Read A Certain Age for Free Online Page B

days passed like the pages of a book. So what if the end of struggle meant the end of human suffering? What she wanted was to be the character in a poem she had once read, in which the heroine
    . . . should have sprung from Cardin s
    at twenty, molded in bisque, draped in chiffon, her eyes
    glazed with perfection,
    her eyelids on gold hinges
    swinging open and shut
    at intervals marked by the sun.
    Wasn't that the only dream for women at the end of the twentieth century, even for those who claimed to want other things? At least she was honest enough to admit it.
    It was already warm. She decided she didn't need a towel. The outdoor shower was behind a bamboo gate, a cubicle built into the wall, and there was only one tap; the water ran hot for a few
----
    minutes before turning cold, and she jumped out quickly, still unable to obliterate her queasy feeling. At least the sticky, oily salt was off her now, and the sensation that she had been powdered with potato fertilizer. The sour scent, crematorium-acrid, blew across the nearby fields.
    Claudia came out onto the patio, carrying a huge bag, an umbrella, dressed in a bright pink polka-dot cotton hat with ruffles that tied under her chin and a long-sleeved blue-and-white-striped cotton robe that gave her the appearance of a miniature resident of a nineteenth-century workhouse. She seemed barely able to carry the bag. "I'll take that," Florence said.
    "Do you need suntan lotion?" Claudia asked.
    "I don't know."
    "Here." Claudia handed her a huge pink plastic bottle. The stuff smelled like bubble gum and coconut. "You should put it on. I never tan. Mother has basal-cell carcinoma. That's from lying in the sun too long."
    "Is it serious?"
    Claudia shrugged. "I told her, there's no ozone layer, she shouldn't lie in the sun! She has to put on medicine that makes the cancers turn brown. She smokes cigarettes, sometimes, too. If I find them, I throw them in the toilet."
    "It must be difficult for her to have a child who's constantly trying to turn her in. She's lucky you're not a Communist. Or a revolutionary in Central America."
    "What?"
    "Nothing," Florence said. They trudged in silence back across the potato field.
    "This stuff they put on the field, it really stinks," Claudia said, dragging the umbrella in the sand. "It goes into the drinking water and you get cancer." Lancer:
    "Last week they had to close the hospital because of some kind of thing that made everybody sick."
    "What kind of thing?"
    "I don't know. Some little whirly thing, in the water, that you
----
    couldn't see, and in the hospital it moved into the ventilation or something and they had to shut it down because they couldn't . . . get it sterilized."
    "Are you sure you know what you're talking about?" Florence stumbled. Her shoe flipped into the air. "Damn!" she said from the ground. "I almost broke my ankle."
    "Here's your sandal," Claudia said, holding up the red patent leather shoe. "It's broken."
    "Oh no, and those were my favorite sandals. My only Guccis, and they don't make them anymore." She grabbed it from Claudia. The heel of the shoe had twisted at a right angle in a way she knew couldn't be fixed. When she got up she stepped straight onto something sharp that gave her a puncture wound at least a half inch into her sole. "Ow!" she said. "Prickers! This just isn't my day."
    They hobbled through the field. "By next year, my dad says, this will all be gone. They're going to build houses." The child was out of breath, sweaty, and stood transfixed, as if she already had sunstroke.
    "Do you want me to carry the umbrella?" Florence said, though her foot hurt.
    "Okay." She passed the umbrella to Florence. The metal handle was sticky to the touch.
    "I think you got cherry jam on this umbrella," Florence said. "You know, your mother is one of my only friends."
    "You're kidding!" said Claudia. "Poor you!"
    "If you're single in New York, a single woman, I mean, nobody wants anything to do with you. If you're a