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Show Motherlunge a novel 93 of 50 poorly built ranch-style homes, each with a picture window in front, 3 bedrooms off the main hall, and wall-to-wall Berber carpeting throughout. "No one coming off an interstate should be exposed to so much sameness. I'm staying here, " I said. I wiped my glasses on my sweatshirt as I followed Walter to the kitchen. "Enjoyed the trip, then, did you?" In the kitchen, Walter poured two cups from his ancient and stained Mr. Coffee maker. He gave me the one in my favorite mug, the pale blue one, and we sat down at the card table in his dining room. I looked around. This is how my father's house has looked, ever since he moved in: Walls painted white over layers of rippled wallpaper. High ceilings, with cobwebs looping from the light fixtures. Windows, loose or painted over, that take on frost in the winter. Books stacked on crates and on wheeled carts from the library, and some folding chairs and a Lionel Trains calendar on the wall in the kitchen. From the archway I could see back into the living room with its worn leather chair and a coffee table. I could see the couch for which I have always had real affection tinged with pity, and which I treat with deference as you would an elderly Russian aristocrat-a distant Romanov relation perhaps-as it is upholstered in velvet with a peony pattern in various colors on a green background, and because it is extra-long and slightly uncomfortable, clearly meant for another time and another kind of living. We had had the couch up at Dorothy's-it had been Alva's. We used to wake up and see Walter sleeping on it there. Walter shook a cigarette out of the pack on the table and lit it with a match. He inhaled, coughed, handed the cigarette to me and said, "So tell me about your sister." I knew he would ask this, and I knew what it meant. Why had Pavia left Jack, he wanted to know, and how was she going to manage on her own, and was she all right? I |