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:
She didn’t say anything to that effect, but her mother raised the subject. “This is the first I’ve been in this room since that night,” she said. “With other people in the house, that is.”
“You’ve come in here alone?”
“Oh, yes. Frequently. I make myself do certain things, Andrea.” And, when Andrea refused to ask about these certain things, “Sitting in that chair, for example. Sleeping on your father’s side of the bed.”
“You’re torturing yourself.”
“No. I know the difference, and I’m not interested in torturing myself. When Mark volunteered to go through the drawers and closets and give the clothing to the Goodwill I didn’t give him an argument. That would have been, I would have had trouble doing it. But there are other things that a person has to do sooner or later, and rushing isn’t good but neither is putting it off. There’s a time when it’s better to get it over with, even if it hurts a little.” She considered this. “Even if it hurts more than a little,” she said.
“I just don’t think you should overdo.”
“No.”
“Or make yourself unhappy.”
“Not make. But I don’t see anything wrong with a person letting herself be unhappy. The sedatives Zucker gave me at the beginning served a purpose. They were necessary.”
“Of course they were.”
“And I still take a sleeping pill at night, a half a grain of Seconal, because there’s no point in lying awake nights. But the other things he gave me, the Librium and the antidepressants. You know, you can tranquilize yourself into a wide-awake coma with those things. Mildred Weingarten started on them when Harold had his operation. He had a prostate operation two years ago, it was completely successful, and he’s fine, and poor Mil has been stoned for the past two years. Of course she was at the funeral but you wouldn’t have noticed, but she always has this glassy look in her eyes and she’s so calm you want to take her pulse to make sure she’s still there. Do you remember that program, Jackie Kennedy showing off the White House? Mil has that same voice now. ‘And this is the Rose Room, and that was President Lincoln’s desk.’ That breathless little-girl voice.”
“You do voices so beautifully. Maybe that’s where Robin gets it from.”
“I could always get a smile out of your father.” Sylvia Kleinman hesitated, but only for a moment. “I don’t want to be a zombie,” she said.
“You couldn’t be a zombie if you tried.”
“I don’t want to swallow any scientific miracle designed to keep me from feeling what I have every reason in the world to feel. It’s not going to kill me to cry once in a while. It’s not going to kill me to feel depressed. Sometimes it’s a very good thing to feel depressed. When you lose someone you want to realize how much you’ve lost or else you don’t appreciate how much you had. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, depression. It can be a relief. Or a release, I don’t know which I mean. Maybe both. Like crying.”
She remembered the night she’d sat up with a bottle mourning Winkie. And other scattered nights when alcohol and solitude helped her sit among shapeless sorrows reaching out at wispy insights.
“Thirty-nine years. Do you know something, Andrea? We loved each other.”
“I know.”
“That’s not terribly common. As a matter of fact it’s unusual. I was with your father, why, since I was a girl, really. My whole adult life. Wouldn’t it be terrible not to be sad? Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing?”
“Oh, yes.”
“It would be awful. I would not want to be like that,” said Sylvia Kleinman.
They were in the house on Admiral Road for almost two hours before they left for the cemetery. They had lunch, they drank coffee, they talked, and the older woman worked on a sweater for her granddaughter. Andrea had tried knitting at various times before deciding she lacked the patience for it. Watching her mother, she thought that it didn’t even seem very interesting. Once you were accomplished enough to do it properly, your fingers worked automatically without any participation by your mind.
The telephone rang periodically. Each time her mother answered it, and each time it was one of her friends just calling to see how she was doing. The first few times the phone rang Andrea thought it might be Mark. Their conversation had disturbed her and she supposed it had disturbed him as well, and she thought he might try to reach her at her mother’s to make some effort at smoothing things out. But the phone kept ringing and it kept not being him.
And why, really, should he call? Nothing he could tell her over the telephone would make things any better, and any number of things could make the situation worse.
She reached for a cigarette and discovered she had one still burning in the ashtray. Every few months she tried to stop smoking, and each time she found some source of tension which excused her putting off the job of quitting. Most of the times she stopped she did so without missing a cigarette. She would put out the last cigarette of the night and resolve not to smoke the next day, and when morning came she usually had a cigarette going before the resolution even came to mind.
Now she sat smoking and listened to her mother having her standard conversation. Her voice had an artificial brittle tone to it, or so it seemed to Andrea.
“That was your mother-in-law, Andrea. I thought of telling her you were here but I didn’t bother.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“You’d have had to talk, and it was enough that I had to talk to her. I shouldn’t say that. It was nice of her to call. It’s nice of everybody to call. The phone calls have been tapering off a little the past few weeks, but today the volume’s up again. Because of it being the anniversary, but do you know that not one single person has mentioned the fact? As if they don’t want to call it to my attention in case it slipped my mind. Although I’m sure I’d behave exactly the same way. As a matter of fact I know I already have behaved the same way, making a point of calling on a birthday or a yahrzeit but not mentioning it unless the other person mentioned it first. Which is sensible, actually. I’d rather not have that particular conversation with the entire world, and by not mentioning it they leave it up to me.” She stopped talking suddenly and frowned. “Do you know something? I’m becoming a chatterbox.”
“Oh, Mother, you are not.”
“But I am, I know I am, I can tell the difference. I’m thinking out loud, using you being here as an excuse for talking to myself.” She stood up. “Are you done with that coffee? Because I’d like to go to the cemetery now.”
“You’re absolutely certain? Maybe the first visit since the funeral, maybe it shouldn’t be on a special day, that’s all.”
“Second visit.”
“What was that?”
“Second visit. I went by myself two or three weeks ago.”
“You never said anything.”
“Why should I say anything? I was sitting here one afternoon and I got the impulse to go and I went. Andrea, there is something you’ve got to understand. I am able to cope with things.”
“Oh, Mother, I know that.”
“I’m not sure that you do. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to. I surprise myself every day. I have more strength than I ever knew I had. Except that I’m not sure it’s right to call it strength. Whatever it is, it’s the thing that enables a person to keep on. The fact that I’m very sad, that I have a deep sense of loss, that doesn’t seem to interfere with my ability to handle things. Now can we just go? Or I’ll go myself if you’d rather, but I want to go now.”
“Oh, Mother!”
“I’m sorry, Andrea, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean the way that sounded. You know I didn’t.” The phone began to ring. “Oh, don’t bother to answer it. Just let it ring or we’ll never get out of here.”