Drowning Lessons Read Online Free PDF Page A

meandering through cemeteries on cloudy days.
    I arrive at the hospital midafternoon. It seems hospital beds are scarce this time of year. They’ve got Mother on a gurney in the hall. She puts down her
Vanity Fair
.
    â€œHow are you feeling?”
    â€œBetter, tank you.”
    (The Death Voice, I’m pleased to report, is gone.)
    â€œHow was de funeral?”
    â€œDay after tomorrow,” I tell her. “The wake is tonight.”
    She grasps my hand in the busy hospital corridor. “Mi dispiace,” she says. I don’t know if she’s sorry for missing Lenny’s mother’s wake, or for getting sick, or what. “Poor Lenny, he must be upset.”
    â€œSure,” I say. “He’s very upset.”
    â€œI bet he cry a lot.”
    What sort of remark is that? “Naturally,” I say. “His mom just died.”
    â€œHmmm …” I’m supposed to translate this “hmm” into a whole conversation but refuse to do so. Instead I study the manufacturer’s label on the gurney rail. Derwood-Kaiser Medical Supplies, Waterbury, Connecticut.
    â€œWhen is you brother come?”
    â€œAround dinner time, he said.”
    â€œDire lui … non preoccuparti. Tell him … not to worry.” She winces.
    I pick up the
Vanity Fair
. Flipping its pages, I come across fat Marlon Brando crying at his son’s murder trial. A pretty nurse takes my mother’s temperature. One-oh-one.
    At suppertime, as promised, from St. Albans, Vermont, where he’s a Unitarian minister, Geordie arrives. Unitarians aren’t supposed to believe in God, or maybe they just don’t have to. Anyway, from what I gather my brother does a good job preaching
around
the Good Lord — like someone eating around the spinach on his plate. He drives an early-model Honda Civic and looks beat up from the trip. He’s been divorced two months, and that shows, too.
    â€œHow are you?” I say, lugging his garment bag inside.
    He takes a look around, shakes his head. I know what he’s thinking. A: nothing’s changed, and B: what’s my jerk-off twin doing still living here? I want his love for me to overwhelm such thoughts. It doesn’t. Though I’ve always looked up to him, Geordie has never liked me. He considers me an embarrassment,a cheap knockoff of his genuine self, a counterfeit coin with his face on it. He especially resents the fact that I’ve spent the last ten years working at the local bicycle-seat factory. He can’t seem to understand that, despite our looking like each other, it’s
my
life, that what I do with it is no reflection on him. The reason he’s surprised to see me here is because, last he heard, I’d taken an apartment of my own, on the seedy side of town, by the train tracks, next door to Goose Lumber. Until two weeks ago, that arrangement still held. But I couldn’t take living alone in that place, in a one-room apartment over a family with something like thirty yapping dogs. When the dogs didn’t rattle my brain, the freight trains rattled it. And, to be honest, I didn’t like leaving Mother alone in the house. Which I’m sure helps shore up Geordie’s impression of me as a
mammone
, which is Italian for “mama’s boy.”
    â€œWhere are you sleeping?” His first words to me.
    â€œIn the den.” Nonnie’s — our grandmother’s — old room, where we used to watch
Hogan’s Heroes
reruns. “I can move; I don’t mind.”
    He grabs the garment bag from me, drags it upstairs. I consider following him up to our old room, where twin beds and cardboard furniture sag, but it would only annoy him. My following Geordie has always annoyed him. Instead I yell, “Need a hand?”
    The sound of unzipping answers. I lean against the balustrade, thinking I’m always at the threshold of things. I want to run up and hug my twin, confide in him