Drowning Lessons by Peter Selgin

Author:Peter Selgin [Selgin, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780820339696
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2008-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE SEA CURE

SHE WAS THE LAST PERSON off the bus. Clarke stood across the street in the zocalo, watching it unload its cargo of brown-skinned passengers, when she appeared, wearing a flowing dress of pale parchment-colored fabric. Except for the tops of her feet, suntanned between the straps of her white sandals, and her shoulders (visible through a scrim of blonde hair and likewise suntanned), her skin was very pale, as pale as her dress: as pale as the sand Clarke had slept on during the night.

She opened a small parasol that also matched her dress and stepped into the pall of dust raised by the bus, oblivious to it and to the screams of children begging their mothers to buy them ice-cream bars from the stand a dozen yards away. Standing in the oval shadow cast by her parasol, she spoke with the bus driver, who leaned against the bus’s front fender smiling and worrying his set of rosary beads. Though she obviously spoke Spanish, Clarke refused to believe that she was a local.

She’s not from around here, he told himself. No way.

Clarke hadn’t wanted to vacation in Mexico. He hated Mexico. He couldn’t decide what he hated more: the crass commercialism, the package tours, the inauthentic strip hotels, or the authentic poverty. He hated the food, the monotony of rice and beans doctored with powerful spices. He had never been a beer lover, but he reserved an especially dark place in his heart for that which went by the name cerveza. And how could any nation that offered but one generic kind of cheese call itself civilized? The sun was too hot, the music too loud, the streets too dusty. As for what the Fodor guide touted as Mexico’s “ancient cultural heritage,” Clarke had seen enough jungle-spangled ziggurats to last him a lifetime. He ached for civilization in the present tense. So far, only the country’s beaches had survived his condemning scrutiny.

The trip had been Lewis’s idea. Lewis, Clarke’s adopted brother and traveling companion. Lewis, whose recent success — a series of documentary films on the westward expansion and the routing of Native Americans (“a milestone in documentary filmmaking” — USA Today) — had made it possible for him to pay for both their trips, while Clarke’s earnings as a freelance graphic designer barely covered his overhead. Since sixth grade, when Mrs. Decker, their social studies teacher, pointed out the historical significance of their joined names, fate had united them like an ampersand. They summered together at Lake Winnipesauke, where Lewis’s family had a cabin. When both of Clarke’s parents died in the MGM hotel fire in Las Vegas, the Bigelows adopted Clarke. Since then they’d been like brothers, odd ones, with Clarke six feet two to Lewis’s five feet six and weighing fifty pounds more. Still the ampersand held.

Done talking to the bus driver, the woman turned and, walking in the shadow of her parasol, made her way to the ice-cream stand, a wooden lean-to festooned with Christmas lights.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.