The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [36]
Phoebe brought the marble eggs to her father’s love seat and lay down. An exhaustion overcame her. I’ll sleep here, she thought, lulled by the foghorns, and felt a sudden hush. She placed one egg in each eye socket, the sensation of cold marble dense, final somehow, like coins on the eyes of the dead.
seven
It shocked Phoebe to find her mother in the kitchen as always the next morning, reading the Chronicle in her white terrycloth robe. “That was so odd,” she said, looking up when Phoebe appeared in the doorway.
“What?” Phoebe was alert.
“Last night. Finding you asleep on the love seat.”
“God, I forgot.”
“I could tell you were in the house because your purse was by the door, but I couldn’t find you,” her mother said. “I got absolutely terrified.”
“What time was this?”
“I’m not sure. Pretty late.”
Something should certainly be different, but everything seemed as usual: the smell of coffee, Bach melodies filing neatly from the radio. KDFC San Francisco, KIBE Palo Alto, Your Radio Concert Hall.
“What were you doing down there?” her mother said.
“Thinking,” Phoebe said. She sat down. Oatmeal bubbled on the stove.
“Did you go to your party?”
Phoebe shook her head. She glanced at the headlines: OPEC promising not to raise prices in 78, NATO planning billions more for defense. A grainy photograph of Aldo Moro, the ex-Prime Minister of Italy who’d been murdered by Red Brigade terrorists the previous month. Phoebe remembered the story only dimly, but the blurred, grainy face of the dead man struck her as poignant. “Look at him,” she said. “That poor guy.”
Her mother was stirring the oatmeal. “Who?”
“Mr. Aldo Moro. They kidnapped him, and when the prisoners weren’t set free, they shot him and left him in the street.”
Her mother shook her head, dropping bread in the toaster. She went to the window and stretched, her spine cracking gently. The sound made Phoebe look up. She noticed the gold serpentine bracelet sliding down her mother’s wrist as she reached her arms overhead. She must have worn it to bed.
“Look. The sun,” her mother said, yawning.
“I guess you don’t really care.”
“About what?”
“Aldo Moro.”
Her mother turned to her. “What kind of a question is that?” she said. “It’s terrible, yes, but I don’t feel personally about it. Why, do you?” She looked incredulous.
Phoebe said nothing. Heart pounding, she carried breakfast to the table, hot cereal and toast, a creamer of milk, brown sugar in a blue ceramic dish. In her mother’s every gesture she sensed a turning away, the loss of some hold Phoebe had had on her before. She felt powerless to stop it.
Her mother returned to the paper. While she read Herb Caen, Phoebe glanced at the soft collar of her robe, the shadowy tops of her breasts. In the attic, she’d come across some old nudes her father had painted of her mother in the fifties, and been startled by her mother’s alien, painted flesh, the bright nipples, stomach and hips that seemed to flow, as if the skin were actually moving. It was not the same body she’d seen dripping after the shower or sucking in its breath to zip up a skirt.
“Have some toast,” her mother said, nudging the plate. She’d moved on to Art Hoppe.
Phoebe lifted a piece to her mouth, wishing her mother would look up. “Did anything funny happen last night?” she asked.
Her mother glanced at her. Phoebe saw the tiredness in her eyes. “Funny how?”
“You know, just sometimes Jack is funny. Like he does funny stuff.”
Her mother’s expression went flat. “No. Nothing funny happened.”
Phoebe saw this was the wrong tack but couldn’t seem to stop. “You know, like that time when he put out his cigarette in the middle of that guy’s steak, or—”
“Jack is not a clown, Phoebe, all right?”
The toast turned to sand in Phoebe’s mouth. She stood up. Dishes rattled in her arms as she brought them to the sink.
“I’m sorry,” her mother said. “I’m just bored with the jokes about Jack, aren’t you? After all this time?”
Phoebe began to cry.
“Sweetheart,” her mother said.
Phoebe stood in