Michael Malone - Weebly

took Judith's arm to remind her that she had not been
coming to Mass. Indeed, she had rarely been in the
church in the past five years, but the fact that he spoke
of her lapse as if he referred instead to an absence of no
more than a few weeks struck neither of them as
peculiar. Judith Sorrow had been raised to share in the
expanse of Father Crisp's temporal perspective, where
five years were no more than five weeks because both
were nothing. The whole world with its sad, sorry
history was nothing at all. To lose it, nothing at all.
Evelyn Troyes, however, who had just lost Today
on television, felt hopelessly adrift without it. Today not
only began, it explained her morning. Yet there on the
round white table in her breakfast nook, nothing but
meaningless static buzzed out of the gray blur of her
television screen. The automatic adjuster adjusted
nothing.
Evelyn was upset, for if significance is to be
measured by time, television watching was the most
significant event in her present life. Her passion for it
had developed gradually, had begun only after Mimi
had left her for Vassar, but it had grown. Solitude