"Lamott, Anne - Blue Shoe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lamott Anne)

market, but a month after she'd reached the top of the waiting list for
The Sequoias, a retirement community where she hoped to grow old, she'd
moved out. She had some money socked away from her husband Alfred's
small life insurance policy, which, coupled with Social Security, was
enough to pay for her expenses in the new apartment.

Her unwanted stuff was still on the shelves, and in the garage and
attic. The house looked much as it always had, or at least for the
nearly twenty years Isa had lived there alone, after Mattie and Al had
moved out and Alfred had died. Isa had taken one couch with her to the
new apartment, a few chairs, a dresser, and Al's old twin bed, and had
sent the rest of her furniture to the dump or Goodwill. There were
mirrors in every room of the house. Isa had always liked to look at
herself, striking movie star poses. Mattie avoided the mirrors
whenever possible. What she saw when she did glance at her reflection
was chestnut-brown hair, which she usually wore in a braid; tired eyes,
so dark that the pupils didn't show; fair English skin and a broad snub
nose from her mother; black lashes and brows from her dad, as well as
his big teeth; and full lips, set off nicely by a

white ring of scar on her chin from a rock Al had thrown at her when
they were young.

Isa had left her house vacant for six months at Mattie's request, while
Mattie got up the nerve to leave her husband. She'd been planning to
break away from Nicky in spring, because she'd had it with his mammoth
inconsistency--his hilarious and brilliant conversations, interspersed
with brooding narcissism; his charming and amiable contributions to the
business of raising children together, wedged in between immobilization
and depression, for which he would not seek help; his inexhaustible
interest in her thoughts about the world, progressive politics, and the
arts, marbled into the slow, cold gaze with which he looked up from his
secret phone calls when she entered his study; the silent, wounding way
he stopped making love to her for weeks at a time, right after nights
of hot, tender sex. Then, in March, when the world was wild and green,
full of blossom and fragrance and mud, Mattie's best friend, Angela,
had told her gently that she was moving to Los Angeles, to live with
Julie, the woman she'd recently fallen for.

"But you're my only real friend!" Mattie wept, and Angela had cried
too. They had been talking in different kitchens for years now, ever
since the night they met over a stranger's stove during a party for
Nicky, when the College of Marin made him an assistant professor of
literature. Minutes after meeting, the two women broke off entirely
from the others. They sat on the kitchen floor and talked like
teenagers about their mothers and their bodies and God, to whom they
were both devoted, and their pets, to whom they were also devoted, and
Nicky, about whom they were both ambivalent. Angela worked with him at
the college, where she read and graded papers for the entire English
department, and while she enjoyed his sense of humor, she disliked his