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.The windshield was webbed and sagging, and she stepped back to take another crack at it.There was a moth on her forehead.I took the club from her hands and said, “Mother, listen to me.This is our car.Why not the Dinellos’ or the Ablemans’?” She said she preferred the Pontiac as she was within the rights of the law to destroy her own property.Another moth, this one brilliant and spotted, lighted on her shoulder, and we all watched as the windshield heaved and collapsed, raining chunks like crushed ice onto the dash and front seat.We replaced the windshield with plastic as a temporary measure.I ride shotgun, my head out the window like a dog, while my mother drives slowly, cursing, the cigarette poking out of her mouth like a fuse.The drivers behind us grouse and honk their horns.“Listen to them,” my mother says, tightening her grip on the wheel, “all in a big hurry to meet some big stinking heart attack.” It embarrasses me that she cannot recognize herself in others.“The trick is not to allow yourself to be consumed by your anger,” she whispers between clenched teeth, her knuckles white.She says she would like to have his body exhumed so she can spit on it.“That’ll cost money.”“We’ll go there at night with shovels, just the two of us,” she says.“What’ll it cost?”I say, “He’s rotting flesh now, and long fingernails.You don’t want to see that.”“I would pay dearly to see a thing like that.Name your price.”That was months ago, before she developed her theory that he wasn’t really dead at all.During the latter period she spent a great deal of time behaving in a clairvoyant fashion.Placing her index fingers to her temples she would pronounce, “Right this minute he’s sitting beside a puddle — no, a pool.I see a swimming pool and a … checkered bathing suit, a wet bathing suit.I see a diving board and … what’s this? I see a cocktail napkin that reads … ‘Fort Cheswick’ — no, I take that back! It reads ‘Port Selznick … Country Club.’ There’s something written beneath it … something in very tiny letters.… I’m seeing the letter H … and the letter V and …” At this point she would surrender her head to the tabletop.“Goddamn you,” she would say.“I’ve lost it.I was this close, Dale, and then I lost it when you cracked that ice tray.”I would then pour my Pepsi and remind her that we had both seen his body after the accident.We saw his arm torn off at the shoulder and lying in a separate bag beside him.“He was in a drawer,” I’d say.“Normal, healthy adults do not choose to spend their time in a refrigerated morgue.If he had it in him to play this sort of joke, chances are we would have known it before now.”“He lied to me for fifteen years so why should I believe him now? Maybe he’s alive with one arm.It happens.”My mother’s sister Margery refers to this as “Evelyne’s stage of denial.” Since my father’s death my mother has grown closer to her sister Margery, who provides her with slogans such as “God doesn’t close one door without opening another,” “One day at a time,” and, my mother’s favorite, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”I feel sick.I’m cleaning the refrigerator in the basement apartment when I find two squirrel tails in the crisper and another one, attached to the genuine article, wrapped in newspaper in the freezer.The squirrel looks pathetically eager, its paws frozen beside its terrible, crowded mouth.“Oh, that Nick Papanides was one sick customer,” my mother says, referring to the former tenant.“He and I were standing in the backyard one day last month when Popeye dragged home a squirrel, the way he’ll do sometimes — it wasn’t quite dead yet.It was putting up a fight but you could tell this one wasn’t going to climb any more trees.It was pitiful.We’re standing there when Nick asks, ‘May I?’ So I said, ‘Hell, it’s a free country — knock yourself out.’ Then he throws a towel over the damned thing, stomps on it a few times, and carries it into the apartment.He used to cook them with eggplant,” she says.“I can’t say I’m too sorry to see him go.You couldn’t pay me to eat a goddamned squirrel — it’s nothing but a rat with long fingernails and a pretty tail.” She pauses to scratch at her ankle with the rough side of a sponge.“There’s a type that rents basement apartments,” she says.“They need a low ceiling to match their self-esteem.You couldn’t pay me to live with pipes eight inches over my head.We should try renting out the attic — get some cheerful people around here for a change.”I thought Nick was cheerful enough.He was no Shirley Temple but neither was he the despondent mole my mother would have me believe.Before he moved away, Nick and I would lie upon his big water bed, naked, listening to my mother’s voice and footsteps as she paced back and forth with the telephone.“She is laying each of her cards upon a table tonight,” Nick would say.It killed me, the way he put a phrase together.Instead of “off the deep end,” he’d say “into the part where the water is more high than your head.”One way or another you find things out about people [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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