- 在線時間
- 294 小時
- 最後登錄
- 24-1-23
- 國民生產力
- 704
- 附加生產力
- 5166
- 貢獻生產力
- 0
- 註冊時間
- 08-6-20
- 閱讀權限
- 10
- 帖子
- 1358
- 主題
- 24
- 精華
- 0
- 積分
- 7228
- UID
- 196829
 
|
回覆樓主：
本帖最後由 cornelius 於 19-12-27 16:57 編輯
本帖最後由 cornelius 於 19-12-27 13:14 編輯
大家覺得呢篇文章適合中幾嘅學生？
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Mrs. Buell (by Jean Little)
For years and years, for what seems like forever, I’ve gone to BUELLS when I had a dime to spare. It’s a run-down, not very clean, corner store. Kids go there mostly, for licorice and bubble gum and jawbreakers and Popsicles and comic books and cones. She only has three flavours and the cones taste stale. Still, she’ll sell you one scoop for fifteen cents. It’s not a full scoop but it’s cheaper than anywhere else. It’s the only place I know where a kid can spend one penny.
Mrs. Buell is run-down too, and a grouch. She never smiles or asks how you are. Little kids are scared to go in there alone. We laugh at them but really, we understand. We felt it too, when we were smaller and had to face her towering behind the counter.
She was always the same except that once. I tripped going in, and fell and scraped my knee. It hurt so much that I couldn’t move for a second. I was winded too, and I had to gasp for breath. I managed not to cry out but I couldn’t keep back the tears.
Mrs. Buell is big but she moved like lightning. She hauled a battered wooden chair out from behind the curtain that hung across the back. Then, without a word, she picked me up and sat me down on it. We were alone in the store but I wasn’t afraid.Her hands, scooping me up, had been work-roughened; hard but kind.
She still didn’t speak. Instead, she took a bit of rag out of her sweater pocket, bent down, and wiped the smear of blood off my knee. The rag looked grayish but her hands were gentle. I think she liked doing it. Then she fetched a Band-Aid and stuck it on.
“Does it still sting?” she asked, speaking at last, in a voice I’d never heard her use before.
I shook my head. And she smiled. At least I think she did. It only lasted a fraction of a second. And I wasn’t looking straight at her.
At that moment Johnny Tresano came in with one nickel clutched in his fist. He was so intent on the candies he hardly noticed me. He stood and stood, trying to decide.
“Make up your mind or take yourself off,” she growled.
She had gone back behind the counter. I waited for her to look at me again so that I could thank her. But when he left she turned her back and began moving things around on the shelves. I had meant to buy some jujubes but I lost my nerve. After all,everybody knew she hated kids. She was probably sorry now that she’d fixed my knee. I slunk out without once opening my mouth.
Yet, whenever I looked down and saw the Band-Aid, I felt guilty. As soon as one corner came loose I pulled it off and threw it away. I didn’t go near the store for weeks.
She was terribly fat. She got so hot in summer that her hair hung down in wet strings and her clothes looked limp. In winter she wore the same sweater every day, a man’s grey one, too big, with the sleeves pushed up. They kept slipping down and she’d shove them back a million times a day. Yet she never rolled up the cuffs to make them shorter.
She never took days off. She was always there. We didn’t like her or hate her. We sort of knew that selling stuff to kids for a trickle of small change wasn’t a job anybody would choose – especially in that pokey little place with flies in summer and the door being opened all winter, letting in cold blasts of cold air. Even after that day when she fixed my knee, I didn’t once wonder about her life.
Then I stopped at BUELLS one afternoon and she wasn’t there. Instead, a man and woman I’d never laid eyes on were behind the counter sorting through stacks of stuff.They were getting some boxes down off a high shelf right then so they didn’t hear me come in. I was so amazed I just stood there gawking.
“How ma stood this cruddy hole I’ll never know!” the woman said, backing away from a cloud of dust. “Didn’t she ever clean?”
“Give the subject a rest, Glo,” he answered. “She’s dead. She won’t bother you any longer.”
“I tried,Harry. You know I tried. Over and over, I told her she could move in with us.God knows I could have used a bit of cash and her help looking after those kids.”
I think I must have made a sound then. Anyway, she whirled around and saw me.
“This place is closed,” she snapped. “Harry, I thought I told you to lock the door. What did you want?”
I didn’t want anything from her. But I still could not believe Mrs. Buell wasn’t there. I stared around.
“I said we’re shut. If you don’t want anything, beat it,” she told me.
The minute I got home I phoned Emily. She said her mother had just read it in the paper.
“She had a daughter!” Emily said, her voice echoing my own sense of shock. “She died of a heart attack. Kate, her whole name was Katharine Ann Buell.”
“Katharine,”I said slowly. My name is really Katharine although only Dad calls me by it. “I just can’t believe it somehow.”
“No,” Emily said. “She was always just Mrs. Buell.”
I told her about Glo and Harry. After we hung up though, I tried to imagine Mrs. Buell as a child. Instead, I saw her bending down putting the Band-Aid on my knee. Her hair had been thin on top, I remembered, and she’d had dandruff. She had tried not to hurt me. Glo’s voice, talking about her, had been so cold. Had she had anyone who loved her? It seemed unlikely. Why hadn’t I smiled back?
But, to be honest, something else bothered me even more. Her going had left a hole in my life. Because of it I knew, for the first time, that nothing was safe – not even the everyday, taken-for-granted, background of my being. Like Mrs. Buell, pushing up her sweater sleeves and giving me my change.
 |
|
發表於 19-12-27 12:57
(只答傷心便冇分，我估要答作者後悔沒有在 Mrs. Buell 在生時感謝她之類)。
同意，尤其科技或財經雜誌。
