• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4435 0

goes to the window for the third time it is now light enough to see how drab everything is. Someone has smashed a bottle on one of the tar roofs. The gutters of Wilbur Street are full of mud that washes down from the new development. While she looks the streetlights, great pale strings of them, go off in patches. She pictures the man at the power plant pulling the switches, little and gray and hunchbacked and very sleepy. She goes to the television set and the band of light that suddenly flares in the green rectangle sparks joy in her breast but it’s still too early, the light is just a speckling senseless brightness and the sound is nothing but static. As she sits there watching the blank radiance a feeling of some other person standing behind her makes her snap her head around several times. She is very quick about it but there is always a space she can’t see which the other person could dodge into if he’s there. It’s the television has called him into the room but when she turns off the set she starts to cry immediately. She sits there with her face in her hands, her tears crawling out between her fingers and her sobs shaking through the apartment. She doesn’t stifle them because she wants to wake somebody; she is sick of being alone. In the bleaching light the walls and furniture are clear and regain their colors and the merging brown spots have gone into herself.

She goes and looks at the baby, the poor thing lying there snuffling the crib sheet, its little hands twitching up by its ears, and reaches down and strokes its hot membranous head and lifts it out its legs all wet and takes it to nurse in the armchair that looks toward the window. The sky beyond is a pale smooth blue that looks painted on the panes. There is nothing to see but sky from this chair, they might be a hundred miles up, in the basket of a great balloon. A door on the other side of the partition slams and her heart leaps but then of course it’s just another tenant maybe grumpy Mr. Cappello going off to work, the stairs rumbling reluctantly. This wakes Nelson and for a time her hands are full. In making breakfast for them she breaks an orange-juice glass, it just drifts away from her thumb into the brittle sink. When she bends over Nelson to serve him his Rice Krispies he looks up at her and wrinkles his nose; he smells sadness and its familiar odor makes him timid with her. “Daddy go away?” He’s such a good boy saying this to make it easy on her, all she has to do is answer “Yes.”

“No,” she says. “Daddy went out to work early this morning before you got up. He’ll be home for supper like he always is.”

The child frowns at her and then parrots with sharp hope, “Like always is?”

Worry has stretched his head high, so his neck seems a stem too thin to support the ball of his skull with its broad whorl of pillow-mussed hair. “Daddy will be home,” she repeats. Having taken on herself the burden of lying, she needs a little more whisky for support. There is a murk inside her which she must tint a bright color or collapse. She takes the dishes out to the kitchen but they slide so in her hands she doesn’t try to wash them. She thinks she must change out of her bathrobe into a dress but in taking the steps into the bedroom forgets her purpose and begins making the bed. But something whose presence she feels on the wrinkled bed frightens her so that she draws back and goes into the other room to be with the children. It’s as if in telling them Harry would be back as normal she’s put a ghost in the apartment. But the other person does not feel like Harry, it feels like a burglar, a teasing burglar dancing from room to room ahead of her.

When she picks up the baby again she feels its wet legs and thinks of changing it but cleverly realizes she is drunk and might stab it with the pins. She is very proud of thinking this through and tells herself to stay away from the bottle so she can change the baby in an hour. She puts good Becky in her crib and, wonderfully, doesn’t hear her cry once. She and Nelson sit and watch the tail end of Dave Garroway and then a