Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses

Author:Kate Moses [Moses, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Death & Co.”

DECEMBER 17, 1962

A.M.

LONDON

It’s ringing.

It’s ringing.

It’s ringing.

It’s ringing and it wakes her up.

She opens her eyes. It’s still ringing. The shrill tandem bleat of a telephone. She opens her eyes: shadows, black and blacker, the edges of furniture, dark heap of Nicholas in one of the cots. Frieda is curled up against her, steamy, back to back on the mattress on the nursery floor. The phone continues its urgent ring.

Light floods the upstairs hallway, loitering along the edge of the cracked door. She rolls onto her knees and the palms of her hands, up off the awkward mattress with its desultory bedding spilling loose over the hardwood planks, up toward the sound.

But she has no phone, she thinks, floating high above her dream self, cautiously widening the door, the angular glare from the bathroom flaring up the staircase, down the hall, spilling over her bare feet, over her nightgown, the braided cord of the ringing telephone stretching across the hallway and disappearing into the vacuous darkness of her bedroom. She leans over, curling her fingers around the receiver, and as the ringing abruptly quits and she lifts the earpiece toward her body, she notices scuffling, gasps, and sharp skittering taps over the bathroom tiles at the bottom of the stairs. Black feathers, white tipped, a wing extended three, four feet across and flapping aggressively, glimpsed beyond the banister rail. A blunt reptilian claw skids partially into view. Lunging, a wing flaps and contracts. A hiss. Then a spurt of blood, gobbets of veiny red dripping down the tiles, sprayed over the leonine leg and enameled curve of the cast-iron bathtub, all she can see. A nude, wrinkled head, pops up with a liquid smack dripping, incarnadine, glossy with blood, and looks at her with its soulless, 180-degree eye. A garnet eye, a beak hooked like an oyster knife. She turns away, drawing the cold receiver to her ear.

Mrs. Plath? asks the caller.

I’m not Mrs. Plath, she says.

Mrs. Plath, I’m afraid that your husband is … gone.

What do you mean? she asks, terrified, her heart searing, concurrent with awed fascination at the immediate adrenaline pump of her fear.

He’s gone. He’s dead. An embolism. His heart—it burst. A blood clot, a flaw.

A flaw? She can’t believe it. No. It can’t be true.

To his heart. It went straight to his heart. It was too much.

Too much? There’s the sudden sledgehammer of guilt. She would do anything—

Too much.

She’s stunned. She can’t believe it. But what will I tell my children?

You mean the girl, the boy?

Yes. Her body is going liquid, it’s flooding away …

Only tell the girl. It won’t matter to the boy.

This stops her. She’s back, maternally vigilant. What do you mean, because Nick is so young?

Who’s Nick?

The boy. Such a comfort, pragmatism!—the chance to wrap oneself in the cloak of practical circumstance, sure and efficient. She’s always loved this part, the bureaucratic grid. Filling out forms, say: the simple, clear questions; dutifully outlining dates, addresses. The neat unequivocal order of facts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.