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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Titel: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Alice Munro
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palace guard, like jolly spear-fighters.
    “She always did have trouble with her teeth,” the aunts said. “She had that abscess, remember, the poison went all through her system.”
    How like them, I thought, to toss aside Alfrida’s wit and style and turn her teeth into a sorry problem.
    “Why doesn’t she just have them all out and be done with it?” they said.
    “Likely she couldn’t afford it,” said my grandmother, surprising everybody as she sometimes did, by showing that she had been keeping up with the conversation all along.
    And surprising me with the new, everyday sort of light this shed on Alfrida’s life. I had believed that Alfrida was rich—rich at least in comparison with the rest of the family. She lived in an apartment—I had never seen it, but to me that fact conveyed at least the idea of a very civilized life—and she wore clothes that were not homemade, and her shoes were not Oxfords like the shoes of practically all the other grown-up women I knew—they were sandals made of bright strips of the new plastic. It was hard to know whether my grandmother was simply living in the past, when getting your false teeth was the solemn, crowning expense of a lifetime, or whether she really knew things about Alfrida’s life that I never would have guessed.
    The rest of the family was never present when Alfrida had dinner at our house. She did go to see my grandmother, who was her aunt, her mother’s sister. My grandmother no longer lived at her own house but lived alternately with one or the other of the aunts, and Alfrida went to whichever house she was living in at the time, but not to the other house, to see the other aunt who was as much her cousin as my father was. And the meal she took was never with any of them. Usually she came to our house first and visited awhile, and then gathered herself up, as if reluctantly, to make the other visit. When she came back later and we sat down to eat, nothing derogatory was said outright against the aunts and their husbands, and certainly nothing disrespectful about my grandmother. In fact, it was the way that my grandmother would be spoken of by Alfrida—a sudden sobriety and concern in her voice, even a touch of fear (what about her blood pressure, had she been to the doctor lately, what did he have to say?)—that made me aware of the difference, the coolness or possibly unfriendly restraint, with which she asked after the others. Then there would be a similar restraint in my mother’s reply, and an extra gravity in my father’s—a caricature of gravity, you might say—that showed how they all agreed about something they could not say.
    On the day when I smoked the cigarette Alfrida decided to take this a bit further, and she said solemnly, “How about Asa, then? Is he still as much of a conversation grabber as ever?“
    My father shook his head sadly, as if the thought of this uncle’s garrulousness must weigh us all down.
    “Indeed,” he said. “He is indeed.”
    Then I took my chance.
    “Looks like the roundworms have got into the hogs,” I said.
    “Yup.”
    Except for the “yup” this was just what my uncle had said, and he had said it at this very table, being overcome by an uncharacteristic need to break the silence or to pass on something important that had just come to mind. And I said it with just his stately grunts, his innocent solemnity.
    Alfrida gave a great, approving laugh, showing her festive teeth. “That’s it, she’s got him to a T .”
    My father bent over his plate, as if to hide how he was laughing too, but of course not really hiding it, and my mother shook her head, biting her lips, smiling. I felt a keen triumph. Nothing was said to put me in my place, no reproof for what was sometimes called my sarcasm, my being smart. The word “smart” when it was used about me, in the family, might mean intelligent, and then it was used rather grudgingly—”oh, she’s smart enough some ways”—or it might be used to mean pushy, attention-seeking, obnoxious. Don’t be so smart.
    Sometimes my mother said sadly, “You have a cruel tongue.”
    Sometimes—and this was a great deal worse—my father was disgusted with me.
    “What makes you think you have the right to run down decent people?”
    This day nothing like that happened—I seemed to be as free as a visitor at the table, almost as free as Alfrida, and flourishing under the banner of my own personality.

    But there was a gap about to open, and perhaps

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