Читать книгу Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина онлайн

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It did not occur to me to resent Reinette. It was my mother I resented, and I showed it with every movement of my sly young body. I gave her every excuse to hound me. She wanted the clothes on the washing line hung by the hems: I hung them by the collars. The jars in the pantry had to have the labels facing the front: I turned them backward. I forgot to wash my hands before meals. I changed the order of the pans hanging on the kitchen wall, largest to smallest. I left the kitchen window open so that when she opened the door the draft would make it bang. I infringed a thousand of her personal rules, and she reacted to each trespass with the same bewildered rage. To her, those petty rules mattered because those were the things she used to control our world. Take them away and she was like the rest of us, orphaned and lost.

Of course, I didn’t know that then.

“You’re a hard little bitch, aren’t you?” she said at last, pushing away her plate. “Hard as nails.” There was neither hostility nor affection in her voice, merely a kind of cool disinterest. “I used to be like that,” she said. It was the first time I had ever heard her speak of her own childhood. “At your age.”