Seeking Rapture: A Memoir. Kathryn Harrison

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ muffled, mute, and stumbling. But in that moment when she looked away from me, hopelessness gave way before a sudden, visionary elation. I dropped the drumstick into the garbage can. The mouthful I had swallowed stopped in its descent, and I felt it, gelid and vile inside me as I washed the sheen of grease from my fingers. At dinnertime, after my mother had left for her apartment, I pleaded too much homework to allow time to eat at the table, and I took my plate from the kitchen to my bedroom and opened the window, dropping the food into the dark foliage of the bushes below.

      When I was fifteen my mother forsook the parish to which we belonged, and we began to attend one of the few Los Angeles churches that offered Latin mass. It was a romantic choice, I believe, one that justified for her the long and mostly silent drive we took each Sunday. During the celebration of the Eucharist, the priest would place the Communion wafer on my tongue. I withdrew it into my mouth carefully, making the sign of the cross over myself. Back in the pew I knelt and lay my head in my arms in a semblance of devotion, stuck out my tongue, and pushed the damp wafer into my sleeve. I was a little afraid of going to hell, very afraid of swallowing bread. My rules had grown more inexorable than the Church’s; they alone could save me. But the Host was the Host, and I could not bring myself to throw it away. So I kept it in my sock drawer with my other relics: a small fetish of my mother’s hair, stolen strand by strand from the hairbrush she kept in her purse. An eye pencil from that same source. Two tiny cookies from a Christmas stocking long past, a gingerbread boy and girl, no taller than an inch. A red leather collar from my cat, which had died.

      I still had my little books of the female saints. I looked at them before bedtime some nights, stared at their little portraits, at bleeding hands and feet, at exultant faces tipped up to heaven. But I read longer hagiographies now, grown-up ones. When Catherine was twenty-four she experienced a mystical death. ‘My soul was loosed from the body for those four hours,’ she told her confessor, who recorded that her heart stopped beating for that long. Though she did not want to return to her flesh, Jesus bade her go back. But henceforth, she was not as other mortals; her flesh was changed and unfit for worldly living. From that time forward she swallowed nothing she did not vomit. Her happiness was so intense that she laughed in her fits of ecstasy; she wept and laughed at the same time.

      I began to lose weight and watched with exultation as my bones emerged. I loved my transformed self. I could not look at myself enough, and I never went into the bathroom that I did not find myself helplessly undressing before the mirror. I touched myself, too. At night I lay in bed and felt each jutting rib, felt sternum and hipbone, felt my sharp jaw and with my finger traced the orbit of my eye. Like Catherine’s, mine was not a happiness that others understood, for it was the joy of a private, inhuman triumph and of a universe – my body – utterly subjugated to my will.

      My life was solitary, as befits a religious. Too much of human fellowship was dictated by taking meals in company, and what I did and did not consume separated me from others. Since I had not yet weaned myself completely from human needs, I drank coffee, tea, and Tab. I ate raw vegetables, multivitamins, NoDoz, and, when I felt very weak, tuna canned in water. When I climbed stairs I saw stars. I ate with my grandparents when I was forced to, but the mask of compliance was temporary, and upstairs, in my bathroom, I vomited what I had eaten. This will make you pure, I used to think when I made myself throw up. I used ipecac, the emetic kept in first-aid kits that causes a reeling, sweaty nausea that made me wish I were dead.

      My grandmother and grandfather, sixty-two and seventy-one at my birth, were now old enough that their ebbing energy granted me freedom unusual for a teenager. Losing their sight, they did not see my thinness. Deaf, they never heard me in my bathroom. By the time I was sixteen and a licensed driver, they sometimes depended on me to buy groceries, and en route to the supermarket I would stop at the mall. ‘Where did you go, Kalamazoo?’ my grandmother would ask when I returned, trying to understand why I was hours late. Sometimes she accused me of secretly meeting boys; she used the word assignation.

      Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

      Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

      Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

      Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEAYABgAAD/4QC0RXhpZgAASUkqAAgAAAAGAD4BBQACAAAAVgAAAD8BBQAG AAAAZgAAAAIDAgAWAAAAlgAAABBRAQABAAAAAR1BEBFRBAABAAAAIy4AABJRBAABAAAAIy4AAAAA AAAlegAAoIYBAIOAAACghgEA//kAAKCGAQDpgAAAoIYBADB1AACghgEAYOoAAKCGAQCYOgAAoIYB AG8XAACghgEAUGhvdG9zaG9wIElDQyBwcm9maWxlAP/iDFhJQ0NfUFJPRklMRQABAQAADEhMaW5v AhAAAG1udHJSR0IgWFlaIAfOAAIACQAGADEAAGFjc3BNU0ZUAAAAAElFQyBzUkdCAAAAAAAAAAAA AAABAAD21gABAAAAANMtSFAgIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAEWNwcnQAAAFQAAAAM2Rlc2MAAAGEAAAAbHd0cHQAAAHwAAAAFGJrcHQAAAIEAAAA FHJYWVoAAAIYAAAAFGdYWVoAAAIsAAAAFGJYWVoAAAJAAAAAFGRtbmQAAAJUAAAAcGRtZGQAAALE AAAAiHZ1ZWQAAANMAAAAhnZpZXcAAAPUAAAAJGx1bWkAAAP4AAAAFG1lYXMAAAQMAAAAJHRlY2gA AAQwAAAADHJUUkMAAAQ8AAAIDGdUUkMAAAQ8AAAIDGJUUkMAAAQ8AAAIDHRleHQAAAAAQ29weXJp Z2h0IChjKSAxOTk4IEhld2xldHQtUGFja2FyZCBDb21wYW55AABkZXNjAAAAAAAAABJzUkdCIElF QzYxOTY2LTIuMQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEnNSR0IgSUVDNjE5NjYtMi4xAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABYWVogAAAAAAAA81EAAQAAAAEWzFhZWiAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWFlaIAAAAAAAAG+iAAA49QAAA5BYWVo

СКАЧАТЬ