Read The Middle Stories for Free Online Page B

left, and neither said more than “okay” or “good-bye.”
    Now she was alone. She put down her money and realized for the second time that she was out of cigarettes, and she felt horrible and hungover and nothing like a slut.
    The girl walked through the city that day, and it was cold and dark, and the sky was uglier than it had ever been, but not as ugly as the boy she had slept with, and she realized that she was twenty-one, and she thought of her life, “What a waste,” and nothing convinced her otherwise.

ELEANOR
     
    ELEANOR WAS FINE, but she had troubles fitting in with the family at first. The young boys looked at her as though she had never had sex, which wasn’t true. When she was nineteen she had slept with her boyfriend many times.
    In those improbable days he was always hanging around, pushing her legs up over her head. He was always tying her spread-eagled to the bed, always rolling her onto her front, and if not onto her front, then onto her back. Other times she was pulled up by her hips and made to kneel in a kind of a bridge at the edge of the mattress. He died tragically three years later, and ever after brown-haired men made her cry.
    The three young brothers knew nothing of this. They had seen nude pictures here and there, sat across from her at meals as though they’d been through things she’d never understand. They had no idea about her at all. They were naive in the way young boys are about middle-aged women who don’t seem so cool.
    The mother was distracted. The nurse was distracted.
    The grandmother, meanwhile, insisted that Eleanor was responsible for her stroke. It was Eleanor’s fault, she said, and so she stuck out her cane to trip Eleanor whenever Eleanor walked by, and pointed her chin at Eleanor. Finally the old woman locked herself in her room and complained about it to her friends over the phone: how Eleanor caused her stroke. Eleanor discussed this with the nurse. They agreed that the phone was making her excited, and so they took away the phone.
    One morning many months before, the old woman had stood at the top of the stairs, clutching at her head dramatically and wailing, “I’ve been poisoned! I’m dying!” Then she fell down both flights and collapsed in a brittle heap in the main hallway, where she convulsed for several minutes before losing consciousness.
    Tim had been the only witness to the scene, and the others grew very jealous as he described it to them later, vividly acting the whole thing out. They wished they’d seen it too. It would have been very funny.
    They all went to visit the old woman in the hospital: the nurse, the boys, the boys’ well-mannered mother, and Eleanor. Eleanor liked the old woman. The old woman, she felt, understood her. She regarded Eleanor as a real cheapie, which was right, Eleanor thought. After all, she had been taken, and allowed herself to be taken, and still thought about it a bit, sometimes.
    Lying under the white sheets, and without moving much, the old woman pulled a notepad out from under her body. It was her will. She passed it around. She had decided to leave everything funny to Tim.
     
     
    IT WASN’T THE first time Tim had left school feeling sullen. Walking home that afternoon he kicked the bigger stones at cars, hoping to cause some damage, even if it was only minor. Down the block men were digging up the road and dust blew into his nose and eyes. He had to keep spitting. He found the butt of a cigarette in the gutter and picked it up and wiped it off and lit it, still walking. It made him feel cruel.
    “This is my life,” he thought deeply and soberly. It felt as dramatic and decrepit as riding the rails. When he arrived home the nurse took off his jacket. In his room he lay on his bed under the model airplanes hanging from his ceiling and thought it again, “This is my fucking life.” His curiosity returned. Was this the first time he had ever thought the word fuck ?
    Eleanor was at the door. He could feel