The Road Taken by Rona Jaffe

Author:Rona Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Everyone was leaving, Ginger thought. She had not minded losing Peggy to marriage and motherhood and the suburbs, because that was natural, and she was happy for Uncle Hugh, who had found Teddy and an apartment to share with him. But Joan’s defection frightened her. If Joan had simply moved out to be on her own, even if she had gone to another city, that would have been natural too. She would have kept up, they would have followed her career, or whatever. But Joan in hiding, incommunicado, made a terrible loss in the house.

Their mother tried to be brave, but Ginger knew she was devastated. No one could have stopped this chain of events, it was Marianne’s death that had started it; but even knowing this, the feeling of being completely powerless frightened Rose. I guess I’m all my mother has now, Ginger thought, and she wondered if she would ever have a life of her own.

She was still hopelessly in love with Christopher Riley. He was happy at B.U., he told her on the phone, he was liking cellular biology as much as she was, and still dreaming of becoming a doctor, as she was; and he had a new girlfriend. He had been reluctant to tell her about the existence of the girlfriend because he knew these things hurt her even though she had no right to be hurt. The two of them knew each other so well after all this time that it was as if they had known each other all their lives, and it was impossible to keep a secret for long. It hadn’t taken much for Ginger to pry the information out of him. She teased him then, of course, and Chris was uncomfortable, because he knew Ginger was making a joke of it for all the wrong reasons.

The new girlfriend was not in a wheelchair. It was sad how men could always find someone, Ginger thought, while women had to be perfect. If she could have been able to walk she would no doubt have focused on her other imperfections, but being the way she was, her legs became everything. Why couldn’t Chris love her? They had a world of things in common, they always had. Her brain told her that even though you had everything in common with someone else it didn’t mean he would love you. The deeper, unreasonable, primitive part of her remembered the way they had been together in Warm Springs, and the seductive way he had put his tongue into her mouth when he kissed her good-bye at his parents’ house, and the beast won. Eventually, Ginger knew, Chris would get tired of all those other girls and realize she was the one he needed to spend the rest of his life with.

She had friends now at college, some of whom were commuters, like herself, and some of whom lived in the dorms. She longed for that dorm life, and envied them in a way, and she knew many of the other commuters did too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.