Lucky Us by Joan Silber Read Free Book Online Page B

the boys doing chin-ups on the stockroom door frames.
    They were so wrapped up in themselves, in the usual ways. There was one girl—very lively, very pretty—who was always spitting mad or strung out over her boyfriend, and I’d watch her with fond amazement. “Never mind,” I’d tell her. “You think you’ll even remember this bozo’s name a year from now?”
    â€œBozo who?” she’d say. She had a friendly personality, when she didn’t have a hangover. I had to explain a lot of the equipment to her; she had no patience but she was very smart. She hovered around me, using me like an uncle who knew the ropes.
You’ll be fine,
I said to her about everything, and it seemed patently true. She was so brisk and leggy in her miniskirts, so electric and willful. When we went out for a drink after work, I thought, nothing isgoing to stand in her way, and I was sorry that she seemed about to ask for my advice on getting her rotten boyfriend back. When Elisa put her hand on my knee, a thrill of surprise went through my whole body. Oh, ho, what’s this? I thought. What’s this? I was caught off guard, knocked out by good news, for once.

3

Elisa
    Oh, fuck
was what I said to Gabe, softly, when I came over to him in the waiting room. This was a stupid way to put it, but I seemed to need this style. The light went out of Gabe’s face. We got our coats and made for the door. Everyone in the room stopped moving to look at us.
    People around us in the elevator were upset by me, a wet-eyed person saying
fuck, fuck, fuck
. Gabe kept rubbing my back. The one thing I wanted to do was go home. I wouldn’t talk until we were there. I felt unsafe on the street—noises jolted me and the rush of strangers coming at me was more than I could stand. It was mybody, of course, that I was afraid of, and I was still in it when we got home.
    I N THOSE FIRST few weeks, Gabe looked like a sunken old man. He walked around with a distracted shuffle; from the back you would’ve thought he was maybe seventy-five. In the morning he’d go to the store and forget what he meant to buy. He’d come back with canned biscuit dough and fruit cocktail, things we never ate. At night he’d get into bed early, by nine or nine-thirty, and he’d lie on his back in his underwear listening to the radio.
    I was the opposite—I couldn’t stay still and I couldn’t shut up. I talked in long sobbing outbursts and I argued with myself out loud about what I had to do. I kicked the stereo and broke it, I threw thick expensive art books down the hall. Everything I saw was an affront to me.
    I woke Gabe in the morning talking. I seemed to always have more to say. He’d put his arms around me and I’d keep talking into his shoulder. When he got up from the bed to go to the bathroom, I complained he wasn’t paying attention. I was hard on him. I made my own grief vulgar. What did I care, it didn’t matter.
    I wasn’t going to tell my friends but then I was on the phone with one after another, telling them. Some of themwere wonderful and some weren’t, but afterward I was sorry I had told anyone. I should have waited (I said this to Gabe), but I was in a hurry. Not a minute to spare. At night I dreamed I was on fire and had only just noticed; I was running into a lake but the lake was on fire.
    Gabe acted as if we had all the time in the world. Every day he was more slowed down. He would tell me to “hold on” or “cool it” or “take a break here.” He shook his head at me and sighed.
    One morning I woke up at dawn, feeling weepy and sorry for myself. I thought about whether this was the last room I was going to live in, and the idea made me shake under the covers.
This can’t go on,
I thought, meaning the horror, and then (Gabe was sleeping next to me with his hand tucked under his head) it did lift, for a second, and I had a glimpse