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“I was almost killed in Jamaica,” she said at breakfast one day. “Your dad swam away from our boat and a wind came up. I started sailing out to sea.” She spoke with the urgency of a first telling, though Ellen had heard the story many times.
“Jesus, what a nightmare,” her father said, looking up from his paper. “You were going so fast I couldn’t catch up. I was splashing around, screaming how to turn the boat, but you couldn’t hear me.”
“So what happened?” Ellen cried, caught in the story.
“I jumped off,” her mother said. “I swam back to your father. The boat kept going.” She was washing apples in the kitchen sink. Now she stopped, still holding the colander under the running faucet, and turned to Ellen’s father. They looked at each other, and Ellen felt a current of something between them that startled her.
Ellen found her mother seated on the living room floor, her hair in a scarf. She had the dreamy look she often wore after spending several hours by herself. “I’m rearranging,” she said. “Dusting.”
Around her lay things she had bought on her various trips: inlaid wood chests, corn-husk dolls, animals carved from ivory. In a glass dish were the colored marble eggs she had bought with Ellen’s father in Florence. Ellen felt a nervous fluttering under her ribs.
“I’ve lost perspective,” her mother said. “Can you see any difference?”
Ellen wished she were back at the age when she would howl shamelessly while her mother used a tweezer to pick bits of gravel from her skinned knees. Her mother looked as delicate now as the blown-glass vase she was holding.
“Mom,” Ellen said.
Her mother looked up. The room was very still. Ellen felt the weight of the old house, its dense curtains and clean, swept kitchen. Her mother’s world was pure, steadfast, decent. But it wasn’t enough for him.
When my husband told me he was leaving, we were sitting in our den. I looked around at the polished shelves, the TV and VCR, piles of The New Yorker and Business Week. The accumulation of ten years of marriage, mostly his.
“I’ve made the arrangements,” he told me. “I’ll rent an apartment.”
I ran my eyes along his encyclopedias, photos he’d taken of whitewashed churches in Greece, a crusty turquoise horse from some ancient dynasty. “All this is yours,” I said.
“We can settle that when the time comes …”
“You stay here,” I told him. “I’ll go.”
This took him by surprise. “Do you want that?”
A terrible feeling had taken hold of me. I searched the room for things of my own and found nothing but things my husband had given me: a kimono pinned to the wall, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, a set of Greek worry beads.'
“What have I got to lose?” I said.
He sighed. “Don’t be a martyr.”
The sunlight in Granada is more pure and strong than any I have felt in Spain this winter. It warms my neck. The soft leather of my new bag rubs pleasantly against my shoulder. I feel the happiness that comes of believing your own lies for a minute. I picture my husband wandering through the halls of the Alhambra, loaded with his guidebooks and maps, describing everything to me at dinner over a bottle of wine.
It is a hot, lazy day. They are becoming torpid from so many days of lying in the sun. They will be ready to go back to Chicago tomorrow.
“It reminds me of that place in France two years ago,” Lucy says. “What was that hotel?”
“Can’t remember,” Parker says. “Never can remember that stuff.”
They have been all over the world, Lucy thinks, watching the sea. Yet so little of it has stuck with her. She clings to names, to snapshots and matchbooks, but the many seasons have mingled hopelessly. She used to arrange their photographs according to which bathing suit she was wearing—the polka-dotted one in Cannes, the striped red in Spain. But the sand and water around the bathing suits all look the same.
Josephine’s apple pie arrived, and she heaped a bite with ice cream and ate vigorously. Her jaws flexed under her wide cheekbones. “You remember,” she began, speaking slowly, “how we used to imagine being rich? Do you remember that?”
Lucy nodded. She sensed from Josephine’s tone that this was a last attempt to get at some basic thing. “Yes …” she said, cautiously.
“All I’m asking is, is it actually like that?”
Lucy considered. It was true, there had been moments when she’d thought, I can’t believe this is happening to me. The feeling came sometimes when she and Parker traveled, sometimes just when she looked around her own house at the fireplace and thick rugs, at the vast green lawn outside. Whenever she had that feeling, Lucy longed to tell someone. She would turn to Parker, who was usually reading, or anyone else who was there, but no one ever behaved as if anything special were happening. Soon her wonderment would begin to fade. As time went on, it came less and less often.
“I get excited,” she said, speaking carefully, “but it’s not like the magazines.”
She could not explain. Something separated her from Josephine, for the first time in her life. Josephine seemed to feel it, too. She sighed and pushed her pie away, lighting a cigarette and looking out at the rain. “Well,” she said, “at least you’re happy.”
“Parker,” Lucy says suddenly, “do you think it was right for you to give it up?”
She knows she has broken some tacit code in asking this. Parker is silent. He opens his mouth to speak, but doesn’t. “I don’t know,” he finally says.
Lucy wants to press the point, but is afraid of pushing him too far. She waits, almost holding her breath, the way one does in the presence of a squirrel or a bird that will scramble away at the slightest jolt.
“I loved history,” he says. “It was exciting.”
As the maître d’ leads the young couple to their table, the blond woman pauses at the grill and looks at the fish. Timidly she reaches out to press the shining scales of one.
“The funny part is,” Parker says, “somehow I made a choice. I don’t even know when. Only after it was made, I noticed that I just—”
“Thought differently?”
“Yes! That’s right!” He seems elated that she understands. “That’s what it was, I thought differently. But what bothers me …
The man and woman sit down and hold hands. The blond hair falls in a curtain down the woman’s back.
“What bothers me is …” He can’t seem to finish. One hand waves halfheartedly, trying to conjure the sentence.
“Money?” Lucy says very gently. “That somehow it was the money?”
Parker drops his hand. They look at one another in silence.
“Always watching,” Silas says, looking at me. “Those big eyes, always moving.”
I nod, ashamed. “But I never do anything,” I say. And all of a sudden I know, I know why Angel left me.
Silas frowns. “Sure you do. You watch,” he says, “which is what’ll save you.”
I shrug. But the longer we sit, the more I realize he’s right—what I do is watch. I’m like Silas, I think. In twenty years I’ll still be alive.
On one side the sky is getting light, like a lid is being lifted up. I watch it, trying to see the day coming, but I can’t. All of a sudden the sky is just bright.
By now it was late September; I had tracked the passing days in the obsessive belief that if I measured the time, it wouldn’t really be lost. [...]
After two days of reading, I had tottered from the library into the empty husk of “downtown,” across the river from our house, nearly all of whose commerce had been leached away by malls far to the east of the river, out by the interstate. My mother beeped her horn from the parking lot across the street. But I held still for a minute, clutching my bookbag, letting the smallness and meagerness of this forgotten place pour in around me. Rockford, I now saw, was a city of losers, a place that had never come close to being famous for anything, despite the fact that again and again it had tried. A place revered among mechanics for its universal joint was not a place where I could remain. This was clear to me at age twelve: my first clear notion of myself. I was not Rockford—I was its opposite, whatever that might be. I decided this while standing in front of the public library. Then I crossed the street and got in my mother’s car.
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