Read Gryphon: New and Selected Stories for Free Online

whole thing backward.” Seeing that he said nothing, she went on. “So often I myself have … so often I, too, have found that I have been myself in a place where I have found myself so often in a place where I have found myself.” Standing there, squarely in the middle of the room, she felt herself tipping toward Horace’s cigarette smoke, falling through it, tumbling as if off a building, end over end, floor after floor. Horace held his hand up. Margaret, whose mind was still plunging, walked toward him. He whirled his hand counterclockwise as an invitation to bring her ear down to his mouth.
    “Don’t tell me anything,” he whispered. “That’s for kids. And be quiet. Listen. There’s a bird scratching in the tree outside. Hear it?”
    She did not. Margaret bent down to kiss his forehead and made her way out of the room, sick with vertigo. The hallway stretched and shrank while she balanced herself like a tightrope walker in a forward progress to the elevator. Three floors down, Mr. Bartlett was waiting for her, wearing a cap and a jacket in his wheelchair, but she tottered past him, out into the sun, which she saw had turned a sickly blue.
    There was something wrong with the bus.
    She sat near the back. The bus would start, reach twenty-five milesan hour, then stop. Not slow down. Stop. In midair, as it were. When it stopped, so did the world. The trees, pedestrians, and birds froze in midair, the birds glued to the sky. And when this occurred, Margaret grabbed the top of the seat in front of her, pressing it hard with her thumbs, hoping she could restart the world again.
    She looked up. In front of her a little girl was kneeling on the plastic seat next to her mother, facing the back, staring at Margaret. The little girl had two pigtails of brown hair, a bright red coat, and round-rimmed glasses too large for her face. As the bus began to move, Margaret stared at the girl, frowning because she wanted the youngster to know that staring is rude, a sign of bad breeding. But as she scowled and frowned, and the bus passengers swayed like a chorus together, she was horrified to feel her own eyes producing tears, which would run partway down her cheeks and then stop, as the bus itself stopped, as time halted. The little girl reminded Margaret of someone, someone she would never exactly remember again.
    The girl’s mouth opened slightly. Her eyes widened, and now she, too, was crying. Her glasses magnified her tears, which were caught by the rims in tiny pools. Margaret gathered herself together. It was one thing to cry herself for no special reason. It was quite another to make a little girl cry. That was contagion, and a mistake in anyone’s part of the world. So Margaret wiped her eyes with her coat sleeve and smiled fiercely at the girl, even laughing now, the laugh sounding like the yip of a small dog. “ Toujours gai, toujours gai, ” she said, louder than necessary, before she realized that little girls on buses don’t speak French and would never have heard of archy and mehitabel even if they did. “There’s a dance in the old dame yet,” Margaret said, to finish the phrase, quietly and to herself. She drew herself up and looked serious, as if she were on her way to someplace. She was not about to be cried at on a public bus in broad daylight.
    “What a nice day!” Margaret said aloud, but no one turned toward her. The little girl took off her glasses, wiped her eyes on her mother’s coat, and gave Margaret a hostile look before turning around. “The old lady shows her mettle,” Margaret continued, editorializing to herself, simultaneously making a mental note not to engage in private conversations where other people could hear her. It takes a minimum of sixty years’ experience to recognize how useful and necessary talking to oneselfactually is. When you’re young, it just seems like a crazy habit. Margaret did not speak these thoughts aloud, as the bus whirled upside down and righted itself;