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

on a horse…. Where was the world? Not here, not near me, not under the dining-room table…. “Not quite,” I’d say, untruthfully, afraid that I might discourage him. “But I almost get it. Just tell me once more.” And on and on he went, while I frowned, breathed hard, and squinted. And then it happened! “I see!” I cried. “I see! I see!” It was air pressure! How in the world had I failed to visualize air pressure? I could see it now. I would never again not see it; it was there in my mind, solid and indestructible, a whitish column sitting on the water. “God damn but science is wonderful!” I said, and heaved my physics book into the living room. “Really wonderful!”
    “It’s natural law,” Preston said reprovingly. “Don’t get emotion mixed up with it.”
    One evening when my sister and Sonny didn’t have a date to go out, my mother tapped lightly on my foot, which protruded from under the dining-room table. “I have a feeling Sonny may call,” she whispered. I told Preston I had to hang up, and crawled out from beneath the table. “I have a feeling that they’re getting to the point,” my mother said. “Your sister’s nervous.”
    I put the phone back on the telephone table. “But, Mother—” I said, and the phone rang.
    “Sh-h-h,” she said.
    The phone rang three times. My sister, on the extension upstairs, said, “Hello…. Oh, Sonny….”
    My mother looked at me and smiled. Then she pulled at my sleeve until I bent my head down, and she whispered in my ear, “They’ll be so happy….” She went into the hall, to the foot of the stairs. “Tell him he can come over,” she whispered passionately.
    “Sure,” my sister was saying on the phone. “I’d like that…. If you want…. Sure….”
    My mother went on listening, her head tilted to one side, the light falling on her aging face, and then she began to pantomime the answers my sister ought to be making—sweet yesses, dignified noes, and little bursts of alluring laughter.
    I plunged down the hall and out the screen door. The street lamps were on, and there was a moon. I could hear the children: “I see Digger. One-two-three, you’re caught, Digger….” Two blocks away, the clock on the Presbyterian church was striking the hour. Just then a little girl left her hiding place in our hedge and ran shrieking for the tree trunk that was home-free base: “I’m home safe! I’m home safe! Everybody free!” All the prisoners, who had been sitting disconsolately on the bumpers of Mr. Karmgut’s Oldsmobile, jumped up with joyful cries and scattered abruptly in the darkness.
    I lifted my face—that exasperating factor, my face—and stared entranced at the night, at the waving tops of the trees, and the branches blowing back and forth, and the round moon embedded in the night sky, turning the nearby streamers of cloud into mother-of-pearl. It was all very rare and eternal-seeming. What a dreadful unhappiness I felt.
    I walked along the curb, balancing with my arms outspread. Leaves hung over the sidewalk. The air was filled with their rustling, and they caught the light of the street lamps. I looked into the lighted houses. There was Mrs. Kearns, tucked girlishly into a corner of the living-room couch, reading a book. Next door, through the leaves of a tall plant, I saw the Lewises all standing in the middle of the floor. When I reached the corner, I put one arm around the post that held the street sign, and leaned there, above the sewer grating, where my friends and I had lost perhaps a hundred tennis balls, over the years. In numberless dusks, we had abandoned our games of catch and handball and gathered around the grating and stared into it at our ball, floating down in the darkness.
    The Cullens’ porch light was on, in the next block, and I saw Mr. and Mrs. Cullen getting into their car. Eleanor Cullen was in my class at school, and she had been dating Joel. Her parents were going out, and that meant she’d be home