First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories by Harold Brodkey Read Free Book Online

your mind,” she said. “Otherwise you might break his heart, you know. Tell him you need some time to think. He’ll understand. He’ll think you’re grownup and responsible.”
    Sonny vanished from our house. In the evenings now, after dinner, the three of us would sit on the screened porch. My sister would look up eagerly when the phone rang, but the calls were never for her. None of her old boy friends knew she had stopped dating Sonny, and after a while, when the phone rang, she would compose her face and pretend she wasn’t interested, or she would say irritably, “Who can that be?” She began to answer the phone herself (she never had before, because it wasn’t good for a girl to seem too eager) and she would look sadly at herself in the hall mirror while she said, “Yes, Preston, he’s here.” She tried to read. She’d skim a few pages and then put the book down and gaze out through the screens at the night and the patches of light on the trees. She would listen with my mother to the comedians on the radio and laugh vaguely when my mother laughed. She picked on me. “Your posture’s no good,” she’d say. Or “Where do you learn your manners? Mother, he behaves like a zoot-suiter or something.” Another time, she said, “If I don’t make a good marriage, you’ll be in trouble. You’re too lazy to do anything on your own.” She grew more and more restless. Toying with her necklace, she broke the string, and the beads rolled all over the floor, and there was something frantic in the way she went about retrieving the small rolling bits of glitter. It occurred to me that she didn’t know what she was doing; she was not really as sure of everything as she seemed. It was a painfully difficult thought to arrive at, and it clung to me. Why hadn’t I realized it before? Also, she sort of hated me, it seemed to me. I had never noticed that before, either. How could I have been so wrong, I wondered. Knowing how wrong I had been about this, I felt that no idea I had ever held was safe. For instance, we were not necessarily a happy family, with the most wonderful destinies waiting for my sister and me. We might make mistakes and choose wrong. Unhappiness was real. It was even likely…. How tired I became of studying my sister’s face. I got so I would do anything to keep from joining the two women on the porch.
    After three weeks of this, Sonny returned. I was never told whether he came of his own accord or whether he was summoned; but one night the yellow convertible drove up in front of our house and he was back. Now when my mother would watch my sister and Sonny getting into Sonny’s car in the evenings, she would turn away from the window smiling. “I think your sister has found a boy she can respect,” she would say, or “They’ll be very happy together,” or some such hopeful observation, which I could see no basis for, but which my mother believed with all the years and memories at her disposal, with all the weight of her past and her love for my sister. And I would go and call Preston. I used to lie under the dining-room table, sheltered and private like that, looking up at the way the pieces of mahogany were joined together, while we talked. I would cup the telephone to my ear with my shoulder and hold my textbook up in the air, over my head, as we went over physics, which was a hard subject for me. “Preston,” I asked one night, “what in God’s name makes a siphon work?” They did work—everyone knew that—and I groaned as I asked it. Preston explained the theory to me, and I frowned, breathed heavily through my nose, squinted at the incomprehensible diagrams in the book, and thought of sex, of the dignity of man, of the wonders of the mind, as he talked. Every few minutes, he asked “Do you see” and I would sigh. It was spring, and there was meaning all around me, if only I were free—free of school, free of my mother, free of duties and inhibitions—if only I were mounted