In Case We're Separated by Alice Mattison

pieces scatter. She leaned against Ruth’s shoulder and sobbed, while Ruth reached up awkwardly to pat her.
    Finally they walked again. “It was good,” Ruth said.
    â€œI really did write a whole one.”
    â€œI believe you. I don’t suppose you have another copy.”
    â€œNo, that was it.”
    â€œIt seemed sad.”
    â€œIt was sad. It got worse.”
    â€œBut wasn’t it fun to write it?” Art, she wanted to say—as dopily as that—makes life worth living. But she couldn’t say that.
    â€œI can think of things that are more fun,” Lillian said.
    Â 
    A t home, their parents were quarreling over a map of Brooklyn. Their mother had found an eye doctor for Lillian, and they were figuring out where his office was, their voices becoming querulous, more Yiddish. “What are you talking about, Eastern Parkway? That’s nowhere near Eastern Parkway.”
    â€œOf course it’s near Eastern Parkway. Where Sylvia lived when she got married.”
    This sort of argument had embarrassed Ruth until recently. So trivial, she’d complain to Lilly. Now she discovered an odd comfort. Her parents’ sentences felt like lines in a poem; maybe after a while Ruth’s thoughts would all come out in poetry. “It’s where Aunt Sylvia lived when first she married,” she recited. “Where little Richard and small Joan, my cousins / First drew their breath. . . .”
    Everyone ignored her. “The map could be wrong,” her father was saying. “Isn’t there a little street over here?” Her father looked elegant, with precisely drawn wide ears that stuck out from his head, which was serenely bald. He looked as if he’d speak in whispers.
    â€œThere’s nothing wrong with the map,” said their mother.
    Lillian had dropped her coat on a chair and gone into the bedroom. She was wearing the yellow sweater again. “Homework?” her mother called after her.
    Ruth found it easier to study in the dining room, listening to her parents’ conversation. In the bedroom, she and Lilly would talk—Lilly never did homework—while Ruth strained to hear her parents as well. For the first time, Ruth was going to read The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, and she took off her shoes and settled down at the dining room table with the anthology. April was the cruelest month, just as she’d always heard—but quickly the poem lost her. Ruth was distracted not only by her family but by herself, as if a radio announcer behind her whispered with suppressed excitement, “Ruth Hillsberg is reading The Waste Land .” Soon she’d no longer be someone who had never read The Waste Land . These days, though, when she read a poem she wanted to know if it might influence Lillian—either by convincing her of life’s goodness or by comforting her with a telling depiction of its woe. If anything, this poem would be in the second category, but Ruth didn’t think it would interest Lillian.
    â€œThe garbage smells,” she said then, however: suddenly and usefully inspired. She got up and put on her shoes. “I’ll take it out.”
    â€œI don’t smell anything,” her mother said. Ruth hadn’t either, but at last she could throw out the old medicine bottles. She put on her coat, took the overflowing grocery bag from the pail in the kitchen, and then remembered that the wastebasket in their room was also full. “The bedroom waste land,” she remarked to nobody, setting down the kitchen garbage near the apartment door, as her mother passed behind her, walking toward the kitchen: the phone was ringing.
    â€œHello?” said her mother’s voice just as Ruth opened the door of the room she shared with Lillian. Her sister sat on her bed, a loose-leaf notebook open beside her. The left sleeve of Lilly’s yellow sweater had been pulled up to her elbow, and with the point of a