Three Women Read Online Free PDF

potent male force that had ever entered her life. He had left her pregnant, shaken, and mistrustful of the power and danger passion held for her. He had taught her how easily she could be rendered foolish, passive, all the things she despised; how easily she could be hurt. That was twenty-seven years ago, and still she shuddered. She had learned after that adventure how to protect herself from the possibility of subjection, her defenselessness before her own body’s desire. If only Elena could learn the same at a smaller cost. She had bequeathed to her daughter her terrible vulnerability, but not the lacquered shell she had grown to protect it.

3
    Beverly
    Beverly climbed the steep stairway from the 103rd Street subway station. “May, hello.” She greeted the homeless woman who always sat on the landing, where Beverly paused to catch her breath. Stairs took her breath away lately.
    “Hello, Beverly. Is the world treating you all right today?”
    “Not bad. I just hope the snow holds off.”
    “As do I, dear.”
    She knew all the street people in her neighborhood and made it a point to speak to them, the ones who weren’t too far gone. Half of them were mental. Fucking budget cuts. Save the state money and dump patients on the street. The other half had just lost too much. Flo Kennedy had said many years ago that every woman was just one man away from welfare. Of course that hadn’t applied to her, since she had never relied on the support of any man since her poor father. Well, every old person was just one lost check away from the streets. Who said that? Beverly Blume.
    She had been out to Brooklyn to see her sister Karla, as superstitious as ever. They had been fighting about Rachel. Beverly simply could not accept that such a bright able girl should do something so useless as becoming a rabbi. Karla was thrilled and defended her grandniece—as well she might, since she was the one who had infected the whole family. Beverly would never forgive her for that. It was one of the worst mistakes she had ever made, leaving her daughter, Suzanne, with her younger sister while she was down south organizing textile workers. Oh, she was as proud of being a Jew as Karla was, but it was the cultural heritage that meant something to her, not the religious mumbo jumbo. Why seek out irrationality when it leapt at you from the TV, from the tabloids?
    But at least she had to give Karla credit for overcoming racism. After Suzanne had gone off to law school at Harvard, Karla had adopted first one mixed-race child and then another. She often said she would have adopted ten more if she’d had the money to support them. So after helping Beverly raise Suzanne, Karla had spent her middle years raising two more girls, Suwanda—generally called Wanda—and Rosella, with whom Karla had moved in when her health began to fail. It was her weight that was doing her in, but Karla had always loved to cook and eat. Karla lived now with Rosella, her husband, Tyrone, and the twins. Karla was very involved with Rosella’s children and Tyrone’s family, the way she had always been involved with any available kind of family. Karla was in many ways a very traditional woman.
    “Miller, how’s the leg?” She greeted him at a table outside a Latino café on Broadway. It was cold to sit outside, but Miller had always smoked, and like her, he wasn’t about to stop because people had got fussy about it. God, to imagine how he had made her blood race. Was it Dorothy Parker who compared love to a bus accident? You were just going along the street minding your business when bam, love fell on you and flattened you. Or picked you up by the nape of the neck like a huge eagle and bore you off, tore your heart and liver out, and then let youfall half a mile to earth. Certainly Miller had made her feel as if every bone in her body had been broken when he left her flat and took off with that Greek girl, Marina—who later became a follower of some guru and shaved