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

them anymore. Mattie prayed with them every night, then prayed
separately for their hearts to heal, even prayed for Nicky's happiness
and half meant it. After a month of weekend visits with Nicky, the
children's distress lessened.

Mattie hadn't worried so much about Ella, who had ways of comforting
herself and a generally sunny disposition. But Harry was sad and
concerned. He was erratic, like Nicky: sometimes he acted so mean to
Mattie and Ella that Mattie wanted to strike him, and at other times he
could be utterly charming, especially with his sister. He'd carry her
around from room to room as if she were an animated grocery sack,
making faces and wisecracks to amuse her. Mattie saw how much he
wanted Ella to disappear sometimes, but that he also listened for her
when she was in her crib. He put his face right into hers to make her
laugh, and she chortled, pleased that something was so grabbably close.
Then he'd pinch her and make her cry. He took things from her, and
she wailed, while he looked blank and innocent. He hugged her too
tightly, he loved her too much, he hated all the same things he loved
about her--her ineptitude, her cuteness, her messiness, her smells.

Mattie stopped seeing the therapist, and paid for Harry to go
instead.

It helped; time's passing helped. Nothing really helped. And the
house--it had been a mistake to move back in. It was falling apart,
revealing mold and memories and ghosts. Mattie's beloved father had
died of a heart attack in the laundry room, twenty years before. He
was fifty-one and had never looked better than in the moments before
his death. He had looked a lot like Mattie's brother Al did now, but
trimmer, tall, with thicker brown hair, and the huge teeth that hardly
fit in his mouth. Everyone had loved her father, including, about half
the time, Isa. Still, it had been a miserable marriage, a shifting,
malignant lava-lamp of a marriage, although it always looked great from
the outside, two tall handsome parents well known in the town for their
willingness to serve on the city council, the school board, liberals
who agitated for the poor, who had an air of being with it, hikers in
the days when knapsacks were avantgarde. They were people to whom
others turned for advice. But inside the house, which they had bought
for $20,000 in 1963, slammed doors and loud silences filled the spaces
between exquisite meals and good California wine.

Mattie had thought she was getting such a great deal when she moved
back in--free rent on a house with a bedroom for each of her children.
But it didn't take long to notice the secrets and memories tiptoeing
around, holding their highballs, debonair and amused at first, then
hissing in the master bedroom as her mother had when her father
returned from his monthly trips to Washington, D.C. Harry was now
sleeping in the bedroom where Al had grown up, where at fifteen he had
started doing drugs while Isa and Alfred pretended he was doing
homework; Ella slept in Mattie's old room, the one with the slanted