中國網(wǎng)站品牌欄目（頻道）
母親毫不猶豫地從書和報刊中剪下自己鐘愛的文字，大大方方地貼滿整個廚房的墻壁；可是面對自己的女兒，她卻從未說將“我愛你”三個字說出口……
By Polly Furth
吳凡 選注
When I read a book from my mother’s shelves, it’s not unusual to come across a gap[2] in the text. A paragraph, or maybe just a sentence, has been sliced out, leaving a window in its place, with words from the next page peeping through.[3] The chopped up page looks like a nearly complete jigsaw puzzle waiting for its missing piece.[4] But the piece isn’t lost, and I always know where to find it. Dozens of quotations, clipped from newspapers, magazines—and books—plaster one wall of my mother’s kitchen.[5] What means the most to my mother in her books she excises[6] and displays.
I’ve never told her, but those literary amputations appall me.[7] She picks extracts that startle me, too: “Put your worst foot forward, because then if people can still stand you, you can be yourself.” Sometimes I stand reading the wall of quotations, holding a scissors-victim novel[8] in my hand, puzzling over what draws my mother to these particular words.
My own quotation collection is more hidden and delicate. I copy favorite lines into a spiral-bound journal[9] —a Christmas present from my mother, actually—in soft, gray No. 2 pencil. This means my books remain whole. The labor required makes selection a cutthroat process: Do I really love these two pages of On Chesil Beach enough to transcribe them, word by finger-cramping word? (The answer was yes, the pages were that exquisite.)[10]
My mother doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know I prefer copying out to cutting out. I’ve never told her that I compile[11] quotations at all.
There’s nothing very shocking about that; for all our chatting, we don’t have the words to begin certain conversations. My mother and I talk on the phone at least once a week, and in some ways, we are each other’s most dedicated listener. She tells me about teaching English to those old Russian ladies at the library where she volunteers; I tell her about job applications, cover letters, a grant I’d like to win. We talk about my siblings[12], her siblings, the president, and movies. We make each other laugh so hard that I choke[13] and she cries. But what we don’t say could fill up rooms. Fights with my father. Small failures in school. Anything, really, that pierces[14] us.
I like to say that my mother has never told me “I love you.” There’s something reassuring in its self-pitying simplicity[15] —as if the three-word absence explains who I am and wins me sympathy—so I carry it with me, like a label on my back. I synthesize our cumbersome relationship with an easy shorthand[16]: my mother never said “I love you.” The last time my mother almost spoke the words was two years ago, when she called to tell me that a friend had been hospitalized[17].
I said, “I love you, Mom.”
She said, “Thank you.”
I haven’t said it since, but I’ve thought about it, and I’ve wondered why my mother doesn’t. A couple of years ago, I found a poem by Robert Hershon called “Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?” that supplied words for the blank spaces I try to understand in our conversations:[18]
Don’t fill up on bread[19]
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge[20]
My son, whose hair may be
receding[21] a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?
What he doesn’t know
is that when we’re walking
together, when we get
to the curb[22]
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand
It’s a humble poem, small in scope, not the stuff of epic heartbreak, yet poignant.[23] After copying it down in my quotation journal, my wrist smudging the pencil into a gray haze as I wrote, I opened an e-mail I had begun to my mother, and added a postscript: “This poem made me think of you,” with the 13 lines cut and pasted below.[24] My mother doesn’t read poetry—or at least, she doesn’t tell me that she reads poetry—and I felt nervous clicking, “Send.”
She never mentioned the poem. But the next time I went home for vacation, I noticed something new in the kitchen. Not on her quotation wall, but across the room, fixed to an antique magnetic board: Robert Hershon’s poem, printed on a scrap of white paper in the old-fashioned font of a typewriter.[25] The board hung above the radiator, where we drape wet rags and mittens dripping with snow, in the warmest spot in the kitchen.[26] The poem still hangs there. Neither my mother nor I have ever spoken about it.
Vocabulary
1. oblique: 轉彎抹角的，不直截了當?shù)摹?/p>
2. gap: 裂口，缺口。
3. slice out: 此處指“挖剪”；peep through: 從……中隱現(xiàn)。
4. chop up: 剁碎，此處指被挖剪的紙頁支零破碎；jigsaw puzzle: 拼圖玩具。
5. clip: 從報紙（或雜志等）上剪下；plaster: 粘貼。
6. excise: 切除。
7. amputation: 切斷，此處喻指文字片段；appall: 使驚駭。
8. scissors-victim: 剪刀的犧牲者，指被剪過的書。
9. spiral-bound journal: 螺旋圈記事本。
10. cutthroat: 嚴酷無情的；On Chesil Beach: 《在切瑟爾海灘上》，是英國作家Ian Mcewan的作品，其代表作還有《贖罪》（Atonement）；transcribe: 抄寫，謄寫；finger-cramping: 讓手指疼痛的，此處形容謄抄作品很不容易；exquisite: 優(yōu)美的，精致的。
11. compile: 匯編，收集。
12. sibling: 兄弟或姊妹。
13. choke: （因感情激動而）哏得說不出話來。
14. pierce: （寒冷、憂傷等）強烈地影響，深深地打動。
15. reassuring: 安慰的，鼓勵的；self-pitying: 自憐的，自哀的。
16. 我用一句簡短且含蓄的話來概括我們之間不那么輕松的關系。
17. hospitalize: 送……進醫(yī)院治療。
18. Robert Hershon: 美國當代詩人，曾出版過11部詩集，他的這首詩《傷感的一刻或者為什么法國面包曾過馬路？》描述了一位疼愛孩子的父親有那么一刻會忘了自己的兒子早已長大成人。
19. fill up on bread: 吃餐前面包把自己填飽。大部分西餐餐館都會提供餐前的免費面包，供顧客在等候上菜或點餐時享用。
20. 這里的菜份量很大。serving: （食物或飲料的）一份（或一客）。
21. recede: （男子頭發(fā)）開始從前額向后脫落，此處形容兒子年紀已不小。
22. curb: 〈美〉（由路緣石砌成的街道或人行道的）路緣。
23. epic: 宏大的，極大規(guī)模的；poignant: 強烈的，深深打動人的。
24. wrist: 腕，腕關節(jié)；smudge: 把……擦模糊；haze: 煙霧，此處形容筆跡被擦成模糊的灰色陰影；postscript: （信末簽名后的）附言，又及（縮寫P.S.）。
25. antique magnetic board: 古舊的磁鐵板；a scrap of: 一小片（紙）；font: 字體。
26. 磁鐵板掛在暖氣片上方，這是（冬天）我們擱放滴著雪水的濕抹布和手套的地方，也是廚房里最溫暖的地方。
（來源：英語學習雜志）
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