#519 Bravery- Charles Baxter
“Despite what other girls said, all boys were not alike: you
had to make your way through their variables blindly, guessing at hidden
qualities, the ones you could live with.”
Susan married Elijah, a good-guy, a sweet man, a loving,
caring doctor. “He was the only man she ever loved and she was still trying to
get used to it.”
After marriage they took a trip to Prague, where they wanted
to conceive their first child. Susan kept seeing the sweetness, and tenderness
of her husband and knew that he would make a good father, but something
bothered her. In the plaza one day a crazy woman grabbed her and told her that
she would have a son and she would become jealous of her husband, of the woman
inside him.
When her son was born, she did in fact resent Elijah’s
tenderness, his ability to sooth the child, and became insistent that he not
ever feed the child, that was a mother’s job and he could not take that from
her. The fight made him angry and when he came home that night bloody from a
fight, he told her a story about saving a girl from being attacked. She didn’t
believe the story—he might have made it up to make her think he was more of a
man—but it still made her happy…at least for one more day.
Notable Passage: “Prague wasn’t Kafka’s birthplace for
nothing.”
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