Lynn Coady

Strange Heaven

Canada   1998

Genre de texte
Roman

Contexte
Ce rĂŞve survient Ă  la fin du chapitre 5. Bridget a Ă©tĂ© envoyĂ©e Ă  l’extĂ©rieur de chez elle pour accoucher. Après l’accouchement, les mĂ©decins estiment qu’elle est dĂ©pressive et la placent dans une institution de santĂ© mentale pour adolescentes. Elle doit un jour prĂ©parer un gâteau lĂ©ger (« angel cake ») pour une fille anorexique, ce qu’elle trouve ridicule. Bryon, un autre patient, vient Ă  la cuisine alors que Bridget s’y trouve et il commence Ă  l’ennuyer. Les autres se rassemblent autour d’eux. Bridget humilie Bryon devant eux. Elle fait ce rĂŞve après une sĂ©ance de thĂ©rapie oĂą elle a dĂ» raconter la scène avec Bryon. Ce rĂŞve renvoie aussi Ă  la dĂ©couverte qu’elle avait faite plus tĂ´t que le frère d’une amie, Kenneth MacEachen, s'Ă©tait suicidĂ© en prenant les calmants de sa grand-mère.

Texte original

Texte témoin
Strange Heaven, Goose Lane Editions : Fredericton, 1998, p. 56.




Bridget 1

Battre les Ĺ“ufs

Bridget had dreamt about Kenneth MacEachern, which was funny because she wasn’t even sure what he looked like. He was one of those people you recognized from school but could never put the face to the name. If anyone pointed him out to you, you would say, Oh, yes... him ! That’s Kenneth MacEachern. But no one had ever done that for Bridget and now no one ever would. So Bridget’s dreaming mind probably just made a compromise, perhaps out of every boy she’d ever seen at school whose name she didn’t know.

What she’d always dreamt was that she was separating eggs into two bowls, eggs into bowls, that was mostly it. And when she went to separate the very last egg, she discovered there was no yolk inside the shell—it was all white. Sometimes she’d wake up at that point in great distress, and then at other times she’d try to rectify the situation by putting the white in with the rest of the whites and then putting the empty shell in with the yolks, as if to substitute. In a sort of panic she would beat the yolks together in hopes that the shell would blend in with them, only it didn’t—you could see the jagged little fragments floating in the frothy yellow. And sometimes she would wake up then. She had these dreams on and off for quite a while after the incident in the kitchen with Byron before Kenneth MacEachern finally made his appearance. She was standing there beating the shell in with the yolks maniacally, beating them and beating them, and finally Kenneth MacEachern—sitting at the end of the table and tapping his fingers—told her that there was nothing to worry about anyway. Because you didn’t need yolks for an angel food cake. And after that Bridget didn’t have the dream at all any more. She barely slept, in any event.

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