The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys by Dao Strom

Author:Dao Strom
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640092716
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

4.

If it was raining or gloomy or too hot, they stayed inside, sprawled on the kitchen tiles in front of the sliding glass doors that looked out to the patio and backyard, and they played quietly indoors. But if the day was sunny, their mother would let them go out.

And if on those days Su Heng spied the Fisher woman in the neighboring backyard (separated from theirs by a hedge they could easily see through and then a fence), lounging in her swimsuit and sunglasses on a towel beside her swimming pool, and the heads of the Fisher children appeared and then disappeared above the fence as they bounced on their diving board; and if Su Heng heard the sounds of their splashing and laughter as merry and felt infected enough by the sopor of the summer afternoon—felt it as warm blessing and not inertia, that is—and if her own children seemed contented enough, then she might take out her drawing pad and sit on the patio to sketch while they played.

Before she was a nurse in Vietnam, Su Heng had wanted to be an artist. She had even for a time loved a man who was a painter, a friend from her high school days. He had encouraged her pursuit of art. That was, until his own paintings started to get attention. Then Su Heng had married, not her artist friend, but someone else, the first husband, the first ill-fated union. As for art, it became nothing more than a hobby for her after that point.

She had sketched the woman on the other side of the hedge a number of times. She had also sketched the neighbor children’s heads bobbing above the triangular wooden tips of the fence slats. There was an atmosphere about the scene she wished to capture. It felt vastly different from the life in her own backyard, and she was mildly in awe of it. Their joy, their crisp, perfect happiness. How could she bring forth the quality of their laughter in lines and scratches on paper? How could she depict the fluidity and the hum of peace that seemed to emanate from their yard? She would try to capture it by drawing the droplets of water that sprayed in an arc through the air around the children’s heads and limbs. But the droplets of water were fast, catching the sunlight for a millisecond only, dazzlingly; and she never felt like she was successful at conveying this: the shining, swift motility of stray water.

In her own backyard, they had only a kiddie pool to splash around in. Once, shortly after they’d first moved in, the Fisher girl had come over to play with Darcy and Mary. The Fisher girl was eight—Mary’s age. She was blond and taller than Mary. Both Darcy and Mary had thrown such huge fits at the prospect of sharing their kiddie pool with the Fisher girl that she had to be sent away from their house. Su Heng had not known how else to deal with it.

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