The End of Eve: A Memoir
Ariel Gore
Language: English
Pages: 237
ISBN: 0986000795
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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Seemed like such a scam of anti-earth abuser culture to teach people that they cause their own cancer with negative thinking. Maybe this desert lake had been guilty of negative thinking? I sighed at the meanness of it all. Like lime juice in your eyes to better resemble your colonizer. WE’D LEFT PORTLAND on a rainy morning. All that lush green and damp gray. Maxito cried from his carseat when the turquoise trailer came off its hitch two blocks from home – the ruthless sound of metal scraping.
At sunrise, set it on the low table. “Do you think you’ll ever see your mother again?” I leaned back into the big equipale chair and it creaked the way it did. It seemed like a crass question, but maybe a reasonable one. “I guess not,” I said. Sol sipped her coffee. “How do you think we’ll find out when she’s dead?” I didn’t know how we’d find out. “We’ll find out,” I said. “Everyone loves to spread news of death.” My cellphone buzzed just then and I cringed the way I always cringed then, but.
Like it was shrinking in on itself. I stepped back. They hadn’t seen me yet. I could still just recede into my humiliation. But just then the hostess chirped, “Joining us for dinner?” and Sol and Bipa looked up, two startled mimes in their grease-white make-up and their black berets. Bipa held up her gloved hands theatrically, like maybe this was a stick up. Sol sat up straight. “Ariel!” she tried, as if they’d been waiting for me to join them and where was my makeup? Where was my beret? I.
Settling. About not being common. About the way she was a classist, sure, but she was more than that. GAMMIE HAD BRIGHT Picasso posters on her walls, leopard-print sheets on her bed. In her walk-in closet, Gammie had a giant mirror with lights all around it, and she’d sit there applying makeup like she was some kind of a movie star. Or maybe a stripper. She wore Max Factor foundation. Dior lipstick. She brushed her long gray hair, then tied it into a bun. She poured herself her morning vodka.
We’d moved to New Mexico? About trusting a stranger in an alley more than I trusted this woman who might have been my wife had the good voters of Oregon not gotten together and amended their constitution to keep me from making that mistake? How could I explain that everything seemed a part of the self-same ugliness: All the death urges, the legacies of abuse and conquest, the poisoned lakes and rivers, the waving knife in the night between a mother and her child, and all the lies I had to tell.