Tell Me a Riddle (17 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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Page 73
''The music," she said, "still it is there and we do not hear; knocks, and our poor human ears too weak. What else, what else we do not hear?"
Once she knocked his hand aside as he gave her a pill, swept the bottles from her bedside table: "no pills, let me feel what I feel," and laughed as on his hands and knees he groped to pick them up.
Nighttimes her hand reached across the bed to hold his.
A constant retching began. Her breath was too faint for sustained speech now, but still the lips moved:
When no longer necessary
to injure others
*
Pick
pick pick
Blind chicken
As a human being
responsibility
**
"David!" imperious, "Basin!" and she would vomit, rinse her mouth, the wasted throat working to swallow, and begin the chant again.
She will be better off in the hospital now, the doctor said.
He sent the telegrams to the children, was packing her suitcase, when her hoarse voice startled. She had roused, was pulling herself to sitting.
"Where now?" she asked. "Where now do you drag me?"
*From Chekhov's "Rothschild's Fiddle."
** From letter by Ida Lerner, Olsen's mother: "As a human being who carries responsibility for action, I think as a duty to the community we must try to understand each other."
 
Page 74
''You do not even have to have a baby to go this time," he soothed, looking for the brush to pack. "Remember, after Davy you told meworthy to have a baby for the pleasure of the ten-day rest in the hospital?"
"Where now? Not home yet?" Her voice mourned. "Where
is
my home?"
He rose to ease her back. "The doctor, the hospital," he started to explain, but deftly, like a snake, she had slithered out of bed and stood swaying, propped behind the night table.
"Coward," she hissed, "runner."
"You stand," he said senselessly.
"To take me there and run. Afraid of a little vomit."
He reached her as she fell. She struggled against him, half slipped from his arms, pulled herself up again.
"Weakling," she taunted, "to leave me there and run. Betrayer. All your life you have run."
He sobbed, telling Jeannie. "A Marilyn Monroe to run for her virtue. Fifty-nine pounds she weighs, the doctor said, and she beats at me like a Dempsey. Betrayer, she cries, and I running like a dog when she calls; day and night, running to her, her vomit, the bed-pan. . . ."
"She needs you, Grandaddy," said Jeannie. "Isn't that what they call love? I'll see if she sleeps, and if she does, poor worn-out darling, we'll have a party, you and I: I brought us rum babas."
They did not move her. By her bed now stood the tall hooked pillar that held the solutionsblood and dex-

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