Dive Read Online Free PDF Page B

it’s impossible to focus on anything, even if a person tries extremely hard. Vertigo is the name of the movie I’m thinking of. Vertigo is the feeling.
     
    When I could finally see, it was clear that everyone was crying, because everybody loved Pop. My brother was actually heaving up and down, and Baby Teeth’s face was all crinkled like a wet pillowcase. The words “Pop died” rushed coldly through me. I don’t know how long Lucky was jumping at my legs when I realized he had to go out. After I left the room and found his leash and stood on the lawn with him, what had happened in school started again.
     
    It was as if I wasn’t really there. My body was standing next to an apple tree, and my eyes were watching my dog pee, while my mind was wondering if people always died in winter. But really it was as if I’d disappeared. A thousand blue robin’s eggs could have dropped from the sky at that moment and I wouldn’t have noticed. I had never seen my mother cry.
     
    So why am I feeling this? My mother’s not crying now. I look up at the sky. It seems to be fading. How can the sky vanish? I haven’t seen her cry since.

If We Were Buffalo and We Ate Grass
     
    My mother had stopped crying about Pop by the time my father came home that night. In the late afternoon it seemed to me she finally just swallowed her sadness. She walked into the pantry, opened a bottle of scotch, poured a stiff one, no ice, and swallowed.
     
    A stiff one is a double. ‘Up’ means without ice, and ‘over,’ full of ice. Pop, my mother’s dad, said ‘over rocks.’ Alcohol was full of illusion; the actual names for drinks were senseless.
     
    Pop drank a Perfect Rob Roy. What was that? It sounded like it belonged in a Texas rodeo, but no, it was made with three different liquors. “Yuck,” I said when he told me they were all mixed together. “Yuck yuck yuck,” I said when he let me taste it. That made him laugh. He always laughed. Pop had a big red face. He was bald. It was hard not to laugh when he did because his entire head would wrinkle and his eyes almost close from all that happy flesh.
     
    “It’s an acquired taste,” Pop said.
    “Like caviar,” my mother added.
    “What’s that?” I’m a kid, maybe six, maybe eight. I don’t know what caviar is.
    “Fish eggs.” Pop laughed.
    “To eat?” I wondered why so many things were not called what they actually were, but by other names: caviar, bouillabaisse. Why didn’t someone just say, “We’re having some fish stew today”? That’s what bouillabaisse was, after all. I’d learned that from Mrs. Connor, Eileen’s mother, the last time she had invited me to stay for dinner. I said, “No, thank you”—fish stew?
     
    It was as if words needed to be disguised and so were made into nonsense. But it wasn’t the words alone that were dangerous—there’s nothing dangerous about fish stew—it was, I decided, what they could mean.
     
    “Things are just what they are,” said my dad, always so practical. But that wasn’t true. A Perfect Rob Roy was not what it sounded like. They all just laughed, which is what Sundays were full of with Pop around. Neither words nor adults made any sense sometimes.
     
    Pop would drive his metallic blue Buick from Brooklyn and pull bags of licorice and bottles of liquor out of his trunk when he arrived. “Make it a stiff one,” he’d call to my dad, as if because a week had passed, my father would’ve forgotten.
    “ Gotcha,” my dad would say, instead of “No kidding, stupid, you have one every Sunday,” or something like that. Everybody was nice to Pop. Probably because he was nice first.
     
    We’d sit in the living room. Baby Teeth might be on his lap, waiting for the “Hickory Dickory Dock” rhyme to start, and the Wad and I would sprawl on the couch eating licorice for a while. A roast would be cooking, like always, the air warm with that almost-cooked smell that made my eyes wet.
     
    And Pop would say the