The Singer Sisters by Sarah Seltzer

Author:Sarah Seltzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

* * *

Recently, with Dave gone, she had been having a perverse daydream fantasy. She liked to imagine that she was a Jewish girl in World War II France, forced to be a concubine to a cruel Nazi. After hate-fueled sex on his orderly desk, she dreamed of reaching into his drawer, finding his letter opener, and stabbing him to death. Then she would leap from the balcony, martyred.

He would be discovered when the blood soaked through the ceiling of the room below. Like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, when Tess finally kills Alec.

She wasn’t sure what it meant, except that she’d read Tess for the fifth time and that after engineering a family reconciliation when Leon was born, she’d been helping Dave take care of his aging father, who had left Europe in 1939 and told stories. Actually, she knew what it meant: a fantasy about coming through when you’ve been counted out. A dream of redemption, even at the price of death. Making the world better with your sacrifice.

She was so lost in her reverie on the stoop that she didn’t notice the smell from Emma’s diaper. Gina did.

“Do you have Pampers?” Shirley asked Judie. “Bring her in and change her on my kitchen table—why schlep back?”

Judie, who had burp cloths and diapers in her purse, gratefully trooped inside. The apartment was shabby and smelled sour, but it wasn’t dirty. A clean space on the rug seemed homey enough, anyway.

Across the street seemed far to walk. Plus, they helped her change Emma, and got another bottle of wine from the shelf, and threw the dirty diaper in the garbage—which was full to overflowing—laughing and talking all the while.

It reminded Judie of what she still loved about motherhood: The tenderness. The clucking. It reminded her of when Leon was a baby.

Judie had been so happy the first year of parenthood and most of the second and even part of the third when she was pregnant with Emma. As her belly grew, Leon, with a budding beauty and wit, was toddling around like the king of the house.

God, she had been so relieved—convinced she was done with all the creative angst, the performing. Who needed that aggravation, when she could spend time writing ditties for Leon, telling him stories about a series of woodland creatures she invented: Charlie the Chipmunk, Robin the Robin, and Danny the Deer?

She had thrown herself into teaching Leon his words and numbers, and playing funny games, and dressing him sweetly, and walking him out to the park to meet other toddlers.

How could one describe the particular bliss of that interlude in retrospect, to put words to a love so powerful it allowed her to stop narrating her life? She and Leon were best friends. They completed each other. What was broken in her had fixed itself. The months floated by in a dream of hormones and heaven. She missed her closeness with her sister, and she missed her friends—but she was glowing.

Her father had once given her a lecture over BLTs.

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.