The Zigzag Way Read Online Free

and intact. She had shown it when she had insisted on marrying the English stranger who appeared in their village some forty-odd years ago, and again when she chose to send Eric away to school. Now Em, wiping plate after plate with a dishtowel, saw another display of it: a steady stream of questions was being directed at her regarding her work, her research, her university, its labs, her colleagues, and her workplace by the woman who had rarely left the fishing village in Maine where she had been born but seemed keenly aware—unlike the rest of her family—that there was a world beyond it. Em, scrubbing and polishing furiously with her dishtowel, tried to make satisfying answers while attempting to comprehend a mind so free of resentment or envy, so buoyant with curiosity and quest.
    When the last dish was put away and the towel hung up to dry, they paused for a bit by the sink, looking through the window made almost opaque with steam at the rocks below where the figures of Eric and his father could just be discerned, picking their way gingerly around rock pools and boulders. It was clearly the two of them, the only men who wore neither plaid flannel shirts nor rubber boots—hands deep in the pockets of their black parkas, the hoods pulled up over their heads, which were lowered to the spray that flew up from the white-capped waves of the wintry sea.
    Eric’s mother gave a little laugh and dabbed her finger at the windowpane, making an opening in the steamy screen. “Don’t they look just like a pair of herons?” she said to Em, as if she thought them a pair of exotic visitors to her workaday world, which, perhaps, Em did too.
    Driving back to Boston in the early dark, Em and Eric were both silent with fatigue and with their thoughts. Em did finally stir herself to say, “Your dad was quiet.”
    â€œIsn’t he always?”
    â€œYour mom’s family seems to overwhelm him.”
    â€œOh, he likes that. They leave him alone, in his office room, with his books. Did you get any time with Mom?”
    â€œWe did the dishes together.”
    â€œTalk?”
    â€œI did more than her.”
    â€œIt’s not her thing.”
    Em laughed suddenly. “She did say you looked like a pair of herons down on the rocks, you and your dad. And you did. I wish I had come with you.”
    He put out his hand to clasp hers for saying that. “I wish you had.” They were passing a row of stores and their attendant parking lots, gas stations, and motels, with the traffic and the glare of lights making it difficult to talk and drive at the same time. It was when they achieved a quieter, darker stretch of the highway with tall fir forests looming on either side that he gave her some information he had clearly been mulling over. “When I told Dad we were going to Mexico, he told me something I hadn’t known before—that he was born there. He’d never told me that.”
    â€œBut how strange, Eric—not to
know
where your dad was born!”
    â€œWell, you know my family
is
strange. You’ve always said that,” he teased her.
    â€œBut as strange as that! I never guessed. Why
hadn’t
he told you before?”
    â€œI suppose because he doesn’t remember a thing about it. He was taken to England as an infant and brought up there. Mexico is just a fairy tale to him.”
    â€œOh.” Em yawned. There seemed no point in pursuing a conversation that had no substance. She settled deeper into the seat, putting her head back to sleep while Eric drove.

2
I dreamed of Mexico and I am in Mexico: the move from the first state to the second happened in these conditions without the slightest shock . . . for me never before has reality fulfilled with such splendor the promise of dreams.
— ANDRÉ BRETON
    Â 
    E M’S DOUBTS ABOUT LETTING ERIC ACCOMPANY her appeared well-founded as soon as they stepped up into the plane together with her