The Last Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    "Who's for more potatoes?" urged my grandmother, at her head of the table. "More peas?"
9
    When we got home that night, I helped my mother bathe Etienne and put him to bed, because Magda had the evening off. Etienne lolled, half asleep, as we put on his nightshirt, his limbs heavy and slightly damp in the heat, and we left him to the cool air that drifted into his darkened room with the tang of the sea on it.
    I, too, bade my good nights, and my mother returned to my father in the living room below, her heels resounding on the stone staircase. While I brushed my teeth, my mouth full of minty foam, I tiptoed onto the landing to listen to my parents' quarreling.
    "...These interminable lectures, as if we were all Sagesse's age—no, for God's sake, as if we had the wit of Etienne!"
    I couldn't hear my father's reply, but could deduce it from what followed.
    "How many years have you been saying that? 'He's difficult,' 'It's a difficult time,' 'I couldn't leave him now'—come off it, Alex, what about our life? Your life?"
    The bickering was as familiar as a dream. I returned to the bathroom to spit and rinse, and brought my nightie from my room so I could change for bed and listen at the same time. It would not end until my father exploded, and won. I could practically hear the ice cubes in his after-dinner glass of scotch, which I knew he held, and put down, and held again as he paced the room, around the furniture, seething like an animal until he would have to roar.
    I stood, barefoot, in my underpants, my nightgown frothy in my hand, leaning forward. My heart pumped and tingled in my extremities; my neck was rigid. I could feel my veins tightening. It was always this way. I was waiting for release. By witnessing their arguments, their hidden confessor, I unthinkingly believed that I controlled and contained them; I would not retreat until their voices subsided, until I was certain that no hand had been raised (none ever was), that nothing, tangible or intangible, had been truly broken.
    "Enough! Your incessant shrieking!" my father's bass thundered. I imagined his face purpled, his curls quivering, his hands, in fists, held tight as though they might escape him. "And how, exactly, would you have us live—with your taste for maids and nurses and luxury all around? Do you think it's so easy?"
    My mother whimpered complaint. She would cry soon.
    "Spoiled! You're nothing but a spoiled American daddy's girl, still, after all this time. You think it's easy? It's work, every second of it is work, hand-dirtying, mind-numbing. You think I like it? You have no idea. I survive it. And he taught me that—which isn't nothing—and we've built something. Christ,
I've
built something, part of it, a large part, even if it's all in his name now. But his name is my name, it's our name, it's the only thing that makes a life mean anything—"
    My mother said something else, inaudible; but conciliation was beginning.
    "It will be our life; it's the only life, the only place we've got. He won't go on like this forever. It's mine—it's your due. For the kids, for our family name. Jesus, Carol, walk away? You want to walk away? Then, walk—"
    I could tell she was crying; she would be trying to embrace him now.
    "I haven't thrown these years away for nothing. Not all these years. And it's our place. It will be our place, and we'll make it ours."
    "Of course we will," my mother was saying. "Of course we will."
    The volume was ebbing.
    "It's going to belong to us," my father said, almost in his normal voice. "If you'll just be patient."
    I slipped my gown over my head and prepared to retreat. They would turn out the lights now. They would come upstairs, maybe even together.
    "Agree with him?" my father said. "Don't ask me that. I don't even fucking hear him. I don't hear it, so how would I know?"
    If they continued, I decided, it would be on the relatively quiet ground of politics, for which neither could muster much