My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

now wanted, even if only for a mad moment, to die, and no-one dared get her to say why, he couldn’t come back to her. He couldn’t stay in the house with us. When my sister was ‘better’—what she had done to herself became an illness or accident that had happened to her, that was the only way we could deal with it in our house—she and my mother and father discussed what she wanted to do . All was resolved as a matter of the right occupation. And he was the one to know all about guidance, career guidance, he was once a schoolteacher. Her whole future before her etc.; the usual parents’ stuff, as if they were the usual parents. My sister fell in with the spirit of the performance. I heard her say it, Oh she was sick of studying. She wanted to take a job. For a while; she’d study again later. (This thrown in, I know, for darling daddy and his old ambitions for his children to be useful, therefore educated, citizens.) She knew my mother wouldn’t believe her, my mother knew she would find some other life, unplanned for her. He knew, surely, that something had driven her out; he didn’t stay to find out why. He fled the house again with that briefcase—did my father keep a toothbrush in it or was he so thick with that woman that he used hers?
    And what I couldn’t get over was how my sister made it easy for him. Perhaps she did it for my mother’s sake, too, but the fact is it had the effect of letting him off the misery he was sentenced to those first few days; she made it possible for that to be shed with her bandages. She appeared with brightly-painted wooden bracelets on each wrist—African artifacts. He didn’t have to see the scars. She has beautiful straight shiny hair, like my mother’s, and she had it frizzed; in her ‘convalescence’ she went about the house, one of my old shirts tied under her naked breasts, midriff showing, her Walkman hooked
to a wide belt and plugged into her ears, moving her hips and head to a beat no-one else could hear. It was tacitly accepted that these were signs of a natural girlish independence; she wanted to earn her own living, she had offered.
    She talked to me about that Saturday night as if it were some particularly daring party escapade to boast about. I couldn’t see how she’d want to; she should have talked to him, really, it was his affair just like his other affair. She was determined to bring it up with me.—You never open your mouth, but I suppose you wonder why anyone’d do such a stupid thing.—
    â€”Like what?—But she knew I was stalling; and she didn’t want to come right out with it, either—‘trying to kill myself’.
    â€”I’d had a bust-up with Marcia, she’s always so nosy, like into everything, sticky fingers getting in my hair. I don’t know why I let her pester me to spend the night, anyway. And the crowd that turned up at her place because they knew her folks were away, Jimmy and Alvin and that lot. I can’t stand them, really. She said Jackie and Dawn and them (how many years had my father spent trying to get his Baby to drop her peers’ bad grammar) were coming but she’s a liar, she did it to persuade me to stay with her, because they never came. What was there to do but smoke. So I was rather stoned, and on top of it, when I wanted to get away from them and their lousy yakking and yelling and dancing like a pack of drunk wildebeest, there was a couple busy on the bed. They hadn’t even shut the door.—
    I nodded and kept my head turned away. She saw I didn’t want to be presented with this version, this performance—another one, in our house.
    â€”The bathroom was the only place to get away.—
    The packet of Gillette Sword, the dagga and the self-pity. I wish I didn’t have so much imagination, I wish that other people’s lives were closed to me.

    â€”They just made me sick. Sick of