Читать книгу Pages For Her - Sylvia Brownrigg - Страница 20

They married, too.

Why not? Flannery was dizzy, excited, seized with a sense that she could change everything about herself in some mad, blurred tumble of adventure. It was like being at some noisy party in an unknown part of town. Do I want another glass? Of course I want another glass! (Wait, where are we again? Do we have a way to get home?)

She moved in with Charles, into the smart, Fauvishly shaded Victorian a few blocks up from the famed intersection of Haight and Ashbury, where hippies and itinerants still slouched toward Bethlehem, just as they had when Didion interviewed them forty years before. At the art college where she had been teaching, Flannery was so unable to discuss maternity leave with her boss that she simply told him she was going to finish the semester and then needed to ‘take time off for some other projects’. She told her mother about the marriage (‘Charles Marshall, honey? The Charles Marshall?’), though left the baby news for a later, rainy day. Flannery’s mother was one of the three people who came to witness what Charles enjoyed calling the couple’s ‘shotgun wedding’ at the San Francisco City Hall on Valentine’s morning. Laura Jansen wore a lilac dress and carried a colorful bouquet of gerbera daisies, as if she were Flannery’s flower girl. The other two in attendance were Charles’s best friends, an architect and his pianist wife, who brought leis to put around the couple’s necks after the ceremony. Flannery stood in the grand, gold-domed building where Dan White shot and killed Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, a gory fact she could not for some reason get out of her head as she took the vows and promised to do all the things you were supposed to do for your spouse. Check, check, check. I will, I do, I promise. (Where had the murders taken place, actually? Who first found the bodies?) The efficient Chinese American officiant was doing a steady business in marriages that day. ‘People like to choose the fourteenth,’ he told them, with a mild, bureaucratic smile. ‘Helps husbands have an easy date to remember, so their wives don’t get mad at them.’ He winked.

This was the life Flannery was entering: the one where people made jokes that might have seemed fresh in the nineteen fifties, about absent-minded husbands and their nagging wives. The ball and chain. Take my wife . . . please!

The experience was like one of those episodic, night-long dreams. It was strange and at points surreal, drawing promiscuously on history and fantasy and odd juxtapositions, yet it had its own internal logic. Flannery was nauseous, she was pregnant, she was married, and she lived in a house – with her husband. She had become a wife and, if all went well, she would, in October, become a mother.

She found herself wondering in quiet moments, on a sloped street, in a slanting light, when she would finally wake up, and how she would feel when she did.