Women and Angels: Stories
Harold Brodkey
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: B00D00W9FQ
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
any good to have you there listening! You don’t do anything to help me—what’s wrong with you? You think I’m like an animal? Like a worm? You’re supposed to be smart, but you don’t understand anything, you’re no good to me, you were never any good to me. I’d laugh at you, you’re so useless to me, but it hurts me to laugh: What good are you to me? Do something for me! Put yourself in my place! Help me! Why don’t you help me?” Sometimes she would say in a horrible voice, “I’ll tell you what you
tired and cheated—I resented it that she was real and not me or part of me, that her death wasn’t sort of a version of mine. It was going to be too much God-damned work this way. I went off into “thinking,” into an untrained exercise of intellect. I started with xs and ys and Latin phrases. I asked myself what was a person, and, after a while, I came up with: a person is a mind, a body, and an I. The I was not in the brain, at least not in the way the mind was. The I is what in you most hurts
believe me.” I expressed disbelief by the way I stared at her. She said, “Go into my top bureau drawer. Look under the handkerchiefs.” There was a bottle there. I held it up. “What is it?” “My morphine.” “You hide it?” “I know how boys like to try things…” “You hide it from me?” “I don’t want you to be tempted—I know you’re often under a strain.” “Momma, I wouldn’t take your morphine.” “But I don’t use it much any more. Haven’t you noticed I’m clearer lately? I don’t let myself use it,
uncertain way; so that as the war wore on and spread, it seemed to me I would have to die as an American among Americans as well. Those families in which observance is the primary element of their Judaism (or rather, those groups of families, since such Judaism does not permit singularity of devotion or individual piety) do not in numbers or in their sense of sacredness, in my belief, supply a definition for me, an American and a Jew, of what it is to be Jewish. When I consider Jewish history,
This was not given to us in any simple way, Its beauty eased our condition at living now with no Final Meaning of This Manifestation, and in no absolute condition of Testimony that it was almost all, all right, but not really. It didn’t judge, It didn’t raise a sword or other weapon or even Its Hand, It spared us Its speech, and if It spoke to us, did so by inducing thoughts inside us, and yet, if my case is that of others, those thoughts, too, were uncontrolled. Years of shame at my inept