OCR Text |
Show Motherlunge a novel 240 was listening to each syllable stitch its way across the wires to me. "Darling," my mother-your grandmother-said, "What more could I want? I have you." In Supernal, Eli was enthusiastic about the abundance of pawnshops. We spent the morning of Christmas Eve walking from one to the other in the small streets near the railroad station, flipping through boxes of 8-track tapes and old Playboy magazines. Eli bought a ukulele for Xavier and a dusty case of discontinued film for the Brownie cameras he used with his students. And in one shop, nestled in a slit in a black velvet display tray, I found my cameo ring. This was the ring that had been Alva's, and then promised to me, but pawned or stolen or lost when Dorothy came to the big city, three years earlier. I bought the ring, of course, and it was only much later (yesterday, in fact) that I J realized how ugly it was. On a chapped-looking background of pink carnelian, it featured the profile of an anonymous lady with a Hapsburg underbite and to her right (my left), an eternal view of the useless pinkie finger Why would anyone want one of these? I wouldn't buy it today. But I wore it nearly every day of that Christmas holiday in Supernal. I was wearing it when Eli and I went with Walter to the cemetery-to visit Judith's grave. The cemetery was on a little square of land that used to be on the edge of town. But Supernal had since sprawled around it; now there were houses on three sides and a string of small businesses-a taco place, a gun place, a fabric shop, a convenience |