OCR Text |
Show Motherlunge a novel 85 I did both, abruptly. I hung up the phone. One, two, three minutes passed while my thoughts settled about me like particles of dust.... Pavia had gone upstairs and the apartment was soundless, still as an empty exhibit. I looked up at the ceiling, cracked and far away, and at the chandelier with its octet of burnt out, flame-shaped bulbs. It was too hard to get up there to replace them; that had been Jack's job. I registered the lack of everyday urban sounds outside: no bus, no garbage pickup, no car alarms, no boom boxes. It was still the day after Christmas. I reminded myself that I was simply in a gap-like the space between sofa cushions, or the summer hiatus where no new TV episodes are on, or the cognitive pause of a petit mal seizure-and I reminded myself that it would end or close or I would get out somehow, and soon. It was just a matter of time, of endurance. So I knew this, and so I could let the quiet fill me up till I was empty to the very top, and cold. I sat there for a while. The phone rang; it was Eli calling from Indiana. It was starting to get dark outside and I could see my reflection in the kitchen window, double-paned; I was blurry edged, slightly off-register, like a 3-D movie without the glasses. How will I remember this Christmas, I wondered? Eli told me the time his flight returned to the City, and I told him about Joseph leaving, and about Pavia's baby-"Quickening," he said, enjoying the word as he should, a word as special as an annual holiday-and I told him about the road trip with Dorothy and that I'd be back after New Year's. "When do you leave?" he asked. "And, hey-do you want me to come with you?" And there I was again in the window reflection, Girl on Phone, Long-Distance; Christmas 1993. And there I was cold, cold, smiling, saying no. |