Three Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

her head like a bowling ball. Beverly stood patiently while he complained of his rheumatism and his heart before she could turn the subject to the governor and the mess he was making in Albany. He had promised to repeal that stupid mandatory sentencing law, and he had dropped it after election like a lump of dung. There were women in there for half their lives because of a purseful of marijuana, while gangstas who slit open their girlfriend’s belly were out in eight years. Women were the mules, the bottom of the heap. Suzanne would understand about that, even if she didn’t see much of the way the world worked.
    Now here was Miller with his legs stuck out as if they could no longer bend, his complexion pickled, glasses thick enough to walk on like river ice. She could give him a big smile and a hello and not be able to imagine how once he had burnt her eyes like the sun itself. He had been a vigorous, charismatic man, full of stories and a line thick enough to tether an ocean liner. “Oh, Bev, you’re the only woman who’s ever understood me. You have the mind of a man and the body of a houri.” For a year she had been crazy about him and then he had bounced out the door, gone. And always, always, even in bed she had called him by his last name, for he would tell no one his given name. She had seen it years later in the FBI records when she had got her seven-foot stack under the Freedom of Information Act. Hymie, his name was, and he was ashamed of it as too Jewish, a borscht belt joke.
    He had never been a good speaker, but he was a solid man in a demonstration, and he had thrust his tough big body between her and danger more than once. How he had loved a good fight. He was a natural brawler, quick and effective with his fists. She had liked that. They had enough talkers. She knew it was silly to respond to physical strength and daring in a man, but she couldn’t help it. It was after such a demonstration they had first gone home together and fallen into her bed. What an explosion. She could remember it yet. At first, one of the best lovers she had ever had, but he cooled down in a matter of months. He was the kind of man who was hot for novelty and tired fast of what he had. She turned on 105th and headed for Amsterdam.
    “ Eh, Gutiérrez , cómo va? ” She always spoke Spanish to the dry cleaner, to the fish peddler, to the super. She’d had to get her good suit dry-cleaned after her old friend Charlotte’s funeral, it had been so muddy, and she’d need it Sunday when the neighborhood organization dedicated the pocket park she had helped lobby for, where the kids could play safe out of the streets. She wished she knew some Korean to speak to the greengrocer. She loved languages and had learned a bit of eight of them, just enough to get along and have a friendly conversation. She had friends who did crossword puzzles, but she had always learned languages for fun. It was a game you could play with people instead of alone—the best kind. You only had to be willing to take a chance, to make a fool of yourself and be a child in another language. Sometimes she felt desolate when she realized that at her age, she would never learn Chinese the way she had always intended. It was like realizing you were never going to meet that one person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, that it just wasn’t going to happen. Not that she truly minded living alone with her cat. She had only herself to please, and she was pleased with herself, as she always said when anybody asked her if she didn’t get lonely.
    People said New York was cold, but she had little conversations with twenty people between the subway and the door to her apartment. She knew hundreds of people in her neighborhood, from the group trying to preserve rent control, to the tenants union created to fight the landlords, to the reform party meetings and all the people she had known in fifty-five years of being politically active. She had lived in this