Strange Fits of Passion by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online

serious way, would put my hands in my pockets and try to match her stride—she would ask about my schoolwork or my friends or tell me stories of her "adventures," as she referred to them, in which I would be expected to find the hidden homilies. She was also given to heartfelt lectures on various essential lessons of life, which I listened to as though receiving the word of God. There was a hierarchy in the universe, she told me, and I would be happy only if I found my place. Things happened to a person; one must learn to accept those things. One must not rebel too much against the natural order; the price one had to pay would be too high—a life of guilt or loneliness.
    I would savor the twelve or fourteen minutes we had together each evening from the station to our bungalow, for I knew that when my mother crossed the threshold, she would be burdened by her chores. She did not complain, but she would become quieter as the evening wore on, like an old Victrola winding down, until it was time for me to go to bed. Then she would come into my bedroom—a tiny room connected by the bathroom to her own—and brush my hair. It was a characteristic that we shared, the color and texture of our hair, and this practice, the faithful hundred strokes, sometimes spilling into another hundred when she was lost in a story or an anecdote, was a ritual we never failed to observe, even when I had grown older and could certainly brush my hair myself.
    When I had been tucked into bed, she sat in the living room, on the sofa, and sewed or watched TV or listened to the radio. Sometimes she read, but often when I got up to get a glass of water or to tell her that I couldn't sleep, I would find her with her book or her sewing in her lap while she stared at a distant point on the wall. I don't know what she dreamed of.
    When my mother had removed her long coat and her hat, and had changed from her suit or her work dress into something looser, I thought that she was beautiful—the sadness of which I will not dwell upon, for I did not think this sad in my childhood, only now. Maybe all daughters think their mothers beautiful; I don't know. There was her hair, and the color of her eyes, a light green that I did not inherit, and a complexion that has not betrayed her, even in her older years. She was most beautiful, I always thought, on a muggy evening, resting in the middle of her chores, on an aluminum-and-plastic chair on the small screened-in porch off the back door. She would have on a sundress, and her skin would be faintly damp from the heat. Her hair, an untidy but voluptuous mass, would be falling loose from the pins, and she might be smiling at a juicy bit of gossip about our neighbor that I was telling her while we sipped a lemonade. I knew my mother liked me to gossip about our neighbor; it eased her jealousy, the fear that someone else had been a mother to her child.
    I was a trial to our neighbor, deliberately so, I think now, and the woman, whose name was Hazel and who had three rebellious children of her own, didn't like me much. The dislike was mutual, or perhaps it was that I disliked living out my childhood in someone else's house. As soon as I was old enough, I begged my mother to let me stay alone at our bungalow after school, and she allowed this privilege, trusting me not to drink or to smoke or to do the other things she sometimes heard that girls my age were trying then. Of course, in time, with my friends, in my house and out of it, I did participate in the wildness she feared—I smoked, I drank some beer—but she was wrong to think that these essentially innocent pastimes would be the traps that would ensnare me.
    Sometimes my mother invited men to the house. I did not think of them as her boyfriends, do not even now. They were men who had befriended my mother in some way—single or unattached men who plowed a driveway for which we had no car, or mended broken windows; or men whom she had met in the