How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

Author:Julie Orringer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307426291
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Care

Tessa knows how to cross the street with a six-year-old: You take her hand, look both ways, and wait until it’s safe. Then you stay within the crosswalk as you cross. She does all these things as she guides Olivia, her niece, across the street toward the cable-car stop. There’s a right way to take care of a child, she knows, and a wrong way. Many wrong ways. What you do not do: Take the drugs that are in your pocket, the Devvies and Sallies in their silver pillbox. She can make it through the day without them. Even bringing them was wrong—another wrong thing. But it makes her feel better to have them close by.

The heel of Tessa’s left shoe is coming loose, so she’s been walking on the ball of her foot ever since she left her apartment. She has a blister already. At the stop she sits on a bench and examines the broken shoe. The tips of tiny nails glint in the space between heel and sole. Olivia sits next to her, zipping and unzipping her lavender jacket.

“What’s wrong with your shoe?” Olivia asks.

“Nothing,” Tessa says, straightening the heel. She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket—Kenji’s jacket, actually, heavy and worn and smelling of his cigarettes—and feels for the pillbox. There it is in the right-hand pocket, round and familiar, a relief.

“Can I get a souvenir?” Olivia says, eyeing a shop across the street.

“Maybe later. We have to wait for the cable car.”

“Can we just look for a second?”

Tessa glances down the street in the direction of the car turnaround. A cable car is just beginning to make the climb up the hill. “We have to stay here.”

“I want a T-shirt and a light-up snow dome,” Olivia says.

“You’ll get what I give you,” Tessa says, and Olivia goes silent. She slides down the bench, as far away from Tessa as possible.

Tessa tries to concentrate on the distant clang of the bell. She wills the cable car to hurry up. All her joints feel dry and sore, her mind whitely empty. She bites the inside of her cheek just for the distraction.

The cable car glides uphill through the intersection of Post and Powell and comes to rest at their stop. It’s packed with tall boys in green-and-white sweatshirts that read BONN JUNGENCHOR. The boys are belting out a peasant tune in three-part harmony. Tessa and Olivia squeeze onto the side rail and grab the brass pole as the cable car begins to move. All around them the boys sing the lilting chorus with its repeating nonsense line: O-di-lon tee-lee, o-di-lon tee-lee. Tessa’s head begins to pound. She wonders if Olivia is too young to be standing on the side rail of a cable car, hanging on to a pole as they ascend Nob Hill. Maybe they should be inside the car, not standing here, where Olivia could fall onto the tracks or be jostled to the pavement. The bell of the cable car is like a pickax inside Tessa’s head.

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