Читать книгу Darwin Alone in the Universe - M.A.C. Farrant - Страница 9

THE RETURN

LIKE ULYSSES, I WAS GONE FOR TEN YEARS. Little changed in my absence.

My husband was still in bed. He had not taken up weaving. “I’ve been using the services of an elderly prostitute named Crystal,” he told me. He looked wan and threadbare lying on the unmade bed, the sheets grey and unraveling.

The dog was miserable when I left and not much had changed there either. Upon my return she leapt into my arms and bit me.

My son, now thirty, was still at home watching TV—Great Sea Journeys of the World. But thinking, he said, of becoming a male siren in the Fall. At last, I thought, direction!

Only my daughter had moved on. Uninterested in Queendom, she was living on a ranch in New Mexico, studying the adventurous techniques of Georgia O’Keefe.

She had changed her name to Penny Pacific and was painting from memory the delicate pink interiors of the West Coast clam.