Читать книгу The Question Authority - Rachel Cline - Страница 11

When I went by the Academy that first day in 1968, that was the first time I really saw how unlike the rest of them we were. I’d been just a kid myself, really, when we got to Brooklyn—when Bob was teaching at that public school where all the kids were black. Those people felt more like my people even though they were nothing like it. But waiting for him at the Academy, I saw how we looked to the mothers there—that we were from the wrong part of town, even though we lived around the corner. The Academy mommies wore their sunglasses on top of their heads like they had a second set of eyes up there, and they had no socks on with their tennis shoes. Back home, not wearing socks was like not wearing a bra—a sure sign that you come from filth and it won’t be long before you're back to it. In first grade, I had no socks and I won’t ever forget that feeling.

The Academy building was just as hard to figure—a mansion, surely, but stuck between its neighbors shoulder to shoulder just like our brokedown brownstone around the corner, like all the houses in Brooklyn, it seemed like. And then there came Bob Rasmussen, such a show-off, with his cowboy boots and his blanket vest and his wavy red hair. . . . That’s my husband, I thought, and I was proud to stand there with Archer on my hip. We looked like freaks.

We didn’t yet say that word to mean “hippies,” but still I was happy that we were different, and young, and free.

Being dead gives a person a lot of leeway. No joy, but perspective. You girls may judge us now, but Bob depended on me and that made my life make sense. I was the keeper of keys and buyer of food; I paid the bills, kept gas in the camper van, did the cleaning, bookkeeping, writing out of mimeos, and filing of negatives. I kept track of your nicknames. I braided your hair. It was a role I knew how to play—watched my ma do it. I knew she wasn’t happy, but I saw how it was right for her anyway. Happy isn’t everything. And for a long time I didn’t even know what I’d got, that our life wasn’t just like every other life a girl might marry into, when all she cares about is getting away from where she was.