The Almanac Branch by Bradford Morrow Read Free Book Online

came up, and these television people worried, got themselves into seemingly inexorable jams, sad but so funny predicaments, and their enemies began to rub the palms of their hands together thinking that this was going to be it, and they were going to get caught off base doing something that would disgrace them forever. But with the shake of a head, the wrinkling of a nose, everything was set right, and the bad guys were foiled. Spirits and magic and common sense were put to the test. This was better than religion, this was the way things should work.
    Jeannie and Samantha could do nothing wrong in their men’s eyes, or in mine. No matter what they did, they did it in such a way that their men were able to maintain a sense of being the man, and not merely a man but the man, the boss, the transcendent hero of a clearly ridiculous, clearly delusory drama of male predominance. Jeannie slept in a bottle, Samantha was reclusive for fear she might twitch her nose by mistake and manufacture a disaster. Both were hidden from the world not because they were ugly, or stupid, but because they were beautiful and unique and clever, because, above all, they had real powers against which a man possessed neither defense nor even a strong argument. They had powers like I thought I might someday like to have, as I lay there curled on the floor like a cat.
    Trudeau I saw every other week. Faw and Mother would drive me in, leaving the boys in Djuna’s charge. It would be a sultry morning, with the drear heat already sitting on the road, and the commuters looking harried behind the wheels of their cars. Manhattan would finally start showing itself, in its pinnacles and the tops of its towers, here and there between Queens overpasses and billboards. Through the tunnel, and already I’d begin saying, “Do we have to go?” and my mother would say, yes I had to go. Trudeau had hours at Mount Sinai, and that was close to the old neighborhood, which made me feel an ambivalence, happy to be near the light people, uneasy to be near them, too, because I had tried—as Djuna recommended—to forget about them, forget everything I could, and being there forced me to realize how utterly I’d failed at doing that.
    â€œMeaning what?” Faw would ask.
    â€œAs I’ve said before,” she (Trudeau was a woman) said, “the icicles are something more common in post adolescents, as Grace has described the blind spot in the center of her visual field—”
    â€œIt’s not a blind spot.” I was fussy about the details, if only because I knew them so intimately.
    â€œWell, what is it, Grace?” Faw asked.
    â€œThere’s nothing there, inside the icicles.”
    â€œWell, that’s what she just said.”
    â€œNo, she said it was a blind spot.”
    Trudeau said, “There isn’t supposed to be anything there, it isn’t that you can’t see it, whatever would be in the blind spot, it’s that there isn’t anything to see, is that what you mean, Grace?”
    â€œYes.”
    As my episodes dated to when I got my braces, the traditional Brush braces—canted front teeth ran in the family—Faw had some theory about the braces being the cause of all my troubles. My brothers teased me about my silvery mouth (“Maybe we should melt Grace down, silver’s worth a lot more than—”) but what was of interest to Trudeau was my appetite—the braces certainly didn’t stop me from eating. Faw noted I was “quite the pig,” though I was thin as a birch limb, my arms and legs strong and spidery under the colorful frocks I liked to wear.
    Said Dr. Trudeau, “My presumptive diagnosis would still be”(at this medicalese my father was always seen to roll his eyes)“that her migraines—”
    â€œMegrims,” interrupted Mother, trying to be helpful.
    â€œâ€”are congenital, and not the result of an injury to the brain, or