LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

pretty good.”

      “You should sell more drawings. Look at your shoes. You could sell hand-drawn sneakers for a lot of money.”

      “Yeah, maybe.” Alison tried the idea on. Her stomach panicked a little at the thought of selling something she’d made herself.

      “You could do themes, whatever they request.”

      Alison had already been approached by a few kids to do a copy of the scenario she had drawn on her own white Converse—a crowded sunshine-lit utopia of spaceships flying through the air toward a wild landscape. Lots of yellow and green. But she’d told the other kids that it was one of a kind. Why hadn’t she thought to offer them something else? She wrestled with wanting and shunning attention. On one hand, she longed to be the center, to have her talents praised and used as currency, but on the other, she got squeamish and shy talking about it.

      As usual, her mother intuited her thoughts, saying, “You shouldn’t be so shy about your skills. You should be proud that you can draw like that. I don’t know where you got it from.”

      Alison didn’t say anything, but she basked in the odd sensation that she was a rare creature. That for every moment her parents were clueless, they could stare right into her like this with ease and see something that she’d grasped only the corner of herself. She kept drinking the Slurpee, the icy cola numbing her throat.

      A couple of blocks from the store, Cynthia pitched her drink into a trash can. “Ugh, I’ve got a headache and I think that’s making it worse.” Cynthia wrenched open the Advil bottle, shook out a tablet, and gulped it down.

      “No water? Can I have one?”

      “You have a headache too?”

      “No, I just like the taste.”

      Her mother frowned. “What do you mean?”

      “The coating. I love the taste.”

      Cynthia stopped walking. “Wait. Do you just pop Advil for the flavor?”

      Alison took another long draw from her drink, wondering what answer could still be relatively honest but not get her in too much trouble. “I guess so. Sometimes I swallow them, sometimes I spit them out.”

      “How often?”

      “I don’t know. Once a week?”

      “Alison, you can’t do that. You can’t just eat Advil because it tastes good.”

      “Most of the time I just suck on it and spit it out.”

      “Jesus, no wonder we’re always out of Advil.”

      Her mom was surprisingly pissed. “What is the big deal? It’s not like it gets you high.”

      “No, but it’s not candy. It’s medicine. Promise me you’ll never do that again.”

      “OK, I won’t. I didn’t know it would be such a thing.”

      “God, why would you do that?”

      “It’s sweet; it tastes good. There’s never any sugar or candy in the house.”

      Cynthia nodded. “Maybe we’ve been too strict about that.”

      “Well, you don’t have to jump down my throat about it.”

      “I just want my girl to be safe.” Her mother squeezed her hand.

      Coming down the sidewalk was a tall elderly woman with striking orange-and-red pants, the colors in swirls. She held her beehived head down until the last moment before they crossed paths.

      “Hello,” she greeted Cynthia.

      “Hello,” Cynthia said. “You’re out late tonight.”

      “It’s nice weather for a walk. Is this your daughter?”

      “Sure is.”

      “Love those sneakers. My gosh are those great! Enjoy your evening, ladies.”

      Cynthia swatted Alison on the arm. “See?”

      After the woman walked a distance away, Alison said, “That woman has great style. I could totally draw her some psychedelic sneakers—peace signs, paisleys, oh my god. Whatever she wanted.”

      “She walks more than anyone I’ve ever seen. I see her in the mornings usually. She’s in amazing shape for her age, or any age. I wouldn’t mind being like her.”

      “Mom, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to top that lady’s look. I mean, no offense or anything.”

      Cynthia laughed. “None taken, but I’m not totally hopeless, you know.”

      “Really? What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever worn?”

      “When I was in college,” Cynthia said, “I mostly sat around in bikini tops—trippy psychedelic ones with tiny strings—and jean shorts. Either my shoulders were bare or my feet were bare—or both.”

      “Are you telling me to wear as little clothing as possible when I go to college?”

      Cynthia smiled. “Only if the climate’s right.”

      When Cynthia first met Ernest in college in California, they were both enterprising, politically active firebrands who argued that environmentalism touched every facet of life, no matter your race, class, or gender. In a discussion about water pollution, she watched Ernest, handsome and volatile, stand in his ragged T-shirt and rattle off several statistics about water. When a classmate offered the idea that water problems in Latin America might be exaggerated, Ernest drew him into a debate, expertly shooting him down with a steely command of the facts. He knew how to channel his rage and passion and, somehow, still maintain a sense of absurdist humor, a rare commodity among activist types. Soon enough, they were cooking dinners together in her tiny apartment shared with three other girls, throwing slices of squash into a sizzling pan from her parents’ farm, his arm wrapped around her back as she was cooking, pulling her in as the vegetable caramelized, his breath tracing her ear as he lowered down to kiss her neck.

      Later, on the rumpled sheets of her bed, they’d get lost in each other for hours, until they were tired of the taste of their own bodies, but then the pull would be just as intoxicating the next night, and for a long, long time it sustained them that way.

      Though they were in agreement politically, their beliefs manifested in different ways: Cynthia wanted something tangible, so she pursued a law degree once the kids were in school, working herself hard late at night over the minutiae of environmental law, as it was the early 1980s, with still-fresh laws passed by Nixon, back when Republicans saw the good of protecting the land, air, and water as much as anyone else (or at least did a decent job of parroting the rhetoric).

      Truth be told, Cynthia never quite understood how a man with Ernest’s talents couldn’t find the right fit. He was so committed to his ideals, quoting Roderick Nash, Denis Hayes, and Rachel Carson. He recalled the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 and how it had compelled him to change his life. He alluded to the conditions in Chicago’s industrial South Side, where he’d grown up, with bitter intensity. Yet he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology and promptly stalled out, getting education jobs that let him work outdoors but little else. “Why not law?” she’d asked him. And he’d hemmed and hawed, sometimes agreeing that one could do good that way, other times ripping apart the system as effecting no real change other than holding up a small hand against the tidal wave of destructive corporations.

      He settled instead into a pattern of consulting jobs, most of them low paying, to Cynthia’s disappointment. These short-term gigs never provided the right situation to contain or sustain his specific brand of environmental fervor. Before directing Earth Day, he had worked as an environmental impact consultant for the state government. Basically, his job entailed following all the condo development projects in the area and making sure none

Скачать книгу