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Machine Dreams

Machine Dreams

Titel: Machine Dreams Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Jayne Anne Phillips
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supposed she should be quiet. “He sure gets mad easy now.”
    “Does he?” Katie looked out toward the street. “Yes, I suppose he does.”
    Danner said nothing.
    “There,” Katie said. She leaned over Danner from above, picked up the hand mirror and held it, keeping her face close beside Danner’s so that both images were reflected in the glass. “Let’s see if we look alike,” she said.
    Far off, sirens wailed, marking the end of the parade. Danner looked into the mirror. “I don’t think so,” she breathed.
    “Look closer. Hold the mirror.” Danner took the wide handle of the mirror and Katie lifted both hands. Forefingers touching where their faces met, she drew one cool finger across Danner’s brow, one across her own. “Here,” she said, “we’re the same.”
    The strawberries were ripe and juicy and left a pink tinge on Danner’s fingers. She sat on the edge of the concrete patio with Gladys and Jean while Mitch stood at the far side of the yard, pouring charcoal briquets into the barbecue. The fields around the house were still brightly yellow in the sun of the late afternoon, but the grasses had begun to move and show their pale undersides; later it might rain. Danner and Jean held the bowls of berries and capped them with small knives. Danner moved her knife automatically and watched Billy ride his bike at the far perimeters of the lawn; he rode around and around, the silver fenders of the bike shining. Every time he made the hill past the barbecue, he stood to pedal and moved by with a blast of sound; he’d taken Danner’s transistor radio and hung it from the handlebars. The volume was turned way up and strains of Top 40 songs twisted in the air.
    “Billy’s got my radio,” Danner told Jean.
    Gladys looked up from the bowl of beans she held. “He won’t hurt it, unless he wrecks and hurts himself, and then you’ll feel justified.”
    “He went in my room and took it, Mom.” Danner heardstrains she almost recognized as Billy disappeared around the front of the house; the songs, high wails, seemed to drift behind him.
    Gladys and Jean ignored Danner; they were discussing Katie. Katie couldn’t get pregnant.
    “She’s strung too tight, that’s why.” Gladys broke the beans with a snap. “She looks half-starved, like she’d break in half doing what’s necessary.”
    “I don’t know what that would be,” Jean said. “All I ever had to do was lie there.”
    “Not so. It has to do with a state of mind.”
    “Gladys, that’s ridiculous. I got pregnant so easy—all he ever had to do was look at me.”
    Danner imagined Mitch looking. In the home movies there were always a few dim frames of his face as he held the movie camera in his hands and pondered it, filming himself as he pushed the wrong button. His head filled the frame, lit on one side by tentative light. In the fish-eye view of the camera, his broad forehead curved in near darkness like the smooth plain of an awesome, lonely planet. His chin, his nose, all the features of his face, became a strange, enlarged geography. His eyes were nearly closed as he peered down, his expression wondering.
    “Exactly,” Gladys told Jean, “he looked at you.”
    “Oh, Gladys. People don’t have to be happy together for the woman to get pregnant.”
    “Not saying they have to be happy. Happens faster lots of times if couples don’t get along. It’s a state of mind in the woman before the man even touches her.”
    “So men have nothing to do with it?” Jean arched her brows at Danner to signal that this was another of Gladys’ nutty conversations.
    “Sure they do.” Gladys looked unconcerned and shook the pot of strung beans. The beans rattled and she smoothed them level with her hand.
    Jean smiled. “I hope you’re listening to this, Danner. Gladys is going to tell you her version of what makes women pregnant.”
    “What?” Danner asked.
    Gladys leaned closer. “Desperation,” she said, “suddenly satisfied.”She held up her hand for silence as Jean began to laugh. “Not always desperation for children—could be desperation about something else. But for a few minutes, the desperation is gone, and that’s when women get pregnant.
After
they do what’s necessary, of course.” Gladys nodded once, decisively.
    “Most people don’t have any trouble getting pregnant,” Jean said. “It’s hard to believe so many people are desperate.”
    “Almost everyone is desperate,” Gladys said. “Katie is

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