Read Online Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem - Free Book Online
Authors: Jonathan Lethem
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padded after Rose, ostentatiously thumbing through the glossy pages, while her mother slithered to the foot of the stove and reached up. Miriam’s duty was to witness Rose; this had been required of her for what seemed centuries already, inside Miriam’s seventeen years. Witness, confirm, recognize. So: into the kitchen. Lana Turner, in the magazine’s culture pages, looked identical to Mamie on the cover; squint, and they were one woman. Rose flipped the gas dial, then wrenched the oven’s door open like a black mouth and crawled onto its pouting lip to deliver her head inside.
“I don’t want to live to see you put with child and abandoned as I was by that son of a bitch who was your father. My life’s been nothing but one long heartbreak since the moment he first laid a hand on mybody, now you’re walking out the door to finish the job. But I’ll finish it for you. It’s fine, I’ve lived too many years past the destruction of everything that once mattered. I can’t bear to live through the trials of your stupidity and suffering as I did my own. As if I taught you
nothing
.”
“You’re not making sense, you put too many things together, Rose.” Miriam flapped the magazine under her arm but refused yet to intervene, to take a step in Rose’s direction. “My father isn’t responsible for everything in your life, he wasn’t around long enough for that. My father, for instance, didn’t humiliate the Soviet, you know. Khrushchev did that.” Could Miriam’s scorn embarrass Rose from her demonstration? Rose flopped her arms as though trying to clamber deeper into the oven, a whale going ashore. If Rose could see her own ass from this vantage she’d quit immediately.
“I’m already alone, leave me to die as I should have done the moment that thief stole my life and put me with child. I should have taken the baby in my arms and jumped from a bridge.”
“The baby is me, Rose.”
“Fatherless a child is worse than dead. We’re castoffs, you and I.” Rose reasoned from within the oven, absurdly. Yet the room had begun to fill with that cloying, fartlike odor Miriam had been expertly trained to regard as a life-or-death disaster.
Call the gas company! Open all the doors, run out, find a neighbor!
Families they knew hid beyond the walls in both directions, perhaps hearing Rose’s moans and shrieks as they sat at morning coffee and newspaper. Rose was off speaking terms with every single member of them.
“Speak for yourself. What lies, Rose. After all this time. If you’d wanted me to have a father you could have told me where he was. You wouldn’t let me write a
letter
.”
“He tossed you aside without a glance. You think that man had learned to love a child who was barely doing more than combing her doll’s hair by the time he vanished? You couldn’t give him the satisfaction of making an audience for his great rhetorical postures, you couldn’t buy him a drink, you couldn’t prop up his vanities any better than I could. What would you say to such a man in a letter?”
“A man, everything that happened to you was done by a man. For a revolutionary your heartbreak is awfully pedestrian, Rose.”
“Pedestrian!” It was, admittedly, a peculiar word to throw at the block-watcher, the Citizens’ Patroller, the consummate enraged flaneur that was Rose Zimmer. Rose was the Pope of Pedestrianism, scalding all of Sunnyside with her inquisitions-on-the-hoof. The stink of gas continued to expand in the room, a headache with the ambition to cure you of every future headache.
“Rear guard, Mother. Weren’t men and women to be equally responsible for their lives in your revolutionary blueprints? Or are those now going into the oven as well?”
Every word Miriam hurled at Rose, as well as the exquisite torque with which it was hurled, came straight from Rose herself. Miriam relished this notion, that Rose must feel she faced a renegade self, the demon memorizer of her inmost hypocrisies.
You
“I don’t want to live to see you put with child and abandoned as I was by that son of a bitch who was your father. My life’s been nothing but one long heartbreak since the moment he first laid a hand on mybody, now you’re walking out the door to finish the job. But I’ll finish it for you. It’s fine, I’ve lived too many years past the destruction of everything that once mattered. I can’t bear to live through the trials of your stupidity and suffering as I did my own. As if I taught you
nothing
.”
“You’re not making sense, you put too many things together, Rose.” Miriam flapped the magazine under her arm but refused yet to intervene, to take a step in Rose’s direction. “My father isn’t responsible for everything in your life, he wasn’t around long enough for that. My father, for instance, didn’t humiliate the Soviet, you know. Khrushchev did that.” Could Miriam’s scorn embarrass Rose from her demonstration? Rose flopped her arms as though trying to clamber deeper into the oven, a whale going ashore. If Rose could see her own ass from this vantage she’d quit immediately.
“I’m already alone, leave me to die as I should have done the moment that thief stole my life and put me with child. I should have taken the baby in my arms and jumped from a bridge.”
“The baby is me, Rose.”
“Fatherless a child is worse than dead. We’re castoffs, you and I.” Rose reasoned from within the oven, absurdly. Yet the room had begun to fill with that cloying, fartlike odor Miriam had been expertly trained to regard as a life-or-death disaster.
Call the gas company! Open all the doors, run out, find a neighbor!
Families they knew hid beyond the walls in both directions, perhaps hearing Rose’s moans and shrieks as they sat at morning coffee and newspaper. Rose was off speaking terms with every single member of them.
“Speak for yourself. What lies, Rose. After all this time. If you’d wanted me to have a father you could have told me where he was. You wouldn’t let me write a
letter
.”
“He tossed you aside without a glance. You think that man had learned to love a child who was barely doing more than combing her doll’s hair by the time he vanished? You couldn’t give him the satisfaction of making an audience for his great rhetorical postures, you couldn’t buy him a drink, you couldn’t prop up his vanities any better than I could. What would you say to such a man in a letter?”
“A man, everything that happened to you was done by a man. For a revolutionary your heartbreak is awfully pedestrian, Rose.”
“Pedestrian!” It was, admittedly, a peculiar word to throw at the block-watcher, the Citizens’ Patroller, the consummate enraged flaneur that was Rose Zimmer. Rose was the Pope of Pedestrianism, scalding all of Sunnyside with her inquisitions-on-the-hoof. The stink of gas continued to expand in the room, a headache with the ambition to cure you of every future headache.
“Rear guard, Mother. Weren’t men and women to be equally responsible for their lives in your revolutionary blueprints? Or are those now going into the oven as well?”
Every word Miriam hurled at Rose, as well as the exquisite torque with which it was hurled, came straight from Rose herself. Miriam relished this notion, that Rose must feel she faced a renegade self, the demon memorizer of her inmost hypocrisies.
You
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