A Week as Andrea Benstock
- Автор: Блок Лоуренс
- Год: 1975
- Язык: английский
- Год: Arbor House
- ISBN: 978-0-87795-100-1
- Жанр: Романы для взрослых
Электронная книга - «A Week as Andrea Benstock». Краткое содержание книги:
Wednesday
October 16, 1968
She was in the back yard with Robin when the phone rang again. It had been ringing all morning. She said, “Shit,” and went inside to answer it. The conversation which she had was a brief one, and certainly undemanding; she had been having essentially the same conversation over and over. Throughout the city her mother’s friends and Mark’s mother’s friends were checking their calendars, discovering the notation, “Andrea Benstock 30th B’day,” and reaching for the telephone. It was certainly very nice of them but it was beginning to be boring.
When the conversation ended she broke the connection, then placed the receiver on the table next to the phone. She was halfway to the door before she decided it just wasn’t cricket to leave it off the hook. If people were taking the trouble to call her to wish her well, she could at least take the trouble to answer their calls. And they’d get through sooner or later anyway. They wouldn’t let a busy signal stop them.
She replaced the receiver and stood there for a moment, glaring at the phone, daring it to ring. It remained silent. She went outside again. Robin looked up from her sandbox and sang out, “Happy Birthday!”
“You keep saying that.”
“Happy Birthday!”
“Oh, Happy Birthday yourself, elf.”
“I’m not a elf.”
“An elf. Sure you are.”
“An’ it’s not my birthday. On my birthday I’ll be four.”
“That’s right.”
“Four years old.”
“That’s terrific.”
“It’s better than thirty.”
“Go play in your sandbox, kid.”
“Go play in traffic. That’s what you always say.”
Well, she’d always wondered what happened when you were thirty years old. And now she knew. You got to play straight man to a three-year-old.
She drew a breath, put her hands on her hips, let out a sigh. She wanted a cigarette but they were in the house and it seemed inefficient to make a special trip. She could pick them up the next time the phone rang. She crossed the lawn to examine the tree they had planted their first spring in the house. It was a white oak, a sturdy and well-formed young tree, and it had reached the stage where one was able to take it seriously.
It hadn’t been that long since they’d planted it. A little over three years, and she’d always thought of the growth of trees as being a terribly slow matter. Three years ago the tree had been small enough to fit in the back of their station wagon. Mark had picked it out at the nursery and brought it home, and she remembered how he had dug a huge hole to accommodate the sizable root ball, cursing when the spade glanced off stones in the soil, panting with exertion when the hole was finally dug. Then the job of wrestling the tree over to the hole and propping it in place, and filling in the hole, and soaking the earth, and then they’d stood together with his arm around her waist and admired his handiwork.
“Some day,” he’d said, “we’ll sit in the shade. Try to make yourself believe it.”
“It does take some imagination.”
“Hell of a thing, isn’t it? I came within a few inches of a hernia lifting the son of a bitch, and now that it’s in the ground it looks like a splinter. Maybe I should have sprung for a few more bucks and bought an older tree. And let them plant it.”
“It’s more exciting this way.”
“Exciting?”
“Well, I don’t know. Fulfilling, gratifying, you know what I mean.”
“Uh-huh. You know, there really is something about planting a tree. There was a song that was popular when I was in high school, something to the effect that a man has to accomplish three things in the course of his life.”
“Plant a tree and what else?”
“Take a wife and father a child.”
“Well, you’re three for three, tiger.”
“It’s a funny feeling,” he said, “when you think of it that way.”
And it was a funny feeling now, looking at the tree and wondering how it had grown so without her really having noticed the growth. She looked from the tree to her daughter and that, too, gave her a funny feeling.
The tree had been in bud when they’d planted it. Tight buds that showed green only on close examination. “It’s quite an act of faith planting it,” she’d said at the time. “For all we know we’re digging a hole and planting a dead stick in it.”
But the buds had opened into yellow-green leaves within weeks of planting. And now the leaves were beginning to turn, going shades of rust and bronze.
And today she was thirty years old.
Perhaps a week ago she had found herself standing mesmerized at the bathroom sink, drowning in her reflection in the mirror. She came abruptly out of the state as if from a dream, unable to say how long she had been standing there or what if anything had been going through her mind. And then she’d blinked rapidly at herself, and then leaned forward to stare searchingly into her own eyes.
Looking for what?
On the night when she lost her virginity she had returned to her dormitory to gaze into the mirror. To see if she looked any different. To see if the brief intrusion of a boy’s flesh into her own flesh had left her marked like Cain. It wasn’t until months later that she happened to learn that such post-defloration scrutiny was a positive cliché.
“Christ,” she’d said. “I did that.”
“Well, of course. Everybody does.”
“But I thought I invented it, for God’s sake. And it turns out to be a cliché.”
“That’s how things get to be clichés, Andrea Beth. By everybody doing them.”
“Still.”
And what had she been looking for now?
Signs of age? She supposed they were beginning to appear. Life gradually got around to drawing lines on your face and there wasn’t a hell of a lot you could do about it. Some people seemed to accelerate the process. Eileen Fradin, living on diet pills since the birth of her second child, had managed to lose her baby face along with her baby fat, and without makeup the dark hemispheres beneath her eyes were ghastly. Andrea had never seen any similarly dramatic evidence of aging in her own face.
Oh, there were lines. The horizontal folds in her forehead that came when she raised her eyebrows no longer vanished when she lowered them. Evidently she had raised her brows once too often. “Your face should freeze like that,” her mother had used to say when Andrea would make a funny face of some sort. And in a sense people’s faces did freeze as, over the years, lines appeared to mark off one’s characteristic expressions.
A man is ultimately responsible for his own face.
She had heard that recently, but where? She leaned against the sink and remembered. Of course, sitting in front of a television set in Cheektowaga, she and Mark and Ellie and Cass Drozdowski, watching the Democrats in Chicago. There was a shot of Humphrey in his hotel room and Cass roared and slammed his drink down on the table beside him.
“Look at that face! Four years playing pratboy to the big Texas sheriff and it all shows. I swear to God it’s the truth. After the age of forty a man’s face is his own responsibility.”
She had not understood the remark when he’d made it, but now, studying her own face, she began to understand why it was true. The face you began life with was largely a matter of genetics. You could be fortunate or unfortunate by being given a face that would stop either traffic or a clock, but it was almost entirely a matter of fortune. Your face, when you were young, might be a good reflection of the person you happened to be. Or it might be quite the reverse.
But with the passage of time the expressions you fastened upon your face and the emotions you locked behind it became fixed in place. People who always drew their faces together wound up with pinched little faces. People never disturbed by thought wound up with faces like blank sheets of paper. It took a while, but ultimately you wound up looking like the person you had learned to be.