Tell Me a Riddle (18 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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Page 75
troseto feed her veins. Jeannie moved down the hall to take over the sickroom, her face so radiant, her grandfather asked her once: ''you are in love?" (Shameful the joy, the pure overwhelming joy from being with her grandmother; the peace, the serenity that breathed.) "My darling escape," she answered incoherently, "my darling Granny"as if that explained.
Now one by one the children came, those that were able. Hannah, Paul, Sammy. Too late to ask: and what did you learn with your living, Mother, and what do we need to know?
Clara, the eldest, clenched:
Pay me back, Mother, pay me back for all you took from me. Those others you crowded into your heart. The hands I needed to be for you, the heaviness, the responsibility.
Is this she? Noises the dying make, the crablike hands crawling over the covers. The ethereal singing.
She hears that music, that singing from childhood; forgotten soundnot heard since, since. . . . And the hardness breaks like a cry: Where did we lose each other, first mother, singing mother?
Annulled: the quarrels, the gibing, the harshness between; the fall into silence and the withdrawal.
I do not know you, Mother. Mother, I never knew you.
Lennie, suffering not alone for her who was dying, but for that in her which never lived (for that which in him might never come to live). From him too,
 
Page 76
unspoken words: good-bye Mother who taught me to mother myself.
Not Vivi, who must stay with her children; not Davy, but he is already here, having to die again with
her
this time, for the living take their dead with them when they die.
Light she grew, like a bird, and, like a bird, sound bubbled in her throat while the body fluttered in agony. Night and day, asleep or awake (though indeed there was no difference now) the songs and the phrases leaping.
And he, who had once dreaded a long dying (from fear of himself, from horror of the dwindling money) now desired her quick death profoundly, for
her
sake. He no longer went out, except when Jeannie forced him; no longer laughed, except when, in the bright kitchenette, Jeannie coaxed his laughter (and she, who seemed to hear nothing else, would laugh too, conspiratorial wisps of laughter).
Light, like a bird, the fluttering body, the little claw hands, the beaked shadow on her face; and the throat, bubbling, straining.
He tried not to listen, as he tried not to look on the face in which only the forehead remained familiar, but trapped with her the long nights in that little room, the sounds worked themselves into his consciousness, with their punctuation of death swallows, whimpers, gurglings.
Even in reality
(swallow)
life's lack of it
Slaveships
deathtrains
clubs
eeenough
The bell
summon what enables

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