My sister’s voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher; the clear blue beauty of it cools you and lifts you up beyond your heat, beyond your body. After we went to see La Traviata, when she was fourteen and I was twelve, she elbowed me in the parking lot and said, “Check this out.” And she opened her mouth unnaturally wide and her voice came out, so crystalline and bright that all the departing operagoers stood frozen by their cars, unable to take out their keys or open their doors until she had finished, and then they cheered like hell.
That’s what I like to remember, and that’s the story I told to all of her therapists. I wanted them to know her, to know that who they saw was not all there was to see. That before her constant tinkling of commercials and fast-food jingles there had been Puccini and Mozart and hymns so sweet and mighty you expected Jesus to come down off his cross and clap. That before there was a mountain of Thorazined fat, swaying down the halls in nylon maternity tops and sweatpants, there had been the prettiest girl in Arrandale Elementary School, the belle of Landmark Junior High. Maybe there were other pretty girls, but I didn’t see them. To me, Rose, my beautiful blond defender, my guide to Tampax and my mother’s moods, was perfect.
by Amy Bloom, from the short story "Silver Water," from the collection Come to Me.
Ah, lordy lord.
Do love this story. Once chose to read it before an intro. to fiction writing class on the first day, to have something to discuss, and found myself tearing up near the end, at that part where the narrator thinks her mother will tear her apart, and instead she's proud of her.
What a beautiful passage, and one with the whole story already present: Rose's unsustainable, heightened beauty of body, of voice, something destined finally to collapse. The narrator's looking up to her, the way she was always beside or behind Rose, in the shadow of her celebrity or her insanity.
Posted by: Friend2 | April 15, 2007 at 11:44 PM