Dear Digby Read Online Free Page B

right?”
    “Right.”
    “Betty, don’t get me wrong. But I know everything you’re going to say here. You took your mother’s name because you wanted to be free of the male patronymic and added ‘child’ to designate yourself, then I assume that you went back to your original name because you found Myrtlechild kind of a dumb name.”
    “You’re partly right. The first part. I went back to Betty Berry because my children were embarrassed by the other name.”
    I looked at her. Children? I’d never known about any children—Betty was a lesbian. She looked like Gertrude Stein’s sex therapist. Children?? I saw now how stupid I’d been, looking at a cliché, not Betty.
    “It’s great—the way you’re looking at me. Yes, I have kids. Two little girls. My husband kept them when I fell in love with a woman and had to leave.”
    She was going to start confessing something. Why did this happen to me? Why did I attract the lonely, the miserable, the desperate—and why did they feel such a need to confide in me? I looked down at my letter to Iris.
Let’s wake up here, Iris. Let’s face the fact that this is not happening to you—at least not under hypnosis, kiddo. Who is it that you’re inviting into your room at night?
    Betty took another swig. “My husband won custody of the children when I left. He won’t let me see them. He’s convinced the court I’m a bad influence. He told me on the phone that the oldest thinks I’m dead.”
    She sat up and banged the vodka bottle on the desk. It splashed over the top and spritzed a few more letters.
    “I’m not alive? Do I look dead to you? Don’t I look like I’m still the mother of Jenna and Louise? It’s Lou-Lou’s birthday today; she’s nine and I sent her a gift. I had a SIS messenger take it over to their apartment—my ex-husband told her to wait a minute, went out of the room, then came back with the gift and told the messenger to return it to me.”
    She flipped something across the desk. It was a package wrapped in red-and-blue paper with a bright red bow, a tiny plastic clown dancing from the bow. A piece of ruled writing paper had been taped to the package. On it was painstakingly printed:
LEAVE ME ALONE MOMMY. YOUR DEAD. FOREVER.
    I handed the package back.
    We sat in silence for a while, then Betty Berry stood up. “Jesus, Willis,” she said. “When are you going to take those fucking rabbit ears off? You look like a goddamn idiot.”
    She picked up her bottle and her terrible package and shoved off, teetering a little. I stood up and walked, glancing at my reflection across the room in the opaque windows of late afternoon. An elongated, square-cornered figure in an antennalike headpiece slowed down, stopped to stare. I did look like a goddamn idiot.
    I sat down, pulled off the rabbit ears, and tore up the soggy letter to Iris Moss. And began to type another.
Dear Iris,
    I just destroyed a very smart-aleck letter to you written by me in a state of mind that had nothing to do with your communication to SIS. First of all, SIS can’t pay you for your thoughts; we don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. We do publish letters to the editor occasionally, but I think your remarks might be misunderstood by our general reading public. I’m presumptuous enough to think I understand what you’re talking about in your letter. I am touched by your straightforward presentation of the facts of your life, including the hypnosis-rapes you endure. There is a part of everyone’s mind that’s hypnotized, that cannot look at itself. I have so much in me that’s in a trance, a state of suggestion. Iris, I would like to stay in touch with you. I would like to know if you ever discover the identity of this intruder-in-sleep. I would like very much to know what is going to happen to us.
    Write soon,
    WJD
    [[Footnote]]
* I’m a trained Black Belt.

Two
    A FTER SUPPER AND the dwindling campfire: unexpected rain. A huge rustle, an intimate downpouring, coming in