 |
| Chabot Valley by Richard Diebenkorn |
They lived in a housing tract, where all the houses looked alike from the outside but inside was a different story, like one lady he stayed with in the afternoons had a kitchen table in a cheerful, cozy nook, where the Northern California sun streamed in through the windows, and she let him and his little sister help her glue popsicle sticks into Christmas decorations and spray paint them with gold and silver and sprinkle them with glitter (the only popsicle sticks he’d seen before were inside popsicles, but she had thousands and thousands of unused popsicle sticks, and they were just beautiful, so perfect and brand new), and making things with popsicle sticks was her hobby, not something she was doing just to keep them busy, while the other lady he stayed with, Maude, the one who had MS and was in a wheelchair, always sent him down to a dark, windowless basement when he was at her house in the afternoons, while his little sister was allowed to play with Maude’s daughter somewhere upstairs, and in that dark, windowless basement there was almost nothing for him to do—Maude just had some Lincoln Logs down there and a few old magazines—so he felt just like a prisoner in a dungeon or like he’d been put in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, and the time passed so slowly down there as he listened to the tick, tick, ticking of the Big Clock that a feeling of dread built up inside him, but no matter where he was staying, at the end of the day his father would pick up his sister and him and his older brother would come home, too, and then his father would cook dinner for the four of them (their mother was in the hospital bcause she’d been crying too much, and although there had been that one weekend when she’d had been allowed to come home, she had cried too much that weekend so they said she had to go back to the hospital), usually something quick and easy, like frozen fish sticks, and once in a while something weird and disgusting, like hot dogs and white bread and tomatoes and milk all cooked together in a casserole, and while he sometimes complained about the food his father made he never, ever told anyone about Maude’s basement.
Comments
Post a Comment