Feathered Laura Kasischke

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

told that they are only in high school, so he can t
mistake them for older girls. He knows they aren t
flirting with him, that their friendliness is only
that friendliness.
Michelle looks up from her Sky Juice, looks across
at the stranger, smiling, answering his questions and
when she does, when she really looks at him for the
74
first time, she s shocked to see how blue his eyes are.
For a moment, it surprises her into silence. Seeing
his eyes, she takes a startled little breath. His eyes
have caught her off guard. Has she ever in her life,
she wonders, seen such blue eyes?
75
sixteen
Anne
MY FATHER ALWAYS said of Michelle, That little girl
wants a daddy.
Until I got older, I never understood what he
meant, because Michelle was so shy around men.
When my own dad would come home from work, if
Michelle and I were in the living room playing with
Barbies or at the kitchen table giggling and eating
cookies, she d go completely silent. She d stop what�
ever she was doing and put her hands in her lap.
When my father said, Hello, girls, she d mumble
politely, but mostly she seemed just to want to get
away.
Later, it was the same with our gym teacher, Mr.
Wiknowski. And even Mr. Otto, in French class.
76
And her choir director, Mr. Brecht. The same girl
who would have been laughing hysterically in the
locker room, wearing her gym shorts on her head,
would go completely quiet in the gym when Mr.
Wiknowski said hello.
But by then I d figured it out. How shy, and how
full of longing, an older man made her. Once, I d
caught her looking at a photograph of me and my
dad in the pool in our backyard. I was eleven or
twelve in that photo, and he d hoisted me out of the
water and was getting ready to toss me backward
into it again, and we were both laughing. Michelle
was hovering over it at my dresser, squinting into it,
and I knew then that she was trying to imagine her�
self in that picture, and couldn t. Once, I asked her
if she was sad about not having a father, or not
knowing who her father was. She just said, I m
always looking, and I knew she meant that the
looking was the bad part. Not the not having, but the
blank space always waiting to be filled.
So, you girls, how long are you to stay in Mexico?
We told him we were on a four-day/three-night
charter. And today was the first day.
77
He laughed. He said, So, you plan to see only
this? He gestured to the beach, the crowd of
whooping students on it. They d begun to disperse,
wandering away from whatever had been at the cen�
ter of the crowd. And, he said, to drink Sky
Juice?
The bartender brought me a second drink soon
after bringing Michelle s, and I felt suddenly
ashamed to have it. The first one had already
made me tipsy. Now that the crowd on the beach
had broken up, some of the kids who d been in it
were stumbling back toward the bar, and I could
see how drunk they were. One girl was being held
up between two friends, dragging her legs in the
sand, stumbling, laughing loudly. Her bikini top
had slipped down over one of her breasts, and she
wasn t bothering to do anything about it. I pushed
the drink a few inches away from me.
No, Michelle said. We want to see the Mayan
ruins, too. The pyramid. At Chich�n Itz�.
Chee-chun Eet-sa. He corrected her pronuncia�
tion. In that case, you are in luck. I am here,
myself, for that purpose only, and if you would like
a ride and a guide, I am going to the site tomorrow.
78
I am a historian, by profession. An archaeologist, as
a hobbyist.
Michelle and I exchanged glances.
Could we?
My sunburn had begun to prickle hotly across my
shoulders, as if in answer to the question hanging in
the air between us. As if my mother were tapping me
on the back, on my sunburn, reminding me of the
things I d promised not to do on spring break.
Sunburn. Strangers. Rides.
But, the stranger said, if I were your fathers I
would say do not take a ride to the ruins with a
stranger! And if my own daughters were to do so, I
would be furious. And still, I offer you tomorrow
morning, if you are ready by sunrise, a ride to the
ruins in my rental car. Maybe then I make up for
being a stranger giving you a ride by saving you from
drinking any more Sky Juice tonight. Because then
you must go to bed now. Sunrise here is five o clock
in the morning.
I looked over at Michelle. She was looking care�
fully into the face of the stranger, as if trying to
read his thoughts. Then she looked down, into her
Sky Juice, and shook her head just a little so that
79
only I could have seen it. She d made our decision
for us. No.
It was a relief in a way, but I was also a little dis�
appointed. A free ride in a car instead of on a bus
and we were going anyway. And this man no longer
seemed like a stranger to me. Or at least not the kind
of stranger who would rape us, leave our bodies in
the jungle. Except for his accent, this stranger
reminded me of our history teacher, Mr. Bardot, who
was also an amateur archaeologist. In September
he d forced our class to sit through four weeks of
slides from his various expeditions. Greece. Turkey.
Guatemala. The Upper Peninsula. A bog in Scotland.
He never found, it seemed to us, anything of
interest on any of these trips. A shard of bone in the
bog, where he d been looking for sacrificial victims,
which turned out just to be the back of a pigeon s
skull. A link from a bracelet near an ancient tomb in
Greece. (That one turned out to be from the fifties.)
Mr. Bardot laughed about it, but remained, it
seemed, so passionate about his hobby and all the
treasures he d never found that, despite myself, I d
also become intrigued by the washed-out slides of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Odnośniki