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Show -7 Motherlunge a novel 74 It wasn't a cool way to be, I knew, but I liked it so much, being caught like that, pinned by him to the mattress. It felt specific and conditional, intentional, point-earning. His femoral-pulse thmmmed reliably against my hip. I closed my eyes and felt its beat and allowed myself to speculate: Maybe I and Christmas and everything might be all right after all that year. Perhaps the people of my family had managed to discover-just in time-our unifying aesthetic: a lovable dysfunction, the kind people write about? I doubted it, wished it, fell asleep doing so in Eli's weird embrace. The next day Eli went home to Indiana. Pavia and I both tooliafewdaysLoff work, and as a way of getting Dorothy and Joseph out of the house for at least a few hours each day, we did a lot of scheduled errands. Pavia bought them both clothes at an outlet store, for one thing. We took them to the museum where we shuffled through the rooms with our coats in our arms, feeling stunned and excluded by color fields and high concepts. We went daily to the grocery store where of course we bought a lot of alcohol, which in turn necessitated trips to the recycling center fifteen miles outside of the big city. Pavia, Joseph, and I loved the recycling center. We loved throwing the glass bottles into the bins. It had the excitement of special effects, domestic violence, parties ending badly. We threw green, brown, clear glass-each in its proper bin-and we celebrated the whack, the smash, the shards falling like a beautiful killing rain. I loved the |