Read Online The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards - Free Book Online
Authors: Kim Edwards
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changing her name from Brigitte to Bree because she liked the way it sounded: breezy, she said, and free.
Their mother, mortified by the scandalous marriage and more scandalous divorce, had married a pilot for TWA and moved to St. Louis, leaving her daughters to themselves. Well, at least one of my daughters knows how to behave, she had said, looking up from the box of china she was packing. It was autumn, the air crisp, full of golden raining leaves. Her white-blond hair was spun in an airy cloud, and her delicate features were softened with sudden emotion. Oh, Norah, I'm so thankful to have one proper girl, you can't imagine. Even if you never marry, darling, you'll always be a lady. Norah, sliding a framed portrait of her father into a carton, had flushed dark with annoyance and frustration. She too had been shocked by Bree's nerve, her daring, and she was angry that the rules seemed to have shifted, that Bree had more or less gotten away with it-the marriage, the divorce, the scandal.
She hated what Bree had done to them all.
She wished desperately that she'd done it first.
But it would never have occurred to her. She'd always been good; that was her job. She had been close to their father, an affable, disorganized man, an expert in sheep, who had spent his days in the closed-up room at the top of the stairs, reading journals, or out at the research station, standing amid the sheep with their strange and slanting yellow eyes. She'd loved him, and all her life she had felt a compulsion to make up, somehow: for his inattention to his family; and for her mother's disappointment in having married a man so alien, finally, to herself. When he died, this compulsion to make things right again, to fix the world, had only intensified. So she went on, studying quietly and doing what was expected of her. After graduation she had worked for six months at the telephone company, a job she'd not enjoyed and had given up quite happily when she married David. Their meeting in the lingerie department of Wolf Wile's department store, their whirlwind private wedding, had been the closest she'd come to wild, herself.
Norah's life, Bree was fond of saying, was just like a TV sitcom. It's fine for you, she'd say, tossing back her long hair, wide silver bracelets halfway to her elbow. For me, I couldn't take it. I'd go nuts in about a wee't. A day!
Norah smoldered, disdained and envied Bree, bit her tongue; Bree took classes on Virginia Woolf, moved in with the manager of a health-food restaurant in Louisville, and stopped coming by. Yet strangely, when Norah became pregnant, everything changed. Bree started showing up again, bringing lacy booties and tiny silver ankle bracelets imported from India; these, she'd found in a shop in San Francisco. She brought mimeographed sheets with advice on breast-feeding, too, once she heard that Norah planned to forgo bottles. Norah, by then, was glad to see her. Glad for the sweet, impractical gifts, glad for her support; in 1964 breast-feeding was radical, and she'd had a hard time finding information. Their mother refused to discuss the idea; the women in her sewing circle had told her they would put chairs in their bathrooms to ensure her privacy. At this, to her relief, Bree had scoffed out loud. What a bunch of prudes! she insisted. Pay no attention.
Still, while Norah was grateful for Bree's support, she was, at times, also secretly uneasy. In Bree's world, which seemed mostly to exist elsewhere, in California, or Paris, or New York City, young women walked around their houses topless, took pictures of themselves with babies at their enormous breasts, wrote columns advocating the nutritional benefits of human milk. It's completely natural; it's in our nature as mammals, Bree explained, but the very thought of herself as a mammal, driven by instincts, described by words like suckling (so close to rutting, she thought, reducing something beautiful to the level of a barn), had made Norah blush and
Their mother, mortified by the scandalous marriage and more scandalous divorce, had married a pilot for TWA and moved to St. Louis, leaving her daughters to themselves. Well, at least one of my daughters knows how to behave, she had said, looking up from the box of china she was packing. It was autumn, the air crisp, full of golden raining leaves. Her white-blond hair was spun in an airy cloud, and her delicate features were softened with sudden emotion. Oh, Norah, I'm so thankful to have one proper girl, you can't imagine. Even if you never marry, darling, you'll always be a lady. Norah, sliding a framed portrait of her father into a carton, had flushed dark with annoyance and frustration. She too had been shocked by Bree's nerve, her daring, and she was angry that the rules seemed to have shifted, that Bree had more or less gotten away with it-the marriage, the divorce, the scandal.
She hated what Bree had done to them all.
She wished desperately that she'd done it first.
But it would never have occurred to her. She'd always been good; that was her job. She had been close to their father, an affable, disorganized man, an expert in sheep, who had spent his days in the closed-up room at the top of the stairs, reading journals, or out at the research station, standing amid the sheep with their strange and slanting yellow eyes. She'd loved him, and all her life she had felt a compulsion to make up, somehow: for his inattention to his family; and for her mother's disappointment in having married a man so alien, finally, to herself. When he died, this compulsion to make things right again, to fix the world, had only intensified. So she went on, studying quietly and doing what was expected of her. After graduation she had worked for six months at the telephone company, a job she'd not enjoyed and had given up quite happily when she married David. Their meeting in the lingerie department of Wolf Wile's department store, their whirlwind private wedding, had been the closest she'd come to wild, herself.
Norah's life, Bree was fond of saying, was just like a TV sitcom. It's fine for you, she'd say, tossing back her long hair, wide silver bracelets halfway to her elbow. For me, I couldn't take it. I'd go nuts in about a wee't. A day!
Norah smoldered, disdained and envied Bree, bit her tongue; Bree took classes on Virginia Woolf, moved in with the manager of a health-food restaurant in Louisville, and stopped coming by. Yet strangely, when Norah became pregnant, everything changed. Bree started showing up again, bringing lacy booties and tiny silver ankle bracelets imported from India; these, she'd found in a shop in San Francisco. She brought mimeographed sheets with advice on breast-feeding, too, once she heard that Norah planned to forgo bottles. Norah, by then, was glad to see her. Glad for the sweet, impractical gifts, glad for her support; in 1964 breast-feeding was radical, and she'd had a hard time finding information. Their mother refused to discuss the idea; the women in her sewing circle had told her they would put chairs in their bathrooms to ensure her privacy. At this, to her relief, Bree had scoffed out loud. What a bunch of prudes! she insisted. Pay no attention.
Still, while Norah was grateful for Bree's support, she was, at times, also secretly uneasy. In Bree's world, which seemed mostly to exist elsewhere, in California, or Paris, or New York City, young women walked around their houses topless, took pictures of themselves with babies at their enormous breasts, wrote columns advocating the nutritional benefits of human milk. It's completely natural; it's in our nature as mammals, Bree explained, but the very thought of herself as a mammal, driven by instincts, described by words like suckling (so close to rutting, she thought, reducing something beautiful to the level of a barn), had made Norah blush and
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