Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye Read Free Book Online

changed.
    She left the hairdresser’s where she’d been slaving away for twenty years or more and began going out in the evening. Although Norah and her sister never suspected it at the time, they would gather years later that their mother must have worked as a prostitute and that this activity, which her outward cheerfulness belied, was the particular form her grief took.
    Norah and her sister would return to their father’s on holiday once or twice.
    But no longer did their mother ever want to be told anything about what they’d seen there.
    She’d assumed a hard, determined look; her face was smooth under her makeup; and whatever the context, with a sarcastic curl of the lip and an angry sweep of the hand, she was given to saying, “Oh, what do I care?”
    This new demeanor and this gritty bitterness enabled her tomeet exactly the kind of man she was looking for. She married a bank manager, who like her was divorced and remained her husband to this day. He was an uncomplicated, likable, and well-paid man, very kind to Norah and her sister, even to the point of—at their father’s invitation—taking them with their mother to see Sony all together for the first time.
    Their mother hadn’t seen the boy since he’d left.
    Sony was now sixteen.
    On learning that their mother had remarried, their father wasted no time inviting them, and reserving several nights’ accommodation for them in the town’s best hotel. It was as if—Norah thought—he’d been waiting for their mother to make a new life for herself before he could stop worrying that she’d try to abduct Sony.
    And that’s how they all found themselves, like a big, happy, reconstituted family, Norah and her sister, their mother and her husband, Sony and their father, seated in the hotel dining room eating local delicacies, their father and the new husband discussing calmly, with only a hint of awkwardness, the international situation, while the boy and his mother, sitting close together, shot furtive, uneasy glances at each other.
    Sony was as usual superbly turned out: he wore a dark linen suit; his skin was soft and smooth, and he had a short Afro haircut.
    Their mother’s face wore its new fixed expression. Her mouth was slightly twisted, her heavily lacquered hair was dyed pale blond, and Norah noticed as her mother asked Sony about school and his favorite subjects that she took care with her grammar and syntax, knowing that Sony was now much better educated andmore refined than herself, a mortifying and uncomfortable awareness.
    Their father looked at them with a happy air of relief, as if at long last he’d managed to reconcile old enemies.
    Is that what he really thinks now? Norah wondered, cross and astonished. Has he managed to convince himself that it was Sony and our mother all these years who were unwilling to meet?
    Long before, when, wild with grief, their mother had told him on the telephone that if he refused to send Sony to spend the holidays with her she would borrow the airfare to visit her son in his house, their father had said, “If I see you getting off that plane, I’ll slit his throat and mine right before your eyes!”
    But was he really man enough to cut his own throat?
    There he was now, seated at the head of the table, handsome, charming, exquisitely polite, his cold dark eyes shining with love and pride whenever he gazed at Sony’s adorable face.
    Norah noticed that her brother never looked anyone straight in the eye. His affable, impersonal gaze flitted from one person to another without dwelling on any face in particular, and when spoken to he stared fixedly at an invisible point in the distance, without ceasing to smile or to adopt an expression of serious interest in whatever was being said to him.
    He was particularly careful, Norah thought, not to be caught unawares by their father’s gaze. Even then, even when their father looked at him and Sony glanced elsewhere, he seemed to withdraw, to curl up in the depths