| OCR Text |
Show A PROPER INTRODUCTION-24 Aunt Laura picks me up at National Airport. She's my mother's oldest unmarried sister, and although she's almost sixty, she has wonderful bones in her face and her eyes are a clear blue. Today, though, her bones seem hidden; her eyes and face look blurred together as if a hand has smudged them. My coat catches on the door of her big sedan. I suppose I'm not used to getting into cars that aren't made like taxis. She waits for me to gather myself, touches my hand briefly, then snatches it away as if I'm a strange dog she isn't sure of, and says, almost in a whisper, "Now there isn't any sense in being sorry about something so clearly a blessing from God, is there?" "What something?" "Your mother is gone-about two hours ago." "Oh," I say. I'm struggling to get the hair unknotted from the button. It interests me that I'm so absorbed in this hair. I know that people are supposed to focus on trivia when faced with momentous news, and I wonder if I'm doing it because I know that. I always see my life as a bad play, and then feel the fool in an even larger, more terrible production for seeing things that way. It's endless, like punching out a featherbed to make it lie evenly. I keep losing the chance to feel something straight on and smooth. Any emotion is instantly channeled off in every direction by my overactive mind, like the underground pipes, until i t is so diverse, so thinned out, there is no clarity to it, no basis on which to act or choose, only a kind of dull sadness. But I think I just had some feelings. What are they? Are they the right ones? As I reach for them, they vanish like frightened birds, abandoning me to a place in my mind that looks flat and gray. I tiptoe along it, around the steel plates which lie there like land mines. Steam mines. Steam minds. I almost |
