Prime Time 7, Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks

5 Love Before you read a) Work on your own first. You have two minutes to write down as many items, ideas, situations as you can think of when you think of the word “love”. b) Then get into groups of three. Take turns and write your items etc. on one sheet of paper. Do not talk while writing. c) Discuss which of the items etc. are the most important ones and which are the least important ones for you as a group. d) Share your findings with your class. Reading and listening: Arranged marriage Read the following text first, then listen to it. While listening focus on the situation of the narrator. The word love 1  2  4 2.2 You practice them out loud for days in front of the bathroom mirror, the words with which you’ll tell your mother you’re living with a man. Sometimes they are words of confession and repentance. Sometimes they are angry, defiant. Sometimes they melt into a single, sighing sound. Love. You let the water run so he won’t hear you and ask what those foreign phrases you keep saying mean. You don’t want to have to explain, don’t want another argument like last time. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he’d asked, throwing his books down on the table when he’d returned from class to find you curled into a corner of the old, second-hand sofa you’d bought together at a Berkeley garage sale. You’d washed your face but he knew right away that you’d been crying. Around you, bundles of paper crumpled tight as stones. (This was when you thought writing would be the best way.) “I hate seeing you like this.” Then he added, his tone darkening, “You’re acting like I was some kind of a criminal.” You’d watched the upside-down titles of books splaying across the table. Control Systems Engineering. Boiler Operations Guide. Handbook of Shock and Vibration. Cryptic as tarot cards, they seemed to be telling you something. If only you could understand their message. “It isn’t you,” you’d said, gathering up the books guiltily, smoothing their covers. Holding them tight against you. “I’d have the same problem no matter who it was.” You tried to tell him about your mother, how she’d seen her husband’s face for the first time at her wedding. How, when he died (you were two years old then) she had taken off her jewellery and put on widow’s white and dedicated the rest of her life to the business of bringing you up. We only have each other, she often told you. “So?” “She lives in a different world. Can’t you see that? She’s never travelled more than a hundred miles from the village where she was born; she’s never touched cigarettes or alcohol; even though she lives in Calcutta, she’s never watched a movie.” “Are you serious!” “I love her, Rex.” I will not feel bad about it or apologetic, you told yourself. You wanted him to know that when you remembered her face, the stern angles of it softening into a rare smile, her silver hair catching the afternoon sun in the backyard under the pomegranate tree, love made you breathless, as though someone had punched a hole through your chest. But he interrupted. “So don’t tell her,” he said, “That you’re living in sin. With a foreigner, no less. Someone whose favourite food is sacred cow steak and Budweiser. Who takes a pill now and then when he gets depressed. The shock’ll probably kill her.” You hate it when he talks like that, biting off the ends of words and spitting them out. You try to tell yourself that he wants to hurt you only because he’s hurting, because he’s jealous of how much she means to you. You try to remember the special times. The morning he showed up outside your Shakespeare class with violets the color of his eyes. The evening when the two of you drove up to Grizzly Peak and watched the sunset spreading red over the Bay while he told you of his childhood, years of being shunted between his divorced parents till he was old enough to move 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 68 Extreme situations Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv