State of Grace Read Online Free Page A

constantly. My soul cringed before it, my heart sweated and shrunk in my chest. I became all matter, lush and blameless, turning into the sun. I had been the perfect child—motherless—and now I was the ideal young woman. All tanned meat, carefree and compliant. Yet I find myself performing as he would want me to, though I hardly ever dwell on Father any more. I use the doggerel, of course, which can’t be helped. But he is so constant! His pursuit in my head and my heart stops only long enough to show me that it is going on still.
    Yes, I’m going into my second year. Like the alcoholic, I’ll age myself through abstinence. I’ve even learned a harmless thing or two. In the summer, I worked in the dirtiest little Dairi-Whip in the South. The practices that went on there! My God. I left to become a cocktail waitress in one of the town’s finest restaurants. Where even more terrible things occurred. Why, I’ve heard them pissing in the Rhine wine. Jizz in the béchamel. Running sores in the cherry flan. I letit all ride. Who am I to bubble the globe of the ordinary life? My only concern was that Father would enter and demand to be served. He sent his surrogates, I know, but never himself. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this, they’d say. Actually, I’ve never seen a man who resembles him in any way, but if Father’s the Shepherd, then we’re all his willing lambs.
    You’ve a nice face, dear, they’d say. You bring to mind a girl I loved once and lost, and what are you doing after this place closes and you’ve washed your lovely hands?
    When you think of life’s routine … They’d always have to make a remark about Entree Six: Red Snapper, Hush Puppy and Cole Slaw, our luncheon special all for only $1.35. They’d have the same attire—seersucker jacket, black pants, white shirt—and the same amusements in their linty pockets. Comb, nail clip and a roll of Life Savers in assorted flavors. I believe that 98 per cent, if not more, of all Life Savers in America are sold to middle-aged men out to turn a trick. I can’t understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.
    Yet I’d attend to them for I’m passing the time while I recover. I’m just taking this opportunity to get better. Yes, we’d go out, these patrons, these consumers, and myself. Down to the race track and a bottle of Mums. Scratching at me beneath the clubhouse table as though I were a flea. Each time they got up they shot their cuffs and grazed me while passing. Father sees all this. He imagines that I’m doing it. I must confess, I used to see him everywhere. On the phone and in my sorority sisters’ heartshaped lockets. On some mornings when the air is very clear, windless muggy mornings when I feel my head earnestly trying to repair itself, I can hear him tracking me. It’s a sound like a hymn. Pale. Full of rectitude. And I’m distressed because I see that even when I cheat, I’m losing.
    But the summer vanished and now it’s the fall. I’m rockingon the swing as though in my dotage, watching the students leave their classes and spill across the lawns, a pretty amoeba washing up the walks, cutting across the grass, which is cut out like cookies in the shape of Greek letters.
    It’s accurate grass, not a single Weed, all the roots and rhizome stacked in the gutters. This whole estate, this college acreage, once belonged to a madman. He had a circus quartered here. You can still see the lions’ paw prints on the concrete rim of the swimming pool, and stranger things still and some not so strange. What acts! Elephants, bears and Siamese twins truly from Siam. Silhouette artists and palmists. A man with a tattooed eye and another with an organ growing directly from his ear. Actually it looked more like an infant’s pacifer, but who would come to see that? They billed it as his organ.
    He’s around still, a soldier of fortune.
    Many of the old performers return. Dwarfs and