Off the Shelf: Call Me Ahab by Anne Finger
Read from "Helen and Frida" in Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection by Anne Finger:
"I’m lying on the couch downstairs in the tv room in the house where I grew up, a farmhouse with sloping floors in upstate New York. I’m nine years old. I’ve had surgery, and I’m home, my leg in a plaster cast. Everyone else is off at work or school. My mother re-covered this couch by hemming a piece of fabric that she bought from a bin at the Woolworth’s in Utica (“Bargains! Bargains! Bargains! Remnants Priced as Marked”) and laying it over the torn upholstery. Autumn leaves—carrot, jaundice, brick—drift sluggishly across a liver-brown background. I’m watching the Million Dollar Movie on our black-and-white television: today it’s Singin’ in the Rain. These movies always make me think of the world that my mother lived in before I was born, a world where women wore hats and gloves and had cinched-waist suits with padded shoulders as if they were in the army. My mother told me that in The Little Colonel Shirley Temple had pointed her finger and said, “As red as those roses over there,” and then the roses had turned red and everything in the movie was in color after that. I thought that was how it had been when I was born, everything in the world becoming both more vivid and more ordinary, and the black-and-white world, the world of magic and shadows, disappearing forever in my wake.
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