[...] but Fergusson's grandmother had no interest in Laurel and Hardy, her passion was for cleanliness and domestic order, and once she had given her grandson his post-school snack, generally two chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk, but sometimes a plum or an orange or a stack of saltines that Fergusson would coat with dabs of grape jelly, he would go off to the living room to turn on his program and she would busy herself with scrubbing down kitchen counters or scouring off crud from the stove burners or cleaning the sinks and toilets in the two bathrooms, a dedicated destroyer of filth and germs who never grumbled about her daughter's shortcomings as a housekeeper but nevertheless sighed often as she went about these tasks, no doubt changrined that her own flesh and blood did not adhere to her rigurous standards of sanitary living.
(252)
Ferguson was looking down at the floor by then, pretending to examine a loose thread in the carpet as a way to avoid his mother's eyes, for he knew he would be lost if he dared to look into them now, her eyes had always been too strong for him, they were charged with a power that could decipher his thoughts and extract confessions from him and overwhelm his puny will even as he fought to resist her, and now, horribly and inevitably, she was reaching out and touching his jaw with the tips of her fingers, gently prodding him to lift his face and look into her eyes again, and the moment he felt her hand make contact with his skin, he knew that all hope was gone, tears were gathering in his eyes, the first tears that had been there in months and how humiliating it was to feel the invisible faucet turn on again without warning, no better than stupid, weepy Stan, he said to himself, a nine-year-old infant with faults plumbing in his brain, and by the time he found the courage to fix his eyes on his mother's eyes, two waterfalls were trickling down his cheeks and his mouth was moving, words were tumbling out of him, the story of Hilliard was being told, the battle with God and the reasons for the bad grades, the silenced voice and the murder of his father, breaking the rules in order to be punished and then hating God for not punishing him, hating God for not being God, and Fergusson had no idea if his mother understood what he was telling her, her eyes looked pained and confused and almost tearful, and after he had been talking for two or three or four minutes, she leaned over, put her arms around him, and told him to stop. Enough, Archie, she said, let it go, and then the two of them were crying together, a marathon sobfest that lasted for close to ten minutes, which was the last time either one of them broke down in the presence of the other, almost two years to the day since Stanley Fergusson's body had been put in the ground, and once the crying slowly came to an end, they washed their faces, put on their overcoats, and went out to the movies, where they gorged themselves on hot dogs in the balcony instead of eating dinner and then shared a large box of popcorn, which they washed down with fizzless, watery Cokes. The title of the movie they saw that evening was: The Man Who Knew Too Much
Comentarii
Trimiteți un comentariu