The Suitors Read Online Free PDF Page A

had changed, because money, having neither reputation nor personality of its own, is a constant magnet for fantasies and projections, and will always channel its share of bitterness and dreams.
    “As for knowing how to hunt down a rich husband,” I finally admitted to Marie, “you’re right, we’re probably not up to this. And I’m only attracted to weirdos. I like trying to fix problem men, I can’t help it.”
    “Yes, so I’ve noticed,” said my sister slyly, alluding to my two years of nightmare wedlock to a man I’d found irresistible and who’d proved mad as a hatter. “But why couldn’t you fix up a
rich
weirdo?”
    Good point. I laughed. “Shall we give it a try?”
    “You bet!”
    “But how do we find these Prince Charmings?”
    “Oh,
please
!”

     
    Marie and I are very close. I’m thirty years old, she’s thirty-two. We live a few blocks from each other. At the local café we’re known as “the sisters,” even if we go there separately, I with my son and Marie with her lovers. Our close relationship hasn’t always been obvious because we are quite different, almost opposites. My sister looks Swedish, while I could be Brazilian. She has our father’s blond coloring and the svelte silhouette of our mother, a brunette like me, and I got my solid, down-to-earth looks from our father. Marie is always impeccably turned out, whereas I seem to be at loose ends, my curly hair and curvy figure creating an impression of undisciplined excess, the way words can sometimes outrun thoughts.
    When we were children, though, we had even more reason to feel different from each other. Taking her lead from our nanny, Miss Ross, our mother had declared that Marie was the pretty one and I the smart one, insisting all the while that she simply doted on both daughters, a charming affirmation we learned to periodically reinterpret as time went by. In fact, our mother never quite knew what to do with us or, what’s more, what to make of us. Beginning with our conception. What if pregnancy spoiled her figure? True, she was a beauty. A tall, whippet-thin brunette with superb cheekbones, she had glowing skin, an aristocratic nose, slightly almond-shaped black eyes, and she carried herself like a dancer, as truly beautiful women so often do. Her anxiety over losing her figure soon gave way to that of losing her marriage, and she resigned herself to pregnancy only under pressure from a husband so resolute that he threatened her with divorce. She was determined, however, never to become one of those “loving and frumpy mothers who devote themselves to their children and give up trying to look attractive,” as she put it. So she hired an Englishwoman in her sixties to take charge of our upbringing, an undertaking with which our mother was most careful not to interfere.

Nanny
     
    I’m ten years old. No one suspects a thing. Not even Marie, who is incapable, luckily, of imagining Nanny’s duplicity. So I keep quiet. Just as I keep to myself all the terrible ways she mistreats me. Because I don’t want to spoil Marie’s fragile happiness by revealing how our governess tortures me as soon as we’re alone together. That madwoman actually beats me, using any pretext to take her resentment out on me with vicious blows. And I am in such fear of these violent episodes, which leave me staggering in terror, that I live mesmerized by her moods, like an appliance plugged into a wall socket, picking up on the fluctuations of her emotional current and preparing myself for the next crisis
.
    Her anger comes on like wind billowing a sail: I can see the rage course through her, taking over, and I await in despair the moment when Nanny will take me away with her,out of sight, to vent her fury by attacking me like an evil giant. A formidable opponent, she has endless tricks up her sleeve
.
    She has decided, for example, that I am absentminded and has made it her mission to root out this flaw that seriously threatens my chances in