Recitatif, p.6
Recitatif,
p.6
Her eyes were watery from the drinks she’d had, I guess. I know it’s that way with me. One glass of wine and I start bawling over the littlest thing.
“We were kids, Roberta.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I know, just kids.”
“Eight.”
“Eight.”
“And lonely.”
“Scared, too.”
She wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand and smiled. “Well, that’s all I wanted to say.”
I nodded and couldn’t think of any way to fill the silence that went from the diner past the paper bells on out into the snow. It was heavy now. I thought I’d better wait for the sand trucks before starting home.
“Thanks, Roberta.”
“Sure.”
“Did I tell you, my mother, she never did stop dancing.”
“Yes. You told me. And mine, she never got well.” Roberta lifted her hands from the tabletop and covered her face with her palms. When she took them away she really was crying. “Oh shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit. What the hell happened to Maggie?”
A Note About the Author
TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.
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Toni Morrison, Recitatif
