"Seond Inquisition by Joanna Russ" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 6)

meanwhile I stay here waiting for the signal and I have messages
clipped to the frame of your mother's amateur oil painting of Main
Street because it will be in a museum-some day and my friends can find
it; meanwhile I read The Time Machine."

Then I would say, "Can I come with you?" leaning against the door.

"Without you," she would say gravely, "all is lost," and flaking out
from the wardrobe a black dress glittering with stars and a pair of silver
sandals with high heels, she would say, "These are yours. They were
my great-grandmother's, who founded the Order. In the name of
TransTemporal Military Authority." And I would put them on.

It was almost a pity she was not really there.

Every year in the middle of August the Country Club gave a dance, not
just for the rich families who were members but also for the "nice"
people who lived in frame houses in town and even for some of the
smart, economical young couples who lived in apartments, just as if
they had been in .the city. There was one new, red-brick apartment
building downtown, four stories high, with a courtyard. We were
supposed to go, because I was old enough that year, but the day before
the dance my father became ill with pains in his left side and my
mother had to stay home to take care of him. He was propped up on
pillows on the living-room daybed, which we had pulled out into the
room so he could watch what my mother was doing with the garden
out back and call to her once in a while through the windows. He could
also see the walk leading up to the front door. He kept insisting that
she was doing things all wrong. I did not even ask if I could go to the
dance alone. My father said:

"Why don't you go out and help your mother?"

"She doesn't want me to," I said. "I'm supposed to stay here," and then
he shouted angrily, "Bess! Bess!" and began to give her instructions
.through the window. I saw another pair of hands appear in the
window next to my mother's and then our guest-,squatting back on her
heels and smoking a cigarette-pulling up weeds. She was working
quickly and efficiently, the cigarette between her teeth.

"No, not that way!" shouted my father, pulling on the blanket that my
mother had put over him. "Don'-t you know what you're doing! Bess,
you're ruining everything! Stop it! Do it right!" My mother looked
bewildered and; upset; she passed out of the window and our visitor
took 'her place; she waved to my father and he subsided, pulling the
blanket up around his neck. "I don't like women who. smoke," he
muttered irritably. I slipped out through the

kitchen. --