"Rosenblum-CaliforniaDreamer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenbaum Benjamin)

MARY ROSENBLUM

CALIFORNIA DREAMER

THE RELIEF BOAT CAME ONCE a week. This morning it had been a sturdy salmon
fisher, hired down from Oregon. The crew had unloaded the usual relief supplies;
canned milk and shrink-wrapped cheese, cans of peanut butter and stuff like
that. It had unloaded mail.

Mail. Letters. Junk mail, for God's sake. No power yet, no telephones, but the
US Postal Service had come through. Neither rain nor snow nor earthquake . . .
Ellen struggled to swallow the hurting lump in her throat as she walked slowly
homeward. Back on the beach -- the new, Wave-scoured beach -- people were
sorting through envelopes and catalogues and cards. Crying and laughing. Britty
Harris had gone into hysterics over a postcard from her vacationing brother.
Wish you were here, he had scrawled on the back of a glossy picture of
Fisherman's Wharf.

Wish you were here. Neither Fisherman's Wharf nor her brother were there
anymore.

There had been no ghost mail from Rebecca. The lump swelled, threatening to turn
into more tears. Ellen ducked her head and walked faster. Her shadow stretched
seaward; a tall, thin caricature of herself. Perhaps she was becoming a
caricature; turned hollow and surreal by the rome of the Quake. Changed.

Beanpole, Rebecca had called her, and said, Why can't I be thin like you? at
least once a week. Then Ellen would tell her to quit eating so much junk food
and Rebecca would call her a Jewish mother and they would both laugh, because
Scandinavian-blonde Ellen had grown up Catholic, and Rebecca was Jewish. It had
been a ritual between them -- a lightly spoken touchstone of love. As she turned
up the walkway to the house, the unshed tears settled into Ellen's stomach, hard
as beach pebbles.

It was a cottage, more than a house. Weathered gray shingles, weathered gray
roof. Rebecca's house, because she'd always wanted to live near the sea, even
though she had called it ours. Scraggly geraniums bloomed in a pot on the tiny
front porch. The pot--generic red earthenware--was cracked. Ellen had watched it
crack, clinging to this very railing as the earth shuddered and the house
groaned in a choir of terrifying voices.

Earthquake, Ellen had thought in surprise. That's not supposed to happen here.

They'd heard it was the Big One on Jack's generator-run radio. But it was only
after the relief boats started coming that they got to see the news photos of
San Francisco and L.A. Ellen stomped sand from her shoes on the three wooden
steps, went inside. A long worktable filled half of the single main room. Boxes
of beads, feathers, and assorted junk cluttered the floor, and unfinished