One True Thing

One True Thing by Anna Quindlen Page B

Book: One True Thing by Anna Quindlen Read Free Book Online
Authors: Anna Quindlen
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Media Tie-In
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the balls of her feet, baking the day away with flour in her hair, keeping her dark feelings inside, was the clean slate of death. Then that Kate Gulden would live always in my mind. I was frightened of this other Kate, this enraged and dessicated impostor. She was right about that; I did want that angry stranger gone. For so long I had wondered why she was not angrier at my father, at her lot in life, at the bargain she had made. But as I saw her rage, felt it like a black thing with teeth and claws, I blessed her tranquillity, and yearned for it.
    I tried to tell Jonathan all this. Dr. Cohn was right; I needed someone to talk to. After we made love I lay staring up at the ceiling fan, tears running down the sides of my face, and said, “If I had any guts at all I would hold a pillow over her face.”
    “Don’t say things like that,” Jonathan said.
    “Oh, Jonathan, you don’t know. You’re drinking coffee in the cafeteria and working on your moot court arguments and I’m watching this woman start to slowly disintegrate before my eyes, and all I can think is, this is my last chance to know her, to be her,to not kiss her off because she doesn’t work or she didn’t graduate from an Ivy League school or she doesn’t think the world rises and falls on whether or not there was really a Dark Lady behind Shakespeare’s sonnets. And the days slip by. She hates Elizabeth Bennet, can you believe it? Just hates her.”
    “Who the hell is Elizabeth Bennet?”
    “Pride and Prejudice.”
    “Oh, well, then, that explains it,” Jonathan said, leaning up on one elbow, his face caught in the last bit of daylight shining through the blinds in his bedroom. “Listen, Ellen, you need some rest. You are going to go crazy with this. Can’t Papa George give you a break so you can spend the weekend with me?”
    “I can’t go anywhere, Jonathan. I can’t tell from day to day whether she’ll be all right or not.”
    “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”
    “There’s no such thing as being too hard on yourself, Jon.”
    “Is there such a thing as being too hard?” he said, moving quickly from death to sex, his favorite subject, as he pushed my head down.
    Afterward we dressed and drove back to my house. “Do you realize that during the entire thing we never kissed?” I said.
    “Oh, Christ, Ellen, calm down,” Jon said, sated now and irritable.
    I spent the rest of that evening creaming onions, peeling yams, making stuffing exactly as my mother directed, producing a great groaning board of dishes just as she always had. After Jonathan brought me home, as I stood in the kitchen in my nightgown slicing celery, I realized that I was doing it all for the sake of stability, to make it seem as though this Thanksgiving was no different from any other. I was maintaining, abetting, creating a kind of elaborate fiction, just as my mother had, with gravy and pumpkin pie and heavy cream. The fiction that everything was fine, that life was simple and secure, that husbands did not stray and children grow, that the body did not decay and finally fail, that the axis of the earth passed dead center through the kitchen and the livingworld and the world kept spinning, our family unchanging, safe and sound.
    My mother looked horrid on Thanksgiving morning; she had made up her face elaborately, as though somehow she could create her own fiction with blush and eye shadow, the fiction that she was well, that she was blooming. But my brothers did not collaborate; instead of making the rounds of friends’ houses that afternoon, they stayed at home, wandering in and out of the kitchen, talking of school and asking about home. They settled into the couch with Jonathan for the football games. My father sat with them, reading and making derogatory comments. “The greatest single collection of future car-dealership owners and fast-food-restaurant franchise magnates in the United States,” he said.
    “So Rod Laver is a teaching pro at a

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