of the state, and he'd recently lost another metatarsal. Our moves had not been easy on him. Here in Maine, his elbows rattled in a wind that smelled of salt and stranded crabs. It was Tuesday night, three days before the end of school, and I found myself reciting the names of the bones he still had left instead of solving the last equations of the year.
I was also thinking about Jake Loiseau, the dark boy who sat a row ahead in math. Like me, he was at sea in numbers. The son of the chemistry teacher, it was odd he had no flair for the quantitative. Instead, he had stillness, and I knew it came from living in the same town his entire life. Jake seemed to me to be the essence of Maine, which appeared to be a very private state.
Unlike Florida, our last home, a place I remembered like a short, violent dream, in fragments of alarming colors. The Doctor had only worked there six months when Naomi, my mother, started wondering, often and aloud, if a woman could actually die from humidity. If the Doctor heard the word one more time, I thought he might kick cracks in the pots of bougainvillea, Pensacola's one boon. So last August, he'd called in a favor and found a job at St. Dympna's, a hospital inland from Biddeford. "Spruce,
Page 51
it's got spruce," he said during one of our last Florida suppers, and attacked his dinner in that silver-knife way he had, the style that survived all our dislocations.
Though I was fourteen, no one mentioned schools. But if either of my parents had asked, I could have told them how I handled a new town. You had to touch a place to know it. The cracked paint of a window sash, the wet pole of a parking meter. And as usual, no one was around to talk to. The Doctor was on duty at the E.R. ; Naomi'd scrawled a message that said "Out 'til 10." Naomi was vague on numbers, too: 10 might stretch to 11, though she'd dash back before the end of the Doctor's shift. I let the porch door slam and drifted away from word problems. I was starting to wonder what it'd be like to touch not a mailbox flag or the knob on a cigarette machine, but an actual boy. Not that this would happen soon. I was heads taller than the ones I knew, which we all found quite scary.
Heading downtown, I let my knuckles brush hedges that hid noisy families in yards. People had touched each other in those houses and as a result, babies had been born. Toys in colors worthy of Florida crowded their drives. Everyone on our street was home tonight: the Nasons, the Ballards, the Marcottes, names I turned over in my head like smooth stones found on beaches. Next came Mr. Fleming, the butcher, who'd been glimpsed in a woman's slip when his blind was three inches from the sill. All people had seen was a lacy hem and an inch of Mr. Fleming's pale, haired thigh and that was it. Now it was impossible to buy steak without looking twice at his stumpy fingers.
I'd heard about it in the Purity Supreme, in line behind Mrs. Nason who was telling the cashier, the sort of news that made me feel at home somewhere. But passing Mr. Fleming's, I told him silently I'd remember him more for his clean store and honest scale.
Naomi said she'd always had doubts about the butcher. He fit in too well. No matter where we lived, being taken for a native
Page 52
was one of Naomi's great worries. These days, she muttered about chapped, terse northerners and tried to set herself apart with foamy scarves. A boost to her blondness hadn't hurt, either. On Sunday, we'd performed the season's first tinting, an afternoon of busy quiet, slicing lemon after lemon, squeezing out the straw-colored meat on the cone of the juicer.
I wet my head at the tap and waited for the juice to find the slightest scratch. It coursed, thicker than seawater around ears, along the nape. My eyes smarted and ran and salt mixed with sour in the corners of my mouth. It never worked. My hair, the color of tea, insisted on its plainness, but Naomi got all kinds of silky highlights.
With our scalps on
I was also thinking about Jake Loiseau, the dark boy who sat a row ahead in math. Like me, he was at sea in numbers. The son of the chemistry teacher, it was odd he had no flair for the quantitative. Instead, he had stillness, and I knew it came from living in the same town his entire life. Jake seemed to me to be the essence of Maine, which appeared to be a very private state.
Unlike Florida, our last home, a place I remembered like a short, violent dream, in fragments of alarming colors. The Doctor had only worked there six months when Naomi, my mother, started wondering, often and aloud, if a woman could actually die from humidity. If the Doctor heard the word one more time, I thought he might kick cracks in the pots of bougainvillea, Pensacola's one boon. So last August, he'd called in a favor and found a job at St. Dympna's, a hospital inland from Biddeford. "Spruce,
Page 51
it's got spruce," he said during one of our last Florida suppers, and attacked his dinner in that silver-knife way he had, the style that survived all our dislocations.
Though I was fourteen, no one mentioned schools. But if either of my parents had asked, I could have told them how I handled a new town. You had to touch a place to know it. The cracked paint of a window sash, the wet pole of a parking meter. And as usual, no one was around to talk to. The Doctor was on duty at the E.R. ; Naomi'd scrawled a message that said "Out 'til 10." Naomi was vague on numbers, too: 10 might stretch to 11, though she'd dash back before the end of the Doctor's shift. I let the porch door slam and drifted away from word problems. I was starting to wonder what it'd be like to touch not a mailbox flag or the knob on a cigarette machine, but an actual boy. Not that this would happen soon. I was heads taller than the ones I knew, which we all found quite scary.
Heading downtown, I let my knuckles brush hedges that hid noisy families in yards. People had touched each other in those houses and as a result, babies had been born. Toys in colors worthy of Florida crowded their drives. Everyone on our street was home tonight: the Nasons, the Ballards, the Marcottes, names I turned over in my head like smooth stones found on beaches. Next came Mr. Fleming, the butcher, who'd been glimpsed in a woman's slip when his blind was three inches from the sill. All people had seen was a lacy hem and an inch of Mr. Fleming's pale, haired thigh and that was it. Now it was impossible to buy steak without looking twice at his stumpy fingers.
I'd heard about it in the Purity Supreme, in line behind Mrs. Nason who was telling the cashier, the sort of news that made me feel at home somewhere. But passing Mr. Fleming's, I told him silently I'd remember him more for his clean store and honest scale.
Naomi said she'd always had doubts about the butcher. He fit in too well. No matter where we lived, being taken for a native
Page 52
was one of Naomi's great worries. These days, she muttered about chapped, terse northerners and tried to set herself apart with foamy scarves. A boost to her blondness hadn't hurt, either. On Sunday, we'd performed the season's first tinting, an afternoon of busy quiet, slicing lemon after lemon, squeezing out the straw-colored meat on the cone of the juicer.
I wet my head at the tap and waited for the juice to find the slightest scratch. It coursed, thicker than seawater around ears, along the nape. My eyes smarted and ran and salt mixed with sour in the corners of my mouth. It never worked. My hair, the color of tea, insisted on its plainness, but Naomi got all kinds of silky highlights.
With our scalps on
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