The Saving Graces Read Online Free PDF

went to Wilson High, she was fifteen years old...
What made me think I could help her? All I'd done was tell her about myself, my alcoholic mother, my screwed-up family. Mrs. Phillips was right about everything. I deserved this disgrace, and much more.
Well, I would get more. The worst punishment hadn't started yet, but it was about to. As soon as I tried to explain all this to Curtis, Isabel.
I've been reading a book by a woman who believes that, in her most recent past life, she was a Nazi sympathizer. She collaborated with the SS, she says, spied on her neighbors, and made herself rich (or rather himself rich; she's positive she was a man in this life) by shameless war profiteering. She bases this conviction not only on past-life regression therapy, but also on the circumstances of her current life. Poor woman; she's a quadriplegic; she lost the use of all but her facial muscles in a horrific automobile accident when she was sixteen. She says the suffering she endures now is in payment for the sins she committed in Germany in the 1940s.
Karma. What goes around comes around.
I have never been hypnotized or regressed, and if I've lived past lives, I've lost track of them. But I would not rule out the possibility. Skepticism is a luxury I don't indulge anymore-I leave that to the young and immortal. But if it's true that the yin and yang are always counterbalancing each other, I'd like to think they're doing it within me now, in this life. I even knowwhere I'd place the fulcrum for the most perfect equilibrium: at the center of my forty-sixth year. Before and after that dubious milestone, the halves of my life fall away like wings, like a heart broken in two. I am reborn.
Here in the third year of my new life, I try to balance the old one with hope and love, sympathy, warmth and superfluous kindnesses, gratuitous outbursts of delight. There is so much to counterweigh (although nothing so heinous as the erstwhile Nazi's sins); I only hope I have time. It would help if I could live to ninety-two. Forty-six and forty-six.
Among good friends, ten years isn't much of an age difference, and yet sometimes I feel as if the Saving Graces and I come from different centuries. I'm not quite fifty; technically I'm a boomer. My father was a missionary, though, and I spent half my childhood in Cameroon and Gabon, the other half in Iowa. Then, too, my husband's job kept us stationed in Turkey for the first six years of our marriage; our son was born there, in fact. These are the most obvious explanations for my lifelong uneasiness with the popular culture, but I think something else is also at work. Something in me. Terminal unhipness, Emma would call it. That's as good an explanation as any.
We're all productive, tolerably sane, functioning adults, we Graces, with no more emotional baggage- well, except for Rudy-than you would expect in a random sample of aging yuppie women. And yet our childhoods were disasters. Some more than others, of course. Rudy could write a book; Emma probably will write a book. Lee's family and mine have in common an outward appearance of normalcy, a very different reality inside. Occasionally we four play the intriguing "What keeps us together?" game, and the fact that we all survived our childhoods is mentioned early and often.
I wonder if I could have survived my cancer without their loving-kindness. Survived-yes, probably. But only that: barest survival. Nothing, no other experience has ever leveled me to such an extent. I believed I would never recover, that I was forever changed. And I was, but not in the way I expected. I'd read all the pamphlets and books on the disease, as many as I could find. The first-person stories of women who claimed that cancer changed their lives, turned them into different people, was a blessing in disguise-oh God, these stories infuriated me. I felt cheated and betrayed, lied to, and deeply, personally offended. And now- now I'm one of those women. It's been two years since I lost