Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Online Free

said, “I believe that if Jesus walked into this house this minute, you wouldn’t even raise your eyes.”
    Helen bit her lip and reluctantly put down the book. “Oh, Mom,” she said.
    “And maybe you’d be right. I bet he’d lack charisma. I’d bet my last dollar on it. The only reason he was charismatic before was that those people lived in a prerational time.”
    “Jesus isn’t going to walk in here, Mom, come on,” Helen said.
    “Well, something is, something big. You’d better be ready for it.” She was angry. “You’ve got the harder road,” she said finally. “You’ve got to behave in a way you won’t be afraid to remember, but you know what my road is? My road is the
new
road.”
    Like everyone, Lenore had a dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked. There were billions upon billions of people, after all, it wasn’t out of the question.
    “The new road?” Helen asked.
    “Oh, there’s nothing new about it,” Lenore said, annoyed. She stroked her own face with her hands. She shouldn’t bedoing this to Helen, her little Helen. But Helen was so docile. She wasn’t fighting this! You had to fight.
    “Go back to what you were doing,” Lenore said. “You were reading, you were concentrating. I wish I could concentrate. My mind just goes from one thing to another. Do you know what I was thinking of, did I ever tell you this? When I was still well, before I went to the doctor? I was in a department store looking at a coat and I must have stepped in front of this woman who was looking at coats too. I had no idea … and she just started to stare at me. I was very aware of it but I ignored it for a long time, I even moved away. But she followed me, still staring. Until I finally looked at her. She still stared but now she was looking through me,
through
me, and she began talking to someone, resuming some conversation with whoever was with her, and all the while she was staring at me to show how insignificant I was, how utterly insignificant …” Lenore leaned toward Helen but then drew back, dizzy. “And I felt cursed. I felt as though she’d cursed me.”
    “What a weirdo,” Helen said.
    “I wonder where she picked that up,” Lenore said. “I’d like to see her again. I’d like to murder her.”
    “I would too,” Helen said. “I really would.”
    “No, murder’s too good for that one,” Lenore said. “Murder’s for the elect. I think of murder … sometimes I think I wish someone would murder me. Out of the blue, without warning, for no reason. I wouldn’t believe it was happening. It would be like not dying at all.”
    Helen sat in her nightgown. She felt cold. People had written books about death. No one knew what they were talking about, of course.
    “Oh, I’m tired of talk,” Lenore said. “I don’t want to talkanymore. I’m tired of thinking about it. Why do we have to think about it all the time! One of those philosophers said that Death was the Big Thinker. It thinks the instant that was your life, right down to the bottom of it.”
    “Which one?” Helen asked.
    “Which one what?”
    “Which philosopher?”
    “I can’t recall,” Lenore said. Sometimes Helen amused her, she really amused her.
    Lenore didn’t dream that night. She lay in bed panting. She wasn’t ready but there was nothing left to be done. The day before the girl had washed and dried the bedsheets and before she put them on again she had ironed them. Ironed them! They were just delicious, still delicious. It was the girl who loved to iron. She’d iron anything. What’s-her-name. Lenore got up and moved through the rooms of the house uncertainly. She could hardly keep her balance. Then she went down into the cellar. Her heart was pounding, it felt wet and small in her chest. She looked at the oil gauge on the furnace. It was a little over one-quarter full. She wasn’t going to order any more, she’d just see what happened. She barely had the strength to get back