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SILENCES, OR A
WOMAN’S LIFE
.....
I would help her to her feet and hand her her cane, which she gripped with a look of rage. She quickly restored a smile to her briefly straitened features, then started forward and saw me to the door, lurching all the way. I avoided paying attention to how she walked or making any gesture that might let her think I had doubts about her absolute self-sufficiency. Leaning against the doorjamb, she watched me ring for the elevator and, as I disappeared behind the sliding door, blew me a kiss.
This parting glimpse of her was as upsetting to me as a reproach. I was abandoning her to dark walls covered with pictures, photographs, and bound books she would never again open; to a confined universe cluttered with massive pieces of furniture that had become way stations of her unvarying round between armchair and door; to her lace and the lamps with their veined lampshades of imitation parchment and the doilies that formed her surroundings. I could imagine her slumping back into her chair, cursing her cane as she put it away, settling for two minutes (or ten, or more) into a morose contemplation of the wall. She’d inspect all of them, each in his frame—the dead, the living, the missing, the dearly loved ones: mute witnesses of a halted life, discreet ghosts come to haunt her muffled solitude and remind her incessantly that there was nothing they could do about it. Then she would come back to herself, shivering, drawing the fringed shawl across her bosom; shrugging her shoulders, picking up her spectacles, and concentrating once more on her knitting—the one occupation (along with embroidery) that she could satisfactorily manage left-handed, with a needle held fast in an elastic strap slipped over the wrist of her paralyzed right hand.
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