The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

Author:Claire Messud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

THIS WAS HOW I came to interview Rudy Molinaro about his house. It made him into a sort of ally. I didn’t know any adults that weren’t related to kids I knew, or to school, so he was a first. Rudy made being an adult seem weirdly like being a kid—as if things happened to you, and you couldn’t really change the course of life. Like it was fated, somehow.

My dad took me over to Rudy’s on a Sunday afternoon, and sat on a bar stool by the kitchen counter reading the newspaper while I interviewed Rudy with my mom’s old pocket tape recorder—“the tools of the journalist’s trade,” she’d said as she rummaged in her desk for it and waved it triumphantly aloft.

“I know you,” Rudy said when we arrived. He pointed his stubby finger at me. “You go with that little blond girl. Hair white as an angel. I seen you around town.”

“Not so much anymore,” I said. “But yeah.”

My knees almost touched Rudy’s on the little brown corduroy sofa. A cigarette burn in the cushion next to my thigh distracted me: inside the hole I could spy tufty yellow foam and my fingers wanted to worry and pick at it. Finally I sat on my right hand to stop.

Rudy’s story was sad. He’d grown up in the house in the woods, and after high school he’d done an electrician’s apprenticeship with a firm over in Lawrence, and had eventually saved enough to move out of his parents’ place and rent an apartment in downtown Royston. This made him the first Royston apartment dweller I’d ever knowingly met. For a time, he’d had a girlfriend, and they talked about getting married, but she wanted to move to Boston, and he wanted to stay near home, where he knew everyone and everyone knew him. Then his dad had a heart attack while driving and crashed the pickup on the interstate, aged fifty-nine, and Rudy, himself aged thirty-one and single (the girlfriend having made her move), was faced with a tough choice.

Home alone in the woods, his mother, diabetic, had a bad leg, so she couldn’t drive. She couldn’t have moved to an apartment in town, where there would’ve been stairs. So Rudy moved back into the house on Vine Tail Road, and he got Bessie the German shepherd instead of a bride, and he loved her just as much, even though she wasn’t allowed to sleep in the house with him. Rudy spent most of his thirties there—he’d been let go from the electricians’ outfit in Lawrence in 2009, when the recession hit and they were downsizing, though he was the last employee not to be a blood relation of Doug Bergdahl, the owner and founder, and Doug had made much of how sad he was to see him go.

After that, it was odd jobs, and the security guard-cum-maintenance post for the Land Association, whose land included the asylum—a basic income boosted by short cleanup contracts, which didn’t pay

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.