The Talking Room by Marianne Hauser

Author:Marianne Hauser [Hauser, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780914590217
Google: 538yjP0JT-4C
Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
Published: 1976-03-14T13:00:00+00:00

The delivery truck is crawling blue along the blue horizon and I wave with both arms, hoping that Olli will see me. I climb up the ladder that’s leaning against the silo. But I don’t see him, I see his big brother who is driving because Olli hasn’t got his license yet. He is too young. He says it burns him up that he has to deliver the groceries from his dad’s store while brother has all the fun, driving, munching the candy bars he’d steal by the fistful from under his dad’s counter, or blowing a stolen condom into a balloon.

The sun is a yellow balloon in the white sky. For a second I think that Olli is waving at me, and I begin to feel hot and wet under my poppy dress. But then I realize it’s the American flag atop the antenna that has been waving at me from the truck. So I climb down the ladder. The bottom rung cracks as I jump into the grass. And Q who has been standing at the foot of the ladder, painting a circle of miniature hearts on the silo, cries: T! is it U?—and drops the can of red paint. It spills on the grass.

We’ve painted our garden red, sings Q. And she stretches out in the grass alongside the red puddle and goes to sleep.

Mom too is asleep, upstairs in the bathtub where she passed out an hour ago behind the drawn yellow shades. Aunt V has left by army jeep to pick up the groceries (no Olli for me until night?) and the sisters are still splitting rocks. There is a veiled moon in the sky though it is daytime. Will it rain? I climb down into the dark basement to check out the jam pots. But the old woman who pretends to be granny-anny has gotten there ahead of me. Aunt V says she hired her to look after the house though I know she is being paid to spy on me, and she is wearing all of granny-anny’s old clothes, even the long black shawl.

You’ll never fool me! I tell her. But she doesn’t even look up from under the knitted shawl. She keeps counting the jam pots. You are not granny-anny! I say and slam the cellar door shut and climb the steep narrow stairway to granny-anny’s old room under the slanting roof. There I used to sleep on a cot next to her postered bed. But now that bed has become my bed and my skin is beginning to smell like hers, of rain and slivovitz and wool and Turkish delight. And if I’m in the mood for it in the rain I can dream in Croatian under a cloud of goose feathers.

Shut the shutters and you make your own night, you make the three halos on the ikon glow green over the bed, and the seven red hearts on the treasure chest under the window glow white and red. Her life

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