Before My Life Began Read Online Free Page B

between the thin twisting lines of red and white—into the wooden console. She turned in a circle like a little girl, looking around the room as if she didn’t know what to do next, then she leaned over the sink, knocked on the wall, called into the bathroom to my father that Abe was home, that Lillian was making a party, that he should come home early from work. He didn’t answer. He was coughing again, the way he did every morning, and I imagined him bent over the toilet bowl, hands on thighs. My mother went into the foyer, came back with her pocketbook. She sat next to me, took out the compact that had her initials, E.V., engraved on the gold cover—“E.V.—get it?” she liked to say to people. “My initials and name are just the same!”—and inspected her face, twisting her mouth this way and that, running her tongue around between her gums and her lips. She rubbed rouge into her cheeks, and then, while she smiled at me over the mirror in her compact, she put on fresh lipstick from a brass-colored tube that looked like a machine gun bullet, and blotted her lips with a tissue.
    â€œThere!” she said. “What do you think?”
    I shrugged and tried to keep eating. But it was hard to get the hot cereal to go down smoothly. The grains of Ralston stuck at the back of my throat and all I could think of was what it was going to be like to actually see Abe again. I’d only been in the second grade when he left for training camp four years before. He’d had a furlough once after that and had met my Aunt Lillian in Atlantic City while their daughter Sheila came and stayed with us, but I never saw him again before he was shipped overseas. Abe had been a hero and had killed a lot of Germans. Once, on a postcard, he said that he’d killed two Nazis just for me, and what I wondered—what scared me—was if killing somebody up close would change you in ways that you couldn’t ever change back, even if you didn’t know the person and even if you knew the other person would have killed you first if he could have. I wondered if he would still like me.
    â€œListen,” my mother said. “We’ll go to Poppa.”
    â€œBut I have school.”
    â€œThat’s what we’ll do, okay? Just the two of us. We’ll go to Poppa and give him the news that Abe is coming home and I’ll talk him into coming to the party. Forgive and forget, right?” She reached toward me. “You’ll come with Momma, darling?”
    â€œI have school,” I said. “I told you.”
    â€œSo I give you permission—how often in one lifetime does your uncle Abe get home from the war?”
    â€œWill you write me a note?”
    She smiled. “I’ll write you a note.”
    My father came into the kitchen, lit a cigarette, blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. Three tiny pieces of toilet paper were stuck to his cheek and chin where he’d nicked himself shaving. My mother put her arms around his neck, from behind, but he twisted away and pointed a finger at me.
    â€œYou take good care of your mother while I’m gone, do you hear me?”
    â€œOh Sol!” my mother exclaimed. “Sol darling—not now, all right? Didn’t you hear who was on the phone?”
    â€œI thought you weren’t talking to a good-for-nothing like me anymore.”
    â€œLife is so short, Sol. Why should we use it up fighting?”
    â€œSo your brother is coming home and that makes everything jake, huh?” My father sniffed in. “Wonderful. Last night you told me I didn’t have a pot to piss in and this morning—”
    â€œSol! Please—!”
    â€œâ€”and this morning, now that your big shot brother is coming home you start in with all the hugging and kissing. Sure. Wonderful. Everything is hunky-dory as long as Abe is around.”
    I thought of how cold the radio said it was outside. I imagined the snow on