Reading Madame Bovary by Amanda Lohrey Read Free Book Online

scanty or scant as in the amount of fullness.
    I remember saying, ‘I’m very tired. Often my husband’s work takes him away during the week. I couldn’t face another one (so soon),’ and thinking, I couldn’t bear to spend my days in this room. Is he such a dull man? How does he bear to come into this brown room every day? From the plain green operating theatre to this dull brown room.
    In the spare room I think about my lost, aborted daughter (I had an intuition it would be another girl). She would be two and a half now, she would sleep in Ben’s room in the second of the twin beds. She would run alongside me on the cracked path, catch the toe of her shoes, trip, and bawl, ungainly with outrage. This is sentimental, as is my sadness, as is the doughy-headed doll I lie with under the bedspread.
    Sentimental: mawkishly tender.
    My grandmother, Audrey, used to say: ‘I am a sentimental person and I’m not ashamed of it.’
    Mawkish: sickly, nauseating.
    Morning sickness: the first pre-emptive strike, the warning that things will never be the same again, that the mother must get used to her body belonging to another …
    How to describe that sudden transformation of the moment when you learn that, once again, you have life within you? I was appalled; surprised at myself; and yet I felt as if a light had come on inside my body. I walked to the station, looking in shop windows, and everything seemed vibrant and humming. I walked home, it was winter, there was hardly anything in the garden and I searched intently for something to put into a vase; three blue hydrangeas and a red leafy shrub and some piebald creeper, and I cut them and arranged them in a pewter vase and sat them on the kitchen table and felt my body triumphant again.
    This is a musty house, there is mould in the corner of this room, I can smell it, soon I will sneeze, Frank will hear me. I press my nose into her grubby nylon arm.
    I am forty, and my fertility is dying.
    How can I tell you about the feeling of loneliness that a woman can have in a house with a man and two children sleeping around her? In other rooms. They are pre-occupied, on their own stubborn trajectory; they are dreaming their own dreams. That’s why I’m here, with the doll. The doll has no dreams.
    The doll is for me.
    I can cuddle her now and in the morning I can put her aside. I paid for her. I own her. I bought her for Rebecca but Rebecca never took to her. Other dolls, but not this one.
    I want a man who’s a doll. Without memory, without motivation.
    That’s what men have. They have prostitutes who don’t speak or tell of their dreams or oppress them with their yearning.
    My darling little one. Why did I abort you? I aborted you because your father didn’t want you (‘Honestly, Kay, two children is enough’) and I wasn’t strong enough to raise you on my own.
    On nights like this I could kill Frank.
    Frank’s strong points
    I must concentrate on Frank’s strong points.
    Like his surly and sharp-tongued mother, Frank is a good gardener. It pains him to have only a small courtyard at the rear of the house. He wants to retire to the south coast and plant a large native garden; hakea and bottlebrush, she-oak and the feathery silver-blue of the Cootamundra wattle (his favourite tree). He says that when work is getting him down and he can’t sleep at night he lies in the dark and plans this garden in his head. It is the secret map of his desire: lush and spiky, blossoming with red and golden hues and overt with flagrant and noisy birds. Frank is carrying this little Garden of Eden around in his head.
    Frank’s father died when he was eleven, in a car accident. Sometimes I think this may not have been altogether a bad thing since his mother says his father was a tyrant (she, on the other hand, is not a reliable source). Still, I have observed other men and their fraught relationship with Oedipus, and for