ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 48
need to know to be successful in life."
Like you, huh? Emily thought. You have all the right friends and you're
beautiful and Daddy makes lots of money and everyone thinks you're so
wonderful but I don't even know who you are or what you really think. All
you do is try to make everything and everyone seem okay. I'm the only one
who's wrong.
"I know," she said. "I'm sorry."
Her mother kissed her and left the room as Emily pulled the blanket
loose. She fell into a troubled sleep and woke up in the morning startled by
a bizarre dream she'd just been having about her mother. She was washing
her mother's hair in the toilet bowl and kept flushing the toilet, hoping the
force would suck Mother into some unknown sewage depot oblivion as all the
while Mother was crying and pleading but making no effort to save herself.
Most of the day Emily thought about her story. When she flashed on
that dream she felt ashamed and frightened. The story was forming itself
around her feelings of fear, an emotion she was unwilling to acknowledge,
and rage, an emotion she wasn't permitted to acknowledge. She could hardly
wait to get home from school to start writing. She wanted to do it before her
mother got home from her afternoon rounds. Tonight was piano lesson and
after that Mother was always corning in and out of her room so it had to be
now.
She ran the two short blocks from school, down Eighty-Second Street,
across West End Avenue, and on toward Riverside Drive, not responding to
the Italian boys across the street who were yelling, "Hey, Emily, wanna earn
a nickel?" Emily briefly wished someone would tear down those ugly
brownstones so those stupid boys would mo'V:e away.
Once she began to write, the story came easily and swiftly and now it
was safely cached in her most sacred hiding place. Mother was standing
there trying to pacify her.
"I know he loves me, I guess," Emily replied, "but what's so bad about
playing with Babs? She's okay."
"Daddy feels that people are judged by those they keep company with
and that you'd be better off with other friends from more respectable
families."
Emily sighed, knowing that arguing with her mother would solve
nothing. Why didn't they make any sense with these things they said to her?
She understood about doing well at school and cleaning her room and
practicing the piano, sort of, but all these other things about good people (who
didn't seem to her to be all that good) and bad people (who didn't seem so bad)
were beyond her comprehension.
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