Small Change Read Online Free Page A

male nude asleep in a manner that affords no rest. She thinks of an udder unmilked for days, something unbearably heavy, and feels simultaneously aroused and sad. Even in sleep he has to lug this thing around. The drawing could be a Biblical representation of Lust. It is a good drawing too.
    In some ways they are closer than ever. Even more than before, he confides his artistic ambitions and sexual doubts. She listens. She sits on the pale yellow sofa in their barely furnished living room and keeps track. Sometimes her mind wanders, sometimes she turns away in fatigue, but in general she keeps track.
    “You’re my best friend,” he says, and it would have consoled her once. Victoria is two, William is five. “I can tell you anything.”
    Here she is, a woman who has tormented and aroused herself with the thought of young boys in her husband’s bed, and what lovers does he take? An old sadsack of a drunk and a young woman. Where does that leave her?
    “Where does that leave me?” she asks.
    She sees him disappearing, yet her footsteps are the ones filling with sand, hers are the fingerprints vanishingoff the wall. He will never leave the house, he will never leave his studio.
    By the end of the summer she no longer wants to keep abreast of his every thought and she wants to tell someone in exactly those words.
I no longer want to keep abreast
. But no one calls.
    She runs her hand along the back of the sofa, releasing old dust into the late afternoon light. She looks beyond the stirred and shining air, beyond the disturbances in her life (dusty beautiful spore-filled air; a potential for flowers) to the phone.

    She doesn’t remember, except intuitively, the nightly occurrence of fingers smoothing her lips, stroking the skin under her nose and the edges of her nostrils, but when her mother returns to apply ointments, she finds that she already knows about this comfort, has acquired the knowledge the way you learn a language by listening to a tape while you sleep. Her mother returns in September after the fire.
    Maureen had risen early with the kids. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her long cotton T-shirt and was still wearing it at noon. Victoria was napping, the boy was playing in the living room. He was hungry.
    Maureen went into the kitchen to make pancakes. Sun poured into the kitchen while she poured oil into an aluminum frypan. The oil shone, the pan shone, her white T-shirt shone. And because she was leaning into the stove, because she was so close to the gas jet, because the white ofher shirt fed the hot white light of the pan and the light of the pan bounced back to her shirt and back to the pan and back to her shirt, and perhaps because grease spat onto her shirt, (no one ever fully understood), it caught fire.
    Danny was in the bath. He always had a bath when he got up around noon. Sometimes he locked the door, sometimes he wore a Walkman. It depended on his mood. There was another bathroom in the basement, if Maureen or the kids needed to pee they went there. He liked the bath to be full and hot, and the music loud.
    Maureen sprang away from the stove and flames shot up to her face. There was a sink right there. She knew there was a sink, she knew she needed water. Nevertheless, she fled the kitchen. Later she would say that she wanted to get as far away as possible from the stove, it was only natural.
    She ran screaming into the living room. But Danny didn’t hear.
    She tore a piece of fabric off the wall, an old, dry, embroidered piece of fabric from Peru. She slapped it against her chest and it went up like kindling.
    She banged on the bathroom door and still he didn’t hear. He didn’t hear her, or the fire alarm, or the boy’s screams.
    And so she ran at the door. She backed up (this would be the lasting image in the boy’s head: his mother on fire charging a locked door) and ran at it with her shoulder, knocking it halfway off its hinges and somersaulting into the bathtub.
    My old