Siam by Lily Tuck

Author:Lily Tuck [TUCK, LILY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000
ISBN: 9781468304633
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2012-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

13

EVERY AFTERNOON DURING THE MONTH OF MAY, IT rained with such suddenness and force that if Claire was in the garden spraying the rose bushes or picking hibiscus blooms, in just a few seconds, the time it took her to run back to the house, her hair, her clothes were soaked through. In those few seconds, the rain fell so hard and fast that it obliterated everything from view—the garden gate on one side of the house and, on the other, the canal. The noise, too, of the rain drowned out all sounds—the sound even of Noi’s baby boy crying at the sight of her.

“Noi!” Claire called as she ran upstairs to the bedroom to change her wet clothes.

“Prachi!” She yelled for him to close the wooden shutters to the house.

Neither Noi nor Prachi could hear Claire as the rain fell through the open doors and spattered on the living room floor and on the new grass rug. The rain streamed through the flimsy window screens and splashed on the new sofa slipcover, the new sofa cushions. Soon, too, the dampness would cause mildew to grow on the newly painted white walls.

“Noi! Prachi!” she screamed.

Afterward, the sky, as if suddenly transfused with blue, was clear. It was less humid, too. For a brief time the weather in Bangkok was like that of an ordinary hot summer day on Cape Cod. For once the seasons nearly coincided.

In June every summer, as long as Claire could remember and ever since she was a child, she and her parents went to the same house. The house was situated on a bluff, and even during the worst of the heat, there was always a cool breeze from the sea. And each summer, too, as long as Claire could remember, her parents’ routine never varied. In the morning Claire’s mother gardened while Claire’s father wrote or read; in the afternoon they played tennis. Claire could picture how worn her father’s sneakers looked on the tennis court, how he and her mother both claimed to prefer their old wood rackets. Later her parents went down to the beach to swim. Before dinner they sat outside on the lawn and had a drink—her mother always drank vodka, her father gin. From where they sat, her parents heard the pounding of the sea, they smelled the neighbor’s barbecue.

Up to a certain point Claire could picture them exactly—how her mother was dressed in her denim wraparound skirt, a vertical rose thorn scratch on one of her brown legs, how her father was wearing khakis and was puffing on his pipe. Claire could smell the smoke, the odor of the pipe tobacco mingling with that of the barbecue. Then, almost imperceptibly in front of her eyes, her parents’ orderly lives began to change. Claire could still picture her mother driving the old Saab to the village to buy groceries—but had her mother’s hair turned gray all of a sudden? And why, Claire wondered, was her mother driving at night? Claire’s father was with her in the car.

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