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Show 52.7 He gazed at me and smiled strangely. It was as though he knew something that I d i d n ' t , something that made him seem at once superior and sad and sardonic. "You both sound like bleeding i d e a l i s t s to me. i/i/hat a p a i r ." Suddenly I f e l t dark and sad and let-down. My great, effusive epiphany was suddenly reduced to a match, easily blown out. I went to the bedroom and stared out the window for a long time, gazing at the tangle of t r e e s before me, feeling them to be members of my own confusion. life moved into a house because n e i t h e r of us could bear the closedness of apartment-living, but I f e l t that the house was haunted. The a i r seemed muddy, somehow, and tinged with chartreuse. We l a t e r learned that a convicted rapist had lived there A his s i s t e r , both of them violated by t h e i r father while young. I wanted to move. Instead we painted over the wallpaper, hung c u r t a i n s , scrubbed floors and shoveled garbage out of the basement. Then we dumped hoxol everywhere so that the house smelled the way the mothers' always did when someone was having a baby. But the odor was only an i l l u s i o n of cleanliness. A friend said the house had 'bad karma' and even I could feel the d i r t deep in the cracks and timbers of the old place, the s o i l of human degradation. I was working unconsciously toward a goal: Becky's third birthday. The thing that would make her happiest and at the same time would r e a l i z e my own l o n g - s t i f l e d dream was to invite my mother and father to dinner. I imagined a l l of Us together in the white livingroom with i t s stained glass windows and dark oak woodowrk - - the two p o s i t i v e features |
