Read Online The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus - Free Book Online

small stores kept it still. She had grown up with those Wednesday afternoons when she could not get money at the bank or see a doctor or buy a blouse, but now they were holidays for her. She had been in school so much of her life that she did not think of a year as January to January, but September to June and, outside of measured time, the respite of summer. Now her roads to and from work wound between trees that were orange and scarlet and yellow, then standing naked among pines whose branches a month later held snow, and for the first time in her memory autumn’s colors did not mean a school desk and homework, and snow the beginning of the end of half a year and Christmas holidays. One evening in December, as she crossed her lawn, she stopped and looked down at the snow nearly as high as her boots; in one arm she cradled a bag of groceries; and looking at the snow, she knew, as if for the first time, though she had believed she had known and wanted it for years, that spring’s trickle of this very snow would not mean now or ever again the beginning of the end of the final half-year, the harbinger of those three months when she lived the way they did before factory whistles and clocks.
    The bag seemed heavier, and she shifted its weight and held it more tightly. Then she went inside and up two flights of stairs and into her apartment. She put the groceries on the kitchen table and sat looking from the bag to her wet boots with snow rimming the soles and melting on the instep. She took off her gloves and unbuttoned her coat and put her damp beret on the table. For a long time she had not been afraid of people or the chances of a day, for she believed she could bear the normal pain of being alive: her heart had been broken by girls and boys, and she had borne that, and she had broken hearts and borne that too, and embarrassment and shame and humiliation and failure, and she was not one of those who, once or more wounded, waited fearfully for the next mistake or cruelty or portion of bad luck. But she was afraid of what she was going through now: having more than one feeling at once, so that feeling proud and strong and despairing and resigned, she sat suspended in fear: So this is the real world they always talked about . She said it aloud: ‘the real world,’ testing its sound in the silence; for always, when they said it, their tone was one of warning, and worse, something not only bitter and defeated but vindictive as well, the same tone they had when they said I told you so . She groped into the bag, slowly tore open a beer carton as she looked at the kitchen walls and potted plants in the window, drew out a bottle, twisted off the cap, but did not drink. Her hand went into her purse, came out with cigarettes and lighter, placed them beside the beer. She hooked a toe under the other chair, pulled it closer, and rested both feet on it. I don’t believe it. And if you don’t believe it, it’s not true, except dying .
    What she did believe through that winter and spring was that she had entered the real world of her town, its time and work and leisure, and she looked back on her years of growing up as something that had happened to her outside of the life she now lived, as though childhood and her teens (she would soon be twenty) were, like those thirteen summers from kindergarten until the year of college, a time so free of what time meant to her now that it was not time but a sanctuary from it. Now, having had those years to become herself so she could enter the very heart of the town, the business street built along the Merrimack, where she joined the rhythmic exchange of things and energy and time for money, she knew she had to move through the town, and out of it. But, wanting that motion, she could not define it, for it had nothing to do with place or even people, but something within herself: a catapult, waiting for both release and direction, that would send her away from these old streets,