Suicide Blonde Read Free Page B

always more powerful than the actuality. And I wouldn't have to risk anything—I'd learned my lesson from the teddy. Or I could evoke my caustic mind by moving the straight-back chair into the middle of the room. I tried it but the chair looked like a stage prop and I hated myself for so carefully marking the power in each possibility.
    I always thought of love as a stressful but productive state, because you wanted to improve yourself for your lover. But this was posing, not self-improvement. I wanted to be pleasing. That's what my mother did to try and keep my father. She looked pleasing, acted pleasing, made the house pleasing, all in an effort to mollify the uncertainties and unpleasantries of the unknown.
    Right then the phone rang and I knew it was her. There's a telepathy between us sometimes so laserlike it frightens me. “Hi,” she said. “How are you?”
    My mother used her casual voice, one that hides a heightened desperation. I answered her usual inquiries. When we speak there is a suck that makes me lean into her voice; when I'm in her presence she gets a predatory look. My mother sees me as a part of her body, something that still belongs inside, a heart or a liver that she wants back.
    “You remember the bank president? The one that had the affair with his secretary? It's been very messy, his wife won't give him a divorce. They say she's gone crazy. Yesterday, she walked into the bank and threw acid in the secretary's face.” She stopped, not like the story was over, but like she was startled.
    I examined the story for hidden meaning. While it could imply that my life also is in danger because I too dabble in perversity, it doesn't seem to fit the usual storyline of . . . me falling for a bad man like my father, or that even the wildest people eventually settle down. This one seemed on my side or Bell's . . . it was chaos.
    She started to speak again, but I daydreamed. She was right, I didn't always listen, but it was her I was thinking of, remembering once, when I was four—I knew she was on a diet and I saw on TV something about an operation where you have part of your intestines removed to make you thinner and I told her about it, that she should have it. Her face got red, she was so angry that I felt confused, terrified, and trailed her the rest of the day trying to make it right. When I heard my father's tires on the gravel driveway I was sitting on the damp cellar stairs watching her put clothes into the washer. He walked down past me. She told him it had been a lousy day, she started to cry and said I had been rude to her. “I wasn't,” I said, so upset I was light-headed. She looked at me directly for the first time since morning and said, “You want to cut me open.”
    The fabric of the memory dissolved and I heard her voice again. “How are you, honey? You know how I worry.”
    “I'm O.K.,” I said, then lifted the phone away from my ear because I heard footsteps on the stairs. I told her quickly I had to go.
    “O.K.,” she said rigidly. No matter if we spoke for ten minutes or two hours she never wanted to hang up. “Bye now.”
    After our calls I always have an uneasy feeling. It's like that all the time with my mother. But I love her and probably most after a bad phone call: her fat upper arms, the way she talks like a baby when she's upset, those slippers with rosebuds she wears until the bottoms are flat and gray, and her sense of rigid honesty that has crippled her in this dishonest world.
    Bell's steps were faint at first—then firmer, centered and serious, paced like a showdown. I ran to the kitchen, realized while he searched for his keys that it was silly for me to hide, so I swung the refrigerator door open knowing the white light would be far off and eerie in the apartment. The key was in the lock . . . there were several odd tinfoil shapes, a green pitcher of orange juice, a single jar of shrimp cocktail, a bit of browning smoked salmon and half a tomato that was losing