Nell Read Free

thought about those times, those feelings, for a while. Now she was more financially secure, or at least more relaxed about her financial insecurity.
    Nell stopped her exercises, sat up with her legs crossed lotus-style in front of her, and lay her hands gently, palms up, between her thighs. She took deep breaths, rolled her head slowly from side to side. Calming down. Regaining control. Looking for peace.
    Nell knew that people liked being around her because she was attractive and because she had a sunny disposition. She also knew what work it had become to remain attractive and sunny. Her optimism and figure were no longer given to her free and easily by the fates: both had become matters of daily philosophical choice and hard daily personal labor. Much of that work had to do with going on in spite of the past. Ignoring the past took up a great deal of her energy. For when she stopped to turn around, she sawher past lying behind her in the most awful confusing scramble, she saw her past in a real snarl of people and fears and dead dreams. If she paid close attention to her past, she wouldn’t have the courage to go on into the future.
    Oh no, it hadn’t been that bad. And she had the children: Jeremy, Hannah, and her ex-stepdaughter and friend, Clary. She had true friends and memories that would always make her laugh. It was not so bad. It was just that she had supposed as a child—and now that she thought about it, even as an adult—that she would live her life in one true bright line; her life would make a straight kind of sense like a bold beam of sunshine. Instead, her life had taken on no meaning at all; the years, and the sense of those years, had gotten muddled and tangled and broken and even lost. Her past did not illuminate her future with a steady glow. Instead, it sputtered and flickered behind her like a candle that might burn out, leaving her to pitch forward with the next step into total darkness, or like a strobe light, battering her vision of the future with random spatters of glare and blackness.
    “I am so depressed !” Nell yelled, jumping up from the blue rug, jumping up from her thoughts. She shut off the stereo, stretched one time, then raced up the stairs to her bedroom. She dug through the papers on her desk in the alcove, found her diary, flipped it open to the calendar of the year.
    “Thank God !” she said aloud. “I’m premenstrual!” She slammed the diary back down and hurried into the bathroom. “It’s diuretic time, it’s diuretic time,” she sang to an old Howdy-Doody tune.
    Sometimes she thought the things she loved most in the world were her son, her daughter, her ex-stepdaughter, and her diuretics. They made such a difference in her life. She took one with a full glass of water. Then she went into her bedroom and zipped her old saggy gray sweatshirt robe over her leotard and tights.
    Nell loved this robe like she loved her cats and dog, like she loved a bubble bath. This robe was home . Hannah reminded Nell at every opportunity that Nell looked like a dying elephant in the robe, but then Hannah had always been critical of her mother. Nell knew in her heart that if Hannah had been able to speak at birth, her first words would have been, the instant she was pulled from between her mother’s legs: “Oh gross, Mom, look at you. Your hair’s all wet and tangled, your stomach’s all blubbery, and thathospital gown is really the pits. Couldn’t you at least put some lipstick on?” Hannah smothered compassion on every living thing, and even on nonliving things: she could cry for a rock that Jeremy threw in a pond and thus “drowned.” But she was a pitiless judge of her mother’s looks and seldom could stretch her compassion past her criticism. Still, Nell would wear this robe when she could, when alone in the house cleaning or reading or being sick or paying bills or cooking. It was a comfort, this robe. It just felt right.
    But now, before going down to the kitchen, she