The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) Read Online Free Page A

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book)
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street. She
leaned out, haunches wide as a baker's oven, a smouldering spoon in
each hand, worried the flames might spread to the wooden stalls
of Seventh Street, before finally saying, "Oh, the pot, it didn't
break, maybe dent a little, nothing to worry about, fire is out...." When
she turned I was slumped in a kitchen chair, face in my hands, aching
all over, ashamed. She came over and put her arm around my shoulder,
a kindness that loosened my guard and made me feel a hundred
times worse.
    "Oh do not have worry!" she said. "Please do not have ... is very
difficult making baclava. Do not cry, it will be better next time...."
    So I sat there, hiding my face, letting her think what was bothering me was the fear of disappointing my husband, when what I was
really thinking was, Why didn't anyone tell me marriage was just another form of busy-making? Why didn't anyone tell me a name change doesn't change things that've already happened?
    Those were my days. Every night at six Dimitri came up the stairs
whistling. I'd put his hands in warm water and massage them, so as to
get the crimps out. When finished, I'd present him with whatever creation Georgina had helped me with that afternoon. Like all lanky men, he ate enough to feed a platoon, and no matter how singed or dry or
oversalty the food he'd polish it off while making delighted little snorting noises. Was a little like listening to a Pomeranian trying to breathe.

    "Is good," he'd say, "is so good," the problem being he'd say this
no matter how bad the food was (and many a night it was pretty bad)
so that after a while he started sounding more like a father being patient
with a child than a man discussing things with his wife. Generally, I
ate little.
    Next was the evening's recreation, Dimitri being fond of reading
newspapers, listening to oud music recorded onto cylinders or having
people over for games of cards. All this I would've enjoyed, as I do like
music and've never had a quarrel with a spirited hand of whist, the
problem being it was during this portion of the evening I'd start to
worry about our nightly congress, which still wasn't proceeding in a
way I figured was even close to natural. Mind you, I wasn't positive,
my not having enough nerve to raise the subject with Georgina:
could've been all women had to be elixired to the gills before dealing
with husbandly randiness. I had no way of knowing, my own mother
not being alive to ask, and I guess that's why I put up with it as long as
I did; for all I knew I was being unreasonable.
    Dimitri wanted children, you see. Wanted them the way a man
lost in the Kalahari wants water. He craved them. Yearned for them.
He'd wasted so much time setting up in America he worried he'd never
have them, which to a Greek is as embarrassing as a forehead boil.
What I'm saying is, he wanted to do it every night. And while we
didn't do it every night-he was gentlemanly if I pleaded a headache
or a case of the monthlies-we came pretty close. A routine developed.
I'd tense up, his long loggedness wouldn't go where God had meant it
to go, there'd be an excess of prodding, until finally he'd suggest I take
a Chinaman bottle. After a couple of months we learned to skip the first
two steps and springboard straight to the third, so that within fifteen
minutes I'd be flat on my back, giggling and watching those damn tin soldiers on manouevres across our shimmering bedroom ceiling. I'd
wake up sometime in the middle of the next day, feeling foggy and
headachy and a little more like my grip on things was loosening.

    Understand there were things I liked about Dimitri. He brought
me flowers, often, one arm crooked behind his back as he came
whistling up the stairs. He wasn't the type of man you had to follow
around and clean up after, his having been a bachelor for so long, and he
didn't drink, other than the odd glass of retsina. Plus, he'd given me a
place to go, and at eighteen years of age it
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