Read Online Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen - Free Book Online Page A

the word remain). And you, David, who with a stone slew, screaming: Lord, take my heart of stone and give me flesh. **
*Alludes to the myth of Sisyphus. who was punished eternally in Tartarus for reporting the whereabouts of Zeus. king of the gods, to the father of the maiden Zeus had seized.
**Alludes to the biblical story of David's triumph over the giant Philistine, Goliath; Samuel 1:17. The quotation, which Olsen heard in a black church, paraphrases Ezekiel 11: 19: ''I shall remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh."

 

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Who was screaming? Why was she back in the common room of the prison, the sun motes dancing in the shafts of light, and the informer being brought in, a prisoner now, like themselves. And Lisa leaping, yes, Lisa, the gentle and tender, biting at the betrayer's jugular. Screaming and screaming.
No, it is the children screaming. Another of Paul and Sammy's terrible fights?
In Vivi's house. Severely: you are in Vivi's house.
Blows, screams, a call: ''Grandma!" For her? Oh please not for her. Hide, hunch behind the dresses deeper. But a trembling little body hurls itself beside hersurprised, smothered laughter, arms surround her neck, tears rub dry on her cheek, and words too soft to understand whisper into her ear (Is this where you hide too, Grammy? It's my secret place, we have a secret now).
And the sweat beads, and the long shudder seizes.
It seemed the great ear pressed inside now, and the knocking. "We have to go home," she told him, "I grow ill here."
"It's your own fault, Mrs. Bodybusy, you do not rest, you do too much." He raged, but the fear was in his eyes. "It was a serious operation, they told you to take care . . . All right, we will go to where you can rest."
But where? Not home to death, not yet. He had thought to Lennie's, to Clara's; beautiful visits with each of the children. She would have to rest first, be stronger. If they could but go to Floridait glittered before him, the never-realized promise of Florida. Califor-

 

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nia: of course. (The money, the money, dwindling!) Los Angeles first for sun and rest, then to Lennie's in San Francisco.
He told her the next day. ''You saw what Nancy wrote: snow and wind back home, a terrible winter. And look at youall bones and a swollen belly. I called Phil: he said: 'A prescription, Los Angeles sun and rest.'"
She watched the words on his lips. "You have sold the house," she cried, "that is why we do not go home. That is why you talk no more of the Haven, why there is money for travel. After the children you will drag me to the Haven."
"The Haven! Who thinks of the Haven any more? Tell her, Vivi, tell Mrs. Suspicious: a prescription, sun and rest, to make you healthy. . . . And how could I sell the house without you?"
At the place of farewells and greetings, of winds of coming and winds of going, they say their good-byes.
They look back at her with the eyes of others before them: Richard with her own blue blaze; Ann with the nordic eyes of Tim; Morty's dreaming brown of a great-grandmother he will never know; Dody with the laughing eyes of him who had been her springtide love (who stands beside her now); Vivi's, all tears.
The baby's eyes are closed in sleep.
Good-bye, my children.
III
It is to the back of the great city he brought her, to the dwelling places of the cast-off old. Bounded by two lines

 

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of amusement piers to the north and to the south, and between a long straight paving rimmed with black benches facing the sandsands so wide the ocean is only a far fluting.
In the brief vacation season, some of the boarded stores fronting the sands open, and families, young people and children, may be seen. A little tasselled tram shuttles between the piers, and the lights of roller coasters prink and tweak over those who come to have sensation made in them.
The rest of the year it is abandoned to the old, all else boarded up and still; seemingly empty, except the occasional days and