Pears on a Willow Tree by Leslie Pietrzyk

Author:Leslie Pietrzyk [Pietrzyk, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1998-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

UNTITLED XVII. Oil on wood. Green circle within yellow circle within green within yellow within orange within yellow. My father left my mother last year because she’s a drunk, because she promises each of her days will be different only they’re all the same. Don’t leave me, she begged. It’s you leaving me, he said. I’m still here, is what I thought, always me still here.

Lois moved her towel near mine; we’d nailed her brother in a remarkable ambush over by the deep end, and victory had exhausted us.

Lois was fourteen and she and her brother, Horace Jr., and her little sister, Tina, rode their bikes to the pool every day, all summer long. Her favorite food was macaroni and cheese, the bedroom she shared with Tina was painted yellow and blue, and they used to have a dog named Skippy but it ran away last spring and her mother was just as happy not to have to vacuum up all that hair. Her father pulled night shift at Ford and he’d been a high school star football player; people still recognized him at Kroger when they were buying groceries. When she grew up, Lois wanted to be a nurse or a ballet teacher or maybe one of those dancers on cruise ships.

The sun burned deep into my skin, into my damp bathing suit, and everything Lois said felt important, like I had to remember it to tell someone later, and I saw afternoons ahead at the pool and the letters we’d send during the year and her visiting me in Arizona and coming to my school and all my friends who weren’t half as fun and full of interesting things to say as Lois, and maybe she’d be a ballet teacher in Paris where I planned to live and paint and wear my beret and eat French bread and French fries and French salad dressing. …

“You’re sleeping!” Lois slapped at my leg with the back of her hand.

The sun slashed as I opened my eyes.

“Know any good jokes?” she asked. “I do.”

I sat up, still blinking. My suit was almost all the way dry. “Where’s my brother? I’m sort of supposed to watch him.”

Lois sat up on her knees, visored her eyes with one hand, put the other on her hip. Two boys a couple of towels over nudged each other, pointed. So I sat up the same way, and I spotted Cal in the far corner, trapped underneath someone else’s rowdy game of keep-away. “He’s fine,” I said, rubbing baby oil onto my arms and legs, turning my skin slick. “I don’t know any jokes—you tell me.” I squirted oil in my palms to do my shoulders, then nudged the bottle toward her. “Want some?”

“Can’t you see I’m tan enough?” She pressed her arm against mine so our two skins touched, my arm shiny with oil, scrawny and the elbow knobby, tiny hairs lined up golden in the sun, hers dark. Stupid old Aunt Joane had probably never touched a black person; maybe even my mother hadn’t.

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