One Way or Another by Peter Cameron

Author:Peter Cameron [Cameron, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-5034-1
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

What Do People

Do All Day?

“GUESS WHAT MY MONOGRAM is,” asks Mark. He is sitting at the porch table eating a bowl of Froot Loops: first the pink, then the yellow, and finally the orange circles. The bowl keeps changing color.

Diane, the babysitter, watches him put a yellow spoonful into his mouth. She is not babysitting for him but for his stepbrother, Will, who is sitting in his high chair watching TV.

“Your monogram?” Diane asks. She has the feeling that Mark is smarter than she is and that his questions have some tricky double meaning.

“My monogram. You know, like on a sweater or something. My initials.”

“Well,” says Diane. “M for Mark and V for Volkenburg. What’s your middle name?”

“Theodore,” says Mark. “For Daddy. Get it?”

“What?” admits Diane, feeling dense.

“MTV,” says Mark. “M—T—V. Like on cable TV.”

“Oh,” says Diane. She gives the baby a spoonful of the peaches and yogurt his mother, Helen—Mark’s stepmother—had blended that morning. Will allows the tiny leaf-shaped spoon to be inserted into his mouth, but makes no attempt to swallow the pale orange mush. It slides out of his mouth. Mark watches and imitates with yellow, partly chewed Froot Loops.

Helen is a lawyer and works in the city part-time. Diane comes at eight and leaves whenever Helen or Ted, her husband, comes home. Ted, a recently untenured communications professor at Drew, is now looking for work in the “real world”: television, cable TV, video. He is having no luck.

Outside the screen windows, in the kidney-shaped swimming pool, Annette is swimming her thirtieth, and final, lap. Annette is Mark’s mother—Ted’s first wife. She lives around the block and every morning, when she sees Helen’s car drive past on the way to the bus stop, she pulls her jogging suit on over her bathing suit, trots through the backyards, and dives into her ex-husband’s pool. Technically, she is not allowed to do this. She has Mark all of July and every other week during the school year, but thirty—hopefully fifty by the end of the summer—laps never hurt anyone, especially since she does them when Helen and Ted are out. They never use the pool anyway. Diane and Mark are sworn to secrecy.

Annette gets out of the pool, panting, and dries herself with a towel left out overnight, then wraps it around her waist skirtlike and opens the porch door.

“How many?” Mark asks.

“Three O,” Annette says. “What’s that?” She nods at Mark’s cereal. “Lunch?”

“Breakfast,” says Mark. “Froot Loops.”

“No wonder you like it here,” Annette says. “They let you eat junk.”

“It’s vitamin fortified,” Mark says. “See.” He holds up the cereal box.

Annette ignores the box but picks some green grapes from the fruit bowl. She doesn’t seem to notice that she is dripping water on the floor. Diane watches, fascinated. She is intrigued with Annette. She hasn’t figured her out yet.

“How’s Gerber?” Annette asks the baby. She calls him Gerber because she thinks he looks like the Gerber baby. She always makes it sound like an insult, although secretly she is jealous of how beautiful Will is.

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