"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of
the fundamental mysteries.
Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming. This was, he thought, an
indicator of how happy he had been with the way things were, the situation as he had
had it. Mister Mom—he had loved it. Just this last May he had been walking down
Leland Street and had passed Djina, one of the Gymboree moms he knew, biking the
other way, and he had called out to her “Happy Mother’s Day!” and she had called
back, “Same to you!” and he had felt a glow in him that had lasted an hour.
Someone had understood.
Of course the pure-mom routine of the 1950s was an Ozzie and Harriet nightmare, a
crazy-making program so effective that the surprise was there were any moms at all
in that generation who had stayed sane. Most of them had gone nuts in one way or
another, because in its purest form that life was too constrained to the crucial but
mindless daily chores of child-rearing and house maintenance—“uncompensated
labor,” as the economists put it, but in a larger sense than what they meant with their
idiot bean-counting. Coming in the fifties, hard on the heels of World War II’s
shattering of all norms, its huge chaotic space of dislocation and freedom for young
women, it must have felt like a return to prison after a big long breakout.
But that wasn’t the life Charlie had been leading. Along with the child care and the
shopping and the housework had been his “real” work as a senatorial aide, which,
even though it had been no more than a few phone conversations a day, had
bolstered the “unreal” work of Mr. Momhood in a curious dual action. Eventually
which work was “real” had become a moot point; the upshot was that he felt
fulfilled, and the lucky and accidental recipient of a full life. Maybe even overfull! But
that was what happened when Freud’s short list of the important things in life—work
and love—were all in play.
He had had it all. And so change be damned! Charlie wanted to live on in this life
forever. Or if not forever, then as long as the stars. And he feared change, as being
the probable degradation of a situation that couldn’t be bettered.
But here it was anyway, and there was no avoiding it. All the repetitions in the pattern
were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next
moment embraced as it arrived. This was what the Khembalis were always saying; it
was one of the Buddhist basics. And now Charlie had to try to believe it.



So, the day came when he got up, and Anna left for work, then Nick for school; then
it was Joe and Da’s time, the whole day spread before them like a big green park.
But on this day, Charlie prepped them both to leave, while talking up the change in
the routine. “Big day, Joe! We’re off to school and work, to the White House! They
have a great daycare center there, it’ll be like Gymboree!”
Joe looked up. “Gymboree?”
“Yes, like Gymboree, but not it exactly.” Charlie’s mood plummeted as he
considered the differences—not one hour but five, or six, or eight, or twelve—and
not parents and children together, but the child alone in a crowd of strangers. And he
had never even liked Gymboree!
More and more depressed, he strapped Joe into his stroller and pushed him down to
the Metro. The tunnel walls were still discolored or even wet in places, and Joe
checked everything out as on any other trip. This was one of their routines.
Phil himself was not installed in the White House yet, but the arrangements had been