The Last Chance by Rona Jaffe Read Free Book Online

angered her. She wanted to destroy everything in her that was in any way reminiscent of her mother and be herself, a totally separate being. She had not given much thought to what she wanted to be when she grew up. Stacey had already decided she would be a doctor. She was always taking the subway downtown to the public library and reading medical books. Jill told her not to take the subway, she could get killed. Stacey didn’t care. She wandered around all over the city; once she’d gone into the Bellevue Hospital emergency room and sat there looking at all the accident and assault cases for two hours before anyone even noticed her and asked her what was the matter. She had been so pleased to be able to tell Jill about the stabbings and gunshot wounds and shock, and what had been done for them, and she wasn’t disgusted at all.
    “Well, what do you expect me to do, take a taxi on my allowance?” she would ask angrily when Jill yelled at her.
    “If Mom ever found out …”
    “She’s not going to find out. She’s not interested in me.”
    Jill didn’t know what to answer to that because she knew it was true. Her pain for her sister, whom she loved, made her anger at the suffocation of her mother’s devotion to herself even stronger. She only loves me because she thinks I’m like her. If she only knew how much I despise her.
    Her mother on the phone whenever there was a new man. Jill knew the voice her mother put on so well by now that she could even tell if it was a new man she was going to sleep with, a man she was already in the throes of sleeping with, or one of her rejects whom she liked to keep around. Sometimes she wondered if her mother really thought she was so stupid or if her mother in some strange way wanted her to know, as if to say, “ I’m the grown-up woman around here, not you.” What made her mother think sleeping with men made you grown up? As far as Jill was concerned, if she never had to sleep with a man in her entire life it would be too soon.
    Her mother, the hypocrite, on the phone with her friend Margot. Margot was sleeping with a man sixteen years younger than she was. She’d been the same age Jill was now, even older, when that boy was born! But they weren’t hurting anybody. Neither of them belonged to anybody else. And there was her mother, lecturing Margot, warning her, telling her she’d be hurt, that his friends must be laughing at her, that he’d leave her for a girl his own age. Jill knew her mother was probably just jealous. She’d seen her mother’s last lover one day when he dropped her off at the apartment in his sports car on the way to the suburbs where he lived with his wife and children, and Jill had just been coming home. Her mother had had to introduce them. He was gray-faced and flabby, trying to look young in his sheepskin coat, driving that red Jag, and Jill couldn’t understand why her mother preferred him to Dad. What was so wonderful about that old man? She bet her mother would be thrilled to have a young lover like Kerry Fowler if one would want to have anything to do with her.
    In past years Margot had always found February the most difficult month. The New York weather had finally settled into winter, people were tired of it, short-tempered, depressed. No wonder whoever made the calendar made February the shortest month; it was almost too much to take as it was. But this February seemed too short, because she was in love with Kerry and they were living together in her apartment, and she saw the world through his eyes. Everything seemed to be happening for the first time, and in many ways it was. She had never lived with someone who wanted to be up at seven A . M . on a Saturday morning to rush down to Canal Street to buy plastics for projects. That was what little boys did! He was always doing things: building a Plexiglas coffee table (she’d had no idea how complicated that was), or making her a romantic collage called “The Sun and the Moon and the