Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read Free Page B

or March of Dimes wants a coordinator or a door-to-door collector she does it. And if you think all that, running even a small family and house so that things are decent and peaceful, is a small job, maybe you ought to try it for a year or two. She works hard and uses her head at it. But the trouble is, she's afraid of doing anything else, of being anything else. Not afraid for herself, I think, but afraid that if she did anything except look after us, she'd be letting us down—letting the side down, not being a good wife and mother. She feels she's got to be always there. She can't even take off the time it takes to read a novel. I think she doesn't read novels because if she got really interested in one, absorbed, then she'd be somewhere else, by herself: she wouldn't be with us. And that's wrong, to her. So all she ever reads are some magazines about food and interior decorating and one about extremely expensive holiday travel to places she doesn't want to go to. My father watches a lot of TV, but she never pays much attention to it; she may be sitting there with him in the living room, but she's sewing or doing crewelwork or figuring out household stuff or working on March of Dimes lists. Ready to get up and do what needs doing.

    She didn't spoil me, more than an only kid always gets spoiled by being the center of attention. She used to try to keep me from reading so much, but she sort of gave up when I was twelve or thirteen. As far back as I can remember, I had to keep my room straight and do garden jobs. I do the lawn and carry out trash and so on. Male jobs only, of course. I never learned how to work the washer and dryer till the time she had to have an operation and couldn't climb stairs for two weeks. I don't think my father knows how to work them yet. That's woman's work. It's funny, really, because he's nuts about machines. All our appliances have to have about twelve different cycles and all possible attachments. If he ever bought the plain ordinary model of anything he'd feel he wasn't treating her right. But if they're household work machines, she runs them. And when they break down, she calls the repairman. My father doesn't like to hear about things breaking down.

    That's why I couldn't say anything about the car. Because it had really broken me down. It just was the end, the last stop. I had to get off. But there wasn't anything outside the bus but rain and fog and me jumping up and down doing an ape act and nobody looking or hearing.
    I came in from the bus stop that day. My mother was in the kitchen blending something in the blender. She yelled something over the scream of the machine but I couldn't hear what. I went up to my room and dropped my knapsack and took off my coat with the wet collar and stood there. The rain was whacking on the roof. I said, "I am an intellectual. I am an intellectual. I am an intellectual. And the rest of you can go to hell!"

    I heard my voice and it sounded unbelievably feeble. Big deal! So I was an intellectual, and what else is new? That's when the fog closed in completely. And that's when I found the rock. It was actually like that, as if my hand closed around a solid, round rock. The girl on the bus saying, "Yeah," in that solid, round voice. Yeah: good. So go ahead and be what you are.
    So when I had rubbed some of the rain out of my hair with a towel, I sat down at my desk and started to reread Ornstein's
The Psychology of Consciousness.
Because something like that, thinking about how we actually think, how our heads work, is what I would like to do.

    But it didn't last. I dropped the rock. At dinner my father got going about how you break in a new car. You should drive it at moderate speeds every day, and going to and from school would be perfect for it. "If you want me to take it to work for a week or so, of course I'll be glad to," he said. "It's not good for a new car just to sit there."
    "OK," I said, "you do that."
    That blew it. His face got tight. "If