A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Read Online Free Page B

van and left our unfinished basement home in Holton, Kansas, was a hard day, a day with a lot of crying and swearing and promises. I was sixteen then and our leaving for California seemed like a long, interesting part of a movie to me, but my nine-year-old sister Katie was downright scared.
    I remember how Jean tried to turn it all into a joke, saying the only way to stop living underground was to move west. “Want to stay in a tomb for the rest of your lives?” she asked us as she carried out a box of Christmas decorations, tinsel and angel hair spilling behind her in a luminescent trail. For twelve years we had lived in the basement of a house whose upper stories, season after season, just never got built. Jean became sick of the dark, dank two-bedroom cigar box, of our sweaters always smelling like pee, and finally she grew tired of Eldon Hyde—a good-enough-looking husband but a poor architect, an idle carpenter, and, worst, a dreamless dreamer. Consequently, Jean drove the U-Haul west, I read the map, and Katie sullenly lost herself in the new Etch-a-Sketch Jean had bribed her with.
    In its way, California was good for us. The long, slow, rocky coastline set us free. Soon after we arrived Jean took Katie and me toBalboa Park and sat us down on a concrete bench in a garden steeped with bird of paradise and zinnias, where the colors rushed in high frequency and the air was glass, and she said, “We’re three women now. Comprende vous?”
    â€œWe comprende,” Katie and I told her, and from then on Jean was Jean to us.
    Ten years later, like faithful traveling companions, like people who do not lose each other even after the road, the three of us returned together to the Midwest for the Hillcock reunion. It was June. It was right after Katie completely stopped eating. We came in on a smooth flight, Jean and I tipping a few bourbons, Katie drinking mineral water from a tall plastic container she pulled out of her carry-on tote. Katie had the window seat because, as she put it, she wanted her money’s worth.
    Katie was worried about money, though that was only indirectly the issue in her life. After two years of studying to become an X-ray technician, she had flunked the test for her certification. “Flat out flunked it,” she had said.
    â€œSo what? You can take the test again in two months,” I told her.
    â€œLook,” she said, framed by the bay window in Jean’s pink and black ceramic kitchen. “If I don’t know the bones yet, if my best X-rays are more like vacation snapshots, then it’s over and I’m screwed. Trust me.”
    â€œCome on,” I said, “you were scared. You blanked. You were temporarily insane the day of the test.” But I could see that Katie had already cast those two years into a dismal, untalked-about void that she called her past.
    Toward the end of the flight into K.C. International we looked out the cramped porthole, over the wing, and down onto the endless farmland spread like a squared and colorful quilt, as strong in its way as the brown, slave-driven Rockies had been from the air an hour earlier. It’s probably true that one place is no better than another. Whatever your location, your heart either pounds with tendernessand love or it fails you. And yet, as I flew over the plains and down into the big, broken wheel of Kansas City I felt better, stronger. I don’t know if there are currents in the earth or if some mountains hold power or if certain places pulse with an unknowable energy, but when I finished my third bourbon and unbuckled my seat belt, I felt I was really home.

    The last three miles to the Hillcock reunion are on gravel road, and so my relatives slow down just a little, the flying gravel making its own song, dust layering the air brown and then pink. They know the road by heart: the sunlit curves and the soft, sloping shoulders and the old bridges that can spell trouble on a dark-enough