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Authors: Jonathan Lethem
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“Rear guard?”
Rose cried. Like an animal freeing itself from a burrow in which she’d nosed against a hostile occupant, Rose came clear of the oven. From her knees she tackled Miriam to the floor. For one instant Miriam found herself swept into her mother’s incoherent embrace, arms of iron, bosom of cloying depths, corkscrewed face corroding her own with its bleachy tears. Then, as if she was and had always been only a child, her body to be handled, limbs shoved through sleeves, hoisted bruisingly here and there, a terrifying slackness came over her, feeling Rose’s next intention. Every strength unavailable to Miriam had apparently flowed into her mother’s monstrous wrists and shoulders, her wrestler’s grip. Rose shoved Miriam’s head into the oven. Miriam only slackened. Perhaps it didn’t even matter, so much gas filled the room already. Miriam still preferred not to credit Rose with calculation, despite essentially having begun by sealing the rooms of the apartment. One inspiration flowed into another. This was how you earned the right to inflict murder: by showing a willingness to murder yourself first.
Perhaps Rose was testing Miriam. Perhaps Miriam tested her back by the absence of struggle: She anyway wanted to believe she’d been defiant, rather than suicidally helpless, when an instant later Rose’s vise clench loosened. Miriam was carried into her mother’s lap as they both fell backward, Miriam’s crown thudding on the oven’s top lip as she came free of it. “You’d do it, you’d die to get away from me,” Rose groaned. She writhed loose from underneath, cutting short theirmother-reading-storybook-to-child tableau before the flooding oven, to drape herself in a morose, shuddering heap. One breast found the rent in her nightdress and pooled like pancake batter on the kitchen’s tile.
Miriam shut off the gas. Then stood, smoothed her disarranged clothing, and went to the kitchen windows, raising the shades to light, the sashes to fresh air. Stepping over her mother without a downward glance, she made the rounds of the apartment’s windows, inviting the cool morning to draw the poison out. It would take a while. By the time Miriam circled to the kitchen door Rose had departed to her room, aligned sepulchrally on its high narrow bed like a figure in a marble crypt, Grant or Lenin.
“You’re killing me,” Rose intoned when she detected by some radar Miriam’s tiptoe at her door. Rose’s head didn’t inch, black curls and gray temples sworls forged of stone.
“A family tradition.” Did Rose deserve to be teased? Miriam did it for her own sanity.
“I can’t live with you in this house.”
“First I’m killing you by leaving, now you’re kicking me out?”
“Go to him.”
Rose was less a mother than some preening and jealous Shakespearean lover, a duke fantasizing her rivals into solidity. This, in turn, led to an image of Miriam costuming herself as a man, like Rosalind, to smuggle herself into the sanctum of the Columbia dorms. Anything for a night’s sleep at this point. It was all too comically impossible to make Rose understand, how the disaster of her arrival on the scene had shipwrecked the tenuous excursion with the college boy. Miriam wondered again whether she’d see Porter a second time. Appropriate to her Shakespearean fugue, he seemed a figure from a dream. Maybe the gas had already done its work, snuck in and muddled her brain, and so she might as well have left her head lying on that oven rack and died. Shakespeare flashed before her eyes because, like any New York City public-school child before her, Miriam had memorized the plays before she stood any chance of understanding them and was doomed to spend the rest of her life seeing how the playwright had detailed every agony and absurdity of the existence to come, from his perchin history. Rose, the fiend for education, would be proud if she knew. Miriam’s legs jellied and she sagged into
“Rear guard?”
Rose cried. Like an animal freeing itself from a burrow in which she’d nosed against a hostile occupant, Rose came clear of the oven. From her knees she tackled Miriam to the floor. For one instant Miriam found herself swept into her mother’s incoherent embrace, arms of iron, bosom of cloying depths, corkscrewed face corroding her own with its bleachy tears. Then, as if she was and had always been only a child, her body to be handled, limbs shoved through sleeves, hoisted bruisingly here and there, a terrifying slackness came over her, feeling Rose’s next intention. Every strength unavailable to Miriam had apparently flowed into her mother’s monstrous wrists and shoulders, her wrestler’s grip. Rose shoved Miriam’s head into the oven. Miriam only slackened. Perhaps it didn’t even matter, so much gas filled the room already. Miriam still preferred not to credit Rose with calculation, despite essentially having begun by sealing the rooms of the apartment. One inspiration flowed into another. This was how you earned the right to inflict murder: by showing a willingness to murder yourself first.
Perhaps Rose was testing Miriam. Perhaps Miriam tested her back by the absence of struggle: She anyway wanted to believe she’d been defiant, rather than suicidally helpless, when an instant later Rose’s vise clench loosened. Miriam was carried into her mother’s lap as they both fell backward, Miriam’s crown thudding on the oven’s top lip as she came free of it. “You’d do it, you’d die to get away from me,” Rose groaned. She writhed loose from underneath, cutting short theirmother-reading-storybook-to-child tableau before the flooding oven, to drape herself in a morose, shuddering heap. One breast found the rent in her nightdress and pooled like pancake batter on the kitchen’s tile.
Miriam shut off the gas. Then stood, smoothed her disarranged clothing, and went to the kitchen windows, raising the shades to light, the sashes to fresh air. Stepping over her mother without a downward glance, she made the rounds of the apartment’s windows, inviting the cool morning to draw the poison out. It would take a while. By the time Miriam circled to the kitchen door Rose had departed to her room, aligned sepulchrally on its high narrow bed like a figure in a marble crypt, Grant or Lenin.
“You’re killing me,” Rose intoned when she detected by some radar Miriam’s tiptoe at her door. Rose’s head didn’t inch, black curls and gray temples sworls forged of stone.
“A family tradition.” Did Rose deserve to be teased? Miriam did it for her own sanity.
“I can’t live with you in this house.”
“First I’m killing you by leaving, now you’re kicking me out?”
“Go to him.”
Rose was less a mother than some preening and jealous Shakespearean lover, a duke fantasizing her rivals into solidity. This, in turn, led to an image of Miriam costuming herself as a man, like Rosalind, to smuggle herself into the sanctum of the Columbia dorms. Anything for a night’s sleep at this point. It was all too comically impossible to make Rose understand, how the disaster of her arrival on the scene had shipwrecked the tenuous excursion with the college boy. Miriam wondered again whether she’d see Porter a second time. Appropriate to her Shakespearean fugue, he seemed a figure from a dream. Maybe the gas had already done its work, snuck in and muddled her brain, and so she might as well have left her head lying on that oven rack and died. Shakespeare flashed before her eyes because, like any New York City public-school child before her, Miriam had memorized the plays before she stood any chance of understanding them and was doomed to spend the rest of her life seeing how the playwright had detailed every agony and absurdity of the existence to come, from his perchin history. Rose, the fiend for education, would be proud if she knew. Miriam’s legs jellied and she sagged into
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