think about it, all that going around to places just wasted so much time you could be spending in your own home.
    Back when I was younger, I was always trying to get her out of the house. Let’s go bowling, I said. Miniature golf. The science museum. I tried to think of things she might like—a Christmas craft show over at the high school, a production of Oklahoma! put on by the Lions Club.
    There’ll be dancing, I said. Big mistake, to mention this.
    They just call it dancing, she said.
    S OMETIMES I WONDERED IF THE PROBLEM was how much she’d loved my father. I had heard about cases where a person loved someone so much that if they died or went away, the person never got over it. This was what people meant when they talked about a broken heart. Once, when we were having our frozen dinners, and she’d just poured herself a third glass of wine, I had considered asking my mother about this. I wondered if what it took to make a person hate another person the way she seemed to hate my father now was having once loved him in equal measure. It seemed like something they might teach you in science class—physics, though we hadn’t studied this yet. Like a teeter-totter where how high the person goes up on one side depends on how low the person goes down on the other.
    What I decided was, it hadn’t been losing my father that broke my mother’s heart, if that was what had taken place, as it appeared. It was losing love itself—the dream of making your way across America on popcorn and hot dogs, dancing your way across America, in a sparkly dress with red underpants. Having someone think you were beautiful, which, she had told me, my father used to tell her she was, every day.
    Then there’s nobody saying that anymore, and you are like one of those ceramic hedgehogs