The Sky Is Falling Read Online Free PDF Page A

get out of the kitchen fast. But I definitely wasn’t getting enough protein.
    What to tell her? Belinda was around a lot, having sex with Pete. She stayed overnight several times a week because, I’d overheard, the house on Blenheim Street was “Women Only.” I talked about her as though she were still living there—leaving out the sex. “She’s very dramatic.” I said she walked like she was doing an interpretive dance and got up to imitate her gliding step. As for Pete and Dieter, apart from the phone idolatry and the fact that they argued all the time, I had a slight impression of them, hardly more than Pete was an anarchist as conceived by Botticelli and the owner of the patched Reliant. Dieter was a zealot for composting (I’d learned by mistakenly throwing a banana peel in the garbage), and possibly a Marxist. Both more or less ignored me, but I still didn’t want my aunt to know about the anarchism, or the possible Marxism, or that the house wasn’t “Women Only” but a locus of premarital sex. She’d surely write my father.
    I said Sonia was pretty and very nice. My aunt retorted that I had “beautiful eyes.”
    Sonia was pretty, yet she neglected her appearance and, since the airliner incident on Thursday, she seemed in distress. Anti-Soviet demonstrations were taking place across the country. In Toronto, performances by the Moscow Circus were cancelled. The circus business seemed especially to wound Sonia, causing her to stare uncomprehendingly at her plate all through Friday’s supper. In “Lady with a Lapdog,” Chekhov wrote that Anna Sergeyevna’s long hair hung mournfully on either side of her face . He wrote, It was obvious she was unhappy .
    â€œI’m glad it’s working out,” my aunt said. “You’re young. You should be having fun.” She dabbed at her eyes with her napkin.
    After dinner we cleaned up. There were a number of dented cans by the side of the sink, which I rinsed and stripped of their labels. Then my aunt removed the tops and bottoms with the opener and took them out on the back porch where she savagely stamped them flat in readiness for her basement repository. This was how we’d spent Sunday evenings last year: she in front of the TV unravelling the old sweaters she would later reknit into odorific Christmas and birthday presents, me studying in the kitchen. Tonight I joined her for the start of The Wonderful World of Disney until I could politely escape.
    When I got back to the Trutch house, the porch was more crowded than usual due to additional bicycles. “ Oni velosipyedy ,” I said out loud, to no one. They are bicycles . (I was starting to form sentences.) I hoped to stash the care package of perogies in the freezer and slip up to my room unnoticed, but there was no need to tiptoe around. The double glass doors to the living room with their floraed and faunaed panes were still closed. I knew what their meetings were about because of the leaflets and petitions foisted upon apathetic students like me almost weekly. Voices overlapped, several conversations going on at once, while, in the kitchen, the dirty dishes from the potluck stood around on the table daring me not to do them. Then someone began singing. It was a woman’s voice, quavering and strange. “We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace . . .” Others joined in. “We shall live in peace some da-a-ay!”
    I shivered and hurried up the stairs.
    The bus stop was two blocks away, on Fourth Avenue. In the morning buses came at convenient intervals, though sometimes, if one was too crowded, it would speed indifferently past. Every time this happened, I took it personally, which was what I was doing when Sonia came around the corner nicely dressed for once in a skirt. Not until she was almost at the stop did she realize it was me. “Oh! Hi,” she said.
    I wanted to say something consoling