Taking It Read Online Free

were sure there was something wrong with him, something medical, genetic.
    Maureen said, “Remember that time you told him he could go home if he wasn’t feeling well?”
    Maureen and I always sat together when we shared a class. She doodled a lot when she was bored, filling her notes with stars and planets.
    We were quiet for a moment, enjoying each other’s company. Half the time I couldn’t stand Maureen, but the rest of the time she was like a force of nature, terrible weather that could turn sunny and then, after a while, turn back again.
    â€œThe pain I feel,” said Maureen, “is real.”
    â€œYou agonize more than anyone who ever lived,” I said. I meant it as a kind of compliment. “Seventeen years of torture.”
    â€œI saw a woman on television who looks the way you’ll look in a couple of years,” said Maureen.
    â€œBeautiful woman, right?” I wandered away from her. There was a smell of yeast in the kitchen, and dough drowsed under the plastic dome of a bread machine. There was a bunch of purple onions, and a row of small-to-machete knives on the wall. Maureen was the only person I knew who made yogurt, and her father sometimes made hand-cranked ice cream.
    Back in the living room, Maureen was waiting for me, and started in again. “She had these big pores, you could see even on the TV screen. Too much makeup, the skin not being able to breathe.”
    And then I remembered. I felt sick.
    I had forgotten my mother. She was waiting for me at Nordstrom’s, all the way across the Bay. I was two hours late.
    Three hours late by now.
    And nobody makes my mother wait.

5
    â€œAlso, she was really gaunt and her hair was all over the place.” It took me a moment to follow what Maureen was talking about, some person on TV. I was standing there looking at a ceramic poison-arrow frog and realizing that I was losing my mind.
    I could call Nordstrom’s, I thought. I could have my mother paged. I could make up a story, a flat on the Nimitz Freeway, the AAA tow truck stuck in traffic. I could tell her I got sick, stomach flu. But my mother would have gone home by now, or over to Gump’s to buy another gold fountain pen to add to Adler’s collection.
    I don’t believe in astrology, but sometimes I can feel what is happening out in space, how it pulls on my insides one way and another, like tides. By now my mother was thinking of ways to kill me.
    It would be like the old days, real fury. It must be like this when you realize you’re getting Alzheimer’s disease. Little things go wrong. Or even worse, it must be like this when you start to go insane.
    â€œDo you want to know how the vase got broken?” Maureen asked.
    It was a relief to be able to keep talking. “You said you dropped it.”
    I went over to a mirror on the wall, the glass framed with carved purple bananas.
    â€œThat’s not what I said,” Maureen replied.
    Nobody could tell by looking at me what I was feeling. I gave Maureen one of my best expressions, a sophisticated woman faced with someone less fortunate than herself. Inside I was shriveling. “Tell your dad that I picked it up and threw it at you.”
    â€œI’m not so afraid he’ll be angry,” said Maureen. “It’s more like—I can’t bear to see the look in his eyes.”
    I wanted a cigarette, but Maureen wouldn’t let me smoke in her house. It gave her asthma. Her father was a professor at Cal at the school of optometry, and her mother helped write the bar exams used by each state. She was always calling from distant hotel rooms, lecturing in Milwaukee or Tucson. None of them smoked, but they left big red and purple ashtrays all over, Aztec-style pottery you could stub out your Marlboro in.
    Maureen lifted her head again. She was looking right at me, and she had no idea how I felt. “I get these cramps when I’m upset,” she said. Maureen