Body Surfing Read Online Free PDF Page B

down the road on the beach. She has seen the tent erected, the sign in the driveway announcing The Christopher/Rapp Wedding. She imagines an outdoor wedding planned and wonders if the guests will be able to see the bride at the makeshift altar. Expensive coiffures will be undone in seconds.
    The brothers go for a run together. Sydney avoids them in the hallway. She has generally been expert in her timing, managing to arrive in the kitchen after the Edwardses have breakfasted but before the guests have come down. When Sydney enters the kitchen, there are crumbs next to the toaster, an uncovered butter dish on the counter, plates with the residue of sliced pears in the sink. A coffee cup, the rings already drawn, sits at the edge of the island, suggesting Ben stood to drink his breakfast. How does Sydney know that it is Ben, of all of them, who might stand to drink his breakfast?
    The small gravel driveway just beyond the back door is thick with cars: Mrs. Edwards's maroon Volvo; Mr. Edwards's Subaru Outback; Sydney's gray Civic; Ben's black Land Rover. Sydney wonders what the girlfriend drives and spends quite a lot of time thinking about it. Possibly a Passat, but more likely a Lexus. Sydney hopes for the Lexus. She imagines the girlfriend to be cool and blond, but actually she cannot picture Jeff with a girlfriend. It is not that she thinks he does not deserve one or that he is not attractive enough. It is simply that she cannot picture it.
    Sydney walks out to the porch with her tea and commandeers the teak chaise with the white cushion. She can hear the faint annoyed tone of a lost-key crisis from inside the house.
    I know I had it in my pocket. Did you do a wash?
    (Years ago in Troy, and her father has lost a key, or her mother has. To the apartment? To the car? To what else would her parents have had keys? A simmering tension igniting on that sweltering Memorial Day, as if in celebration. Sydney--maybe eleven--sitting out on the front cement steps, a stoop identical to all the others on the street, hearing through the open windows her father's low accusations, her mother's near hysteria, the fight not about a key but about failed expectations. Did Sydney really hear the word Jew hurled from the room? When her father met her mother at a concert at Russell Sage, he was living in Troy and working for an alternative paper. Sydney's mother thought her father a writer. He thought her an artist. Her father, unusually laconic--now driven to shouting; did he really say her mother's purses were cheap and tawdry?--lived in his mother's apartment house, an acceptable arrangement for a couple with a baby on the way and artistic fantasies to fulfill. Sydney's mother's family in Connecticut refused to come to the wedding of their pregnant daughter to a Jew in Troy, the dead-end city at least as unacceptable as the religion. One couldn't help being a Jew, the thinking went, but one could certainly be expected to do better than Troy.
    When the alternative paper failed, her father took a job with the Troy Record, a tabloid filled with ads, local sports, and obits. Her mother made silk purses and bristled if anyone said the word crafts within her hearing. Each was fatally disappointed in the other, feeling swindled, feeling duped. Perhaps her father less so, for he seemed congenitally used to failure. His own father, a tailor two blocks over, had had to sell his shop to a butcher when the neighborhood had gone Italian. Sydney's grandmother, in a shrewd move, had saved enough money to buy the row house. She lived on the top floor and rented out the two below her.
    Sydney's father coming out onto the stoop, mindful that his daughter is sitting alone, waiting to go on the family picnic. The Olds, parked in front of the house, locked.
    "Ice cream?" her father asks.)
    With biblical drama, the fog lifts. The water scintillates, a sequined surface. Even the dune grass is shiny, giving off more light than green. The air seems freshly laundered.