Burning House Read Online Free Page B

drunk, I have had this revelation: that you can look at something, close your eyes and see it again and still know nothing—like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.
    The drunk in the van that hit Nicholas thought that he had hit a deer.
    Tonight, stars shine over the field with the intensity of flashlights. Every year, Spence calls the state police to report that on his property, people are jacklighting.

GIRL TALK
     

    Barbara is in her chaise. Something is wrong with the pool—everything is wrong with the pool—so it has not been filled with water. The green-painted bottom is speckled with golden-rod and geranium petals. The neighbor’s cat sits licking a paw under the shade of the little mimosa tree planted in one of the raised boxes at one corner of the pool.
    “Take a picture of that,” Barbara says, putting her hand on top of her husband Sven’s wrist. He is her fourth husband. They have been married for two years. She speaks to him exactly the way she spoke to her third husband. “Take a picture of a kitty licking its paw, Sven.”
    “I don’t have my camera,” he says.
    “You usually always have it with you,” she says. She lights an Indonesian cigarette—a
kretek
—waves out the match and drops it in a little green dish full of cherry pits. She turns to me and says, “If he’d had his camera last Friday, he could have photographed the car that hit the what-do-you-call-it—the concrete thing that goes down the middle of the highway. They were washing up the blood.”
    Sven gets up. He slips into his white thongs and flaps down the flagstone walk to the kitchen. He goes in and closes the door.
    “How is your job, Oliver?” Barbara asks. Oliver is Barbara’s son, but she hardly ever sees him,
    “Air-conditioned,” Oliver says. “They’ve finally got the air-conditioning up to a decent level in the building this summer.
    “How is
your
job?” Barbara says to me.
    I look at her, at Oliver.
    “What job are you thinking, of, Mother?” he says.
    “Oh—painting wicker white, or something. Painting the walls yellow. If you’d had amniocentesis, you could paint them blue or pink.”
    “We’re leaving up the wallpaper,” Oliver says. “Why would a thirty-year-old woman have amniocentesis?”
    “I hate wicker,” I say. “Wicker is for Easter baskets.”
    Barbara stretches. “Notice the way it goes?” she says. “I ask a simple question, he answers for you, as if you’re helpless now that you’re pregnant, and that gives you time to think and zing back some snappy reply.”
    “I think you’re the Queen of Snappiness,” Oliver says to her.
    “Like the Emperor of Ice Cream?” She puts down her Dutch detective novel. “I never did understand Wallace Stevens,” she says. “Do any of you?”
    Sven has come back with his camera and is focusing. The cat has walked away, but he wasn’t focusing on the cat anyway; it’s a group shot: Barbara in her tiny white bikini, Oliver in cut-off jeans, with the white raggedy strings trailing down his tan legs, and me in my shorts and baggy embroidered top that my huge stomach bulges hard against.
    “Smile,” Sven says. “Do I really have to say smile?”
    •  •  •
    This is the weekend of Barbara’s sixtieth birthday, and Oliver’s half brother Craig has also come for the occasion. He has given her an early present: a pink T-shirt that says “60.” Oliver and I brought Godivas and a hair comb with a silk lily glued to it. Sven will give her a card and some orchids, flown in from some unimaginably far-off place, and a check. She will express shock at the check and not show anyone the amount, though she will pass around his birthday card. At dinner, the orchids will be in a vase, and Sven will tell some anecdote about a shoot he once went on in some faraway country.
    Craig has brought two women with him, unexpectedly. They are tall, blond, silent, and look like twins but are not. Their clothes are permeated