Strange Sisters Read Free Page B

there was any light at all. She thought of them in stock terms, the brutal little classifications that focused on a particular and left everything else out. Winos, dipsos, nymphos, homos. Felons, vagrants, whores and hoods. Then there were those with no barriers. The normal people. The non-aberrant, the undeviated, the good, clean partisans of orthodox sin. These, she thought, were the ones with the mentionable neuroses, the ones who had tuberculosis as opposed to leprosy, and she was suddenly rocked again by the silent, hysterical laughter. Sinking teeth into her lower hp, she laid her head back and closed her eyes, but she immediately saw Angus Brunn wrap both hands around the handle of the ice-pick and fold over slowly in the middle, so she opened her eyes again and sat staring blankly ahead past the right ear of the cabbie until he stopped at the curb in front of Jacqueline's apartment house.
    She paid the fare and crossed over and through the heavy glass door into the small lobby. The single elevator was up, and she didn't wait, walking back to the stairs and ascending quickly. The stairs seemed interminable, stretching up forever, as if, now that she was so near Jacqueline, there were a kind of inanimate conspiracy to prevent her ever arriving. She had a heady feeling, a sense of treading air, and unconsciously she took hold of the bannister, moving the hand forward with every step to pull herself upward against the resistance of intangibles.
    On the right floor at last, before the right door, she pressed a button and listened to the faint, measured strokes of chimes. There was no response, and she pressed again, leaning forward in a posture of intense concentration to follow the repetition of ordered tones. But it was no use. She rang again and again, but Jacqueline didn't come. The blond door, the final impediment in the conspiracy that had permitted her to advance against odds to defeat, remained closed.
    She wondered where Jacqueline could be, and she could think of a number of possible places. Obviously, she couldn't tour the city, or even the likely restricted area, searching for her, and besides, now that the conspiracy against her was manifest, she was inclined to accept the futility of struggling against it any longer. She was tired. She was more tired than she could remember ever being before, and there was nothing to be done but to make the long uptown trip to her own small apartment.
    On the street again, she found another cab and returned through the dappled city. In her own apartment, she undressed and stood for a moment before the mirror on the back of her closet door, but now she saw herself distorted by her relationship with Angus Brunn, an ugly corruption of what she had been. She turned off the light and got into bed and lay there on her back in the darkness trying to make her mind adhere to the unmenacing present, detached from everything that had approached this moment or would develop from it, and therefore powerless to foretell consequences.
    Sometime during the swing shift of the earth's movement around the sun, she went to sleep, and when she came awake in the morning, lying very still in the painful period of precarious readjustment, the lines of the poem were already running through her mind. Not all of them. She was already up to the third stanza. The poem was like that. It would be in her waking mind at one point or an-other, and she thought it was because the preceding lines had already run through while she was still asleep. This morning, only the third and fourth stanzas were left:
    Oh a deal of pains he's taken and a pretty price he's paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they've pulled the beggar's hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they're taking him to justice for the colour of his hair.
Now 'tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time