Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill

Author:Mary Gaitskill [Gaitskill, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0375424199
Amazon: B004JZWLFE
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2009-03-24T07:00:00+00:00

The Little Boy

Mrs. Bea Davis walked through an enormous light-fluxing corridor of the Detroit airport, whispering to no one visible: “I love you. I love you so much.” The walls of the corridor were made of glowing translucent oblongs electronically lit with color that, oblong by oblong, ignited in a forward-rolling pattern: red, purple, blue, green, and pale green. “I love you, dear,” whispered Mrs. Davis. “I love you so.” You didn’t love hint, said the voice of her daughter Megan. You had nothing but contempt. Even when he was dying you— Canned ocean waves rolled through the corridor, swelling the colors with sound. “You don’t understand,” whispered Bea. The ocean retreated, taking the colors solemnly and slowly back the other way: pale green, green, blue, purple, red. Red, thought Bea. The color of anger and accident. Green: serenity and life. She stepped onto a moving rubber walkway behind a man slumping in his nun-pled suit “I love you like I loved him,” she whispered. Very slightly, the rumpled man turned his head. "Unconditionally.” The man sighed and turned back. A woman with a small boy passing on the left peered at Bea curiously. Does she know me? thought Bea. “What a wonderful idea,” she said out loud. “These lights, the ocean—like walking through eternity.”

The woman smiled uncertainly and continued past; her little boy turned his entire torso to stare at Bea as his mother pulled him

on Maybe she did know me, thought Bea. We lived here long enough. She smiled at the little boy until he turned away, a calf tethered at his mother’s hips.

They had not lived in Detroit, but in the suburb of Livonia, in a neat brick house with a crab-apple tree in front of it. The tree had spreading branches that grew in luxuriant twists; in the spring it exploded with pink blossoms, and in the summer the lawn was covered with the flesh of its flowers. Megan and Susan ran through the yard with Kyle, the neighbor boy. Megan, seven, climbed the crab-apple tree, wrapping her legs around a branch and crowing for her mother to take a picture. Green, blue, purple. Red. It had not been a happy time for the family, and yet her memories of it were loaded with small pleasures. Dancing to the “Mexican Hat Dance” in the living room, the girls prancing around, and Mac swinging her in his arms, yelling, “A hundred pounds! A hundred pounds!” The willow trees on 8 Mile Road, the library with the model of Never Land, the papier-mache volcano at the Mai Kai Theater, glowing with rich colors. Kyle and Megan putting on Gilbert and Sullivan s Mikado in a neighbor’s garage with the litde girls down the block—she had a picture of it in one of the photo albums: Kyle was very dashing in slippers and his mother’s silk robe with black dragons on it. The litde neighbor girls wore gowns with silk scarves tied around their waists. Megan, the director, wore a top hat and a mustache.

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