Lion House,The by Marjorie Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

interest in what he was saying. "Dick, y'oughta been here. Th' other night she was over, playing anagrams. Can she play anagrams! Only anagrams isn't the only thing she plays... Well, I'm taking this nap, and when it gets to be time to play, Franni-o comes up to wake me." He sat up then, dropped his head into his hands, and chuckled. "Walks around looking like s-somebody's k-kid brother," he went on. "But the way she wakes you up... oh, you kid!"
    "Hey, wait —" Dick began, bewildered; while Helene, that paragon of propriety, went scarlet with embarrassment.
    But Brad didn't notice. Carried away on the wings of an inner triumph, he was singing. Driving home his point like a battering ram, dropping his punch like a ton of bricks, he was singing La Marseillaise.
    I got to my feet. I walked out of the livingroom into the kitchen. Automatically I began to wash the brunch dishes. I picked up the glass pitcher. There was just about an inch of the stuff left at the bottom. You did it, I thought, looking at it before I spilled it out; personifying it; talking to it within myself as though it were alive with a heart and a brain and could hear me. You did it. If it hadn't been for you he wouldn't have got that bad; if it hadn't been for you he might never had let me know.
    But I thought it without feeling; or maybe I did feel, but I can't remember the feeling now. You can't ever recall pain; not actually; not really the way it was. Once I asked Frannie about childbirth. She had been standing at the window with her back towards me. The way she leaned on the sill made her jeans stretch flat and tight across her buttocks; and her feet were bare. I had been reminded of modern dancers: slim, boyish ones who have a litheness, a grace no female ever has. And when finally she turned I asked her (why: I haven't the slightest idea) to tell about the pain.
    "You can tell about it intellectually," she had said, slowly, thinking as she talked. "But in the repetition it loses its meaning and becomes something else. It's supposed to hurt; I suppose it did —and I must have known then. But I don't know now; not the way you mean, anyway. I only know that when they brought me down I was happy. I was so happy the world swam. But I can't tell you what that was either. Can anybody ever really tell what it's like when the world swims?"
    After the dishes I went upstairs. I could no more have faced the Finches than my own mother; nor could I bear to look at Brad.
    We had a spare bedroom on the second floor: a tiny cubicle with one small window. We used it as a storage place for clothes and valises. There was a cot in it. I went in and locked the door behind me and lay down. There was an old mustard chair cushion lying on the floor. It wasn't ours. It had been left by the last tenants; or other tenants years before them. I reached down and picked it up and covered my face with it. It was damp and dirty and it made me sick; but, unreasonably, I wanted to be sick. I pressed it down against my nose and mouth and tried to take the stench in. I gagged and a gush of something warm and stinging flooded my throat. When I caught my breath I was crying.
    Brad came up a while later and knocked a jaunty drum-beat on the door. "Hey, Jo," he called, "we're going out for dinner!" I didn't answer; and soon I heard his footsteps fading down the stairs.
    I didn't come out. I stayed there, sleeping, waking, thinking, sleeping, waking, thinking: of Brad and Frannie. I saw them in my mind, suspended above me, swinging back and forth like a double mobile. But no: it hadn't been that. I knew. It had been the other thing. Frannie and I had talked about it one afternoon —the way we talked, the way we seemed to have to talk, about everything. She'd done it a thousand times: the boy from Yale; boys after him; then Marc. She said she liked it. I didn't. It had always made me feel used; cheated; left out, somehow. "You're doing it all for them," I had said to her. "What do you get out