"M. Rickert - Anyway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

I see us the way we are in the photograph, as though I am looking at us through a
lens, and that is not the way I would have experienced it. Then I try to remember
Robbie's father, and I find very little. Scraps of memory, almost like the sensation
when you can hear a song in your head but can't get it to the part of your brain
where you can actually sing it. I decide it isn't fair to try this with Robbie's father
because I had worked so hard to forget everything about him.

I wonder if all my mother has really lost is the ability to fake it anymore. To pretend,
the way we all do, to be living a memory-rich life. Then I decide that as a sort of
homage to her, I will try to remember her, not as she is now, in the nursing home,
curled in her bed into the shape of a comma, but how she used to be. I remember
her making me a soft-boiled egg, which I colored with a face before she dropped it
into the water, and I remember her sitting at the sewing machine with pins in her
mouth and once, in the park, while Tony and I play in the sandbox, she sits on a
bench, wearing her blue coat and her Sunday hat, the one with the feathers, her
gloved hands in her lap, talking to some man and laughing, and I remember her
sitting at the kitchen table sucking on stones. And that's it. That's all I can
remember, over and over again, as though my mind is a flip book and the pages
have gotten stuck. It seems there should be more, but as hard as I look, I can't find
any. Finally, I fall asleep.

Two weeks after my father's birthday, Robbie tells me that he has enlisted in the
Marines. Basically, I completely freak out, and thus discover that a person can be
completely freaked out while appearing only slightly so.

"Don't be upset, Mom," Robbie says after his announcement.

"It doesn't work like that. You can't do this and then tell me not to be upset. I'm
upset."

"It's just, I don't know, I've always felt like I wanted to be a soldier, ever since I was
a little kid. You know, like when people say they 'got a calling'? I always felt like I had
a calling to be a soldier. You know, like dad with figure skating."

"Hm."

"Don't just sit there, Mom, say something, okay?"

"When are you leaving?"

He pulls out the contract he signed, and the brochures and the list of supplies he
needs to buy. I read everything and nod and ask questions, and I am completely
freaked out. That's when I begin to wonder if I have been fooling myself about this
for my whole adult life, even longer. Now that I think about it, I think maybe I've
been completely freaked out ever since my mother came into my room and said
that Tony's body had been found in a dumpster in Berkeley.

I start to get suspicious of everyone: the newscaster, with her wide, placid face
reading the reports of the suicide bombings and the number killed since the war
began, my friend, Shelly, who's a doctor, smiling as she nurses her baby (the very