Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe Read Free Book Online Page B

excuses to stay out late. He was working at his office. He needed to go to Chicago to do some research for a few days.
    Beth was like one of those clouds you notice when lying on your back at the beach, at first it has a shape, a donkey, a unicorn, a mountain with a tree on top, and then as the winds move on the shape changes and the cloud breaks up into several blurred pieces and you can’t make out any form at all and your eye turns away. The cloud cannot sustain interest once it has come apart.
    Would you like to be my research assistant for a few months? Fritz asked his daughter. She was silent. There are some letters in the library that a soldier wrote home to his sister and she saved them. I need to have them available while I’m writing. Anna looked down at her feet. She had no interest in letters from a long gone battlefield. A wave of boredom came over her, a wave so high, so forceful that it might have been a tsunami of boredom. She could drown in her own disinterest. She thought of her razor, its thin blade waiting for the early hours of dawn for her attention. She thought of her knee with the wide white scar from the time she fell on a rock in the park at the sixth-grade field day. She ran her fingers over her scar. I’m busy, she said to her father. Doing what? he asked in a tone that he had not meant to use and embarrassed him as it echoed in the room. Beth said, Leave her alone. Anna cast her mother a thank you look and Fritz seemed fascinated by a report on CNN from a faraway place where some young man had set himself on fire in protest over ever-present tyranny—lack of religious freedom, and an inability to feed his young child. The act disgusted Fritz. He could not take his eyes from the screen as the footage ran over and over again and the flames, starting small at the base of the man’s legs, rose higher and brighter. The camera was held in the hand of someone standing on a distant balcony. Fritz could not see the burning man’s features.
    Anna had left the room. She lay down on her bed. She text messaged her roommate, What’s up? NM, came back the answer. A circle had closed, excluding her. She had left and in leaving all conversations had been cut off as if a power surge had disabled her friendships.
    Dr. Berman, she said the next Thursday, I have no friends. Did you ever have friends? Dr. Berman asked. I did, Anna said. Then you’ll have them again, said Dr. Berman. When? said Anna. When you’re ready, said Dr. Berman.
    Tell me about your last boyfriend, said Dr. Berman.
    I haven’t had a boyfriend, said Anna.
    No one you hoped would be your boyfriend? said Dr. Berman.
    No, said Anna. She was lying.
    Beth missed a lunch with the head of her department. Her graduate assistant was out sick and Beth had forgotten to look at her calendar. She spent time picking at the severe wound to her own pride. What was that pride? Had it been overweening, did she tempt the gods to humble her? She didn’t believe in gods or God but she had no doubts about humbling. She had felt a condescending rush of pity when her friend Ellen’s daughter had been sent to rehab in Minnesota. Now she pitied herself and was ashamed. In addition she was ashamed of being ashamed.
    Would you like to go shopping with me this afternoon? Beth said to Anna.
    Anna did not answer.
    We could go down to SoHo, said Beth.
    Anna did not look up. She was wearing another of her father’s shirts and a pair of old jeans and her sneakers.
    I’m set, she said to her mother. I don’t need anything.
    Since when are clothes about need? said Beth.
    Since now, said Anna.
    If you stood on one side of the River Styx and looked across to the other you would see the shades milling about, going nowhere, sitting on rocks, standing under pale branches of emaciated trees. The shades were not so much ghosts of the living as imprints in space of bodies that had once pulsed with sinew and bone, fluids, waste, red