Drowning Lessons Read Online Free PDF

about hollow tombstones, ask if he’s brought his bathing suit. “They opened a Boston Rotisserie,” I call up.
    Arms crossed, scowling, Geordie appears in gray underwearat the top of the stairs. Legs white, belly sagging, hair, at twenty-eight, thinning and gray at the temples. You’d think he was eight years, not eight minutes, older.
    We hike in the woods behind the house. Nonnie, my father’s mother, was a big believer in wolves. She’d swallowed whole the legend of Romulus and Remus, those twins who, suckled by a she-wolf, went on to found Rome. I’ve always been fascinated by wolf stories.
White Fang. The Jungle Book. Peter and the Wolf
. Werewolves. I daydreamed that, like Kipling’s Mowgli, I’d been raised by wolves. They could have done no worse.
    Geordie walks ahead of me, gathering plastic hand-grenades and other relics of childhood warfare, tossing them over his shoulder, hitting me in the face. He pulls branches out of his way and releases them in time to whack my forehead. I don’t even say ouch.
    In her room, on the folding table next to her portable electric stove, Nonnie kept a bronze miniature statue of Romulus and Remus straddled by the she-wolf. She’d point to the twins one by one saying, “Questo e Alberto; e quello li, Geordie.” Tucked away in the rear of the house, Nonnie’s room was a museum of smells. Mothballs, soy sauce, lavender, iodine — odors that conjured past lives and dreams of ancient, far-off places, crumbling cities beyond time’s greedy grasp. After Papa died (a funeral I hardly remember), Mother treated Nonnie like a prisoner, condemning her to her tiny room and getting furious when she’d step out of her cell to use the bathroom, pasting her with ripe-tomato Italian epithets.
    Nonnie’s world crawled with wolves. She saw them everywhere, in her imagination, in her dreams, slinking across thebackyard terrace at night, eyes burning yellow as the petals of the forsythia bush Papa planted just before he died. Their den (Nonnie claimed) was the abandoned guest cottage behind our house. Geordie and I head there now, walking on dirt-and-leaf-covered flagstones through a raspberry patch, prickers clawing at skin and clothes. Nonnie said the wolves lived in the crawl space under the floor and came out only at night. Being six years old and knowing her window faced the woods, Geordie and I believed her. Anyway, who were we to argue with our grandmother, who was ninety, spoke a dozen languages (none English), and made the best fried spaghetti in the world?
    At the cottage’s empty doorway Geordie kicks through a pile of dead leaves. The floorboards are rotted; the sky pours through a yawning gap in the roof. Kids have been here, punching holes in Homisote walls, scrawling their names in pitch. If a family of wolves ever lived here, they’ve moved on.
    Geordie unzips his fly, pisses into a tangle of venetian blinds. Geordie has always gotten a kick out of me watching him pee. He’d stand at the edge of our driveway, his golden effluence arching into milkweed and bulrushes. I’d stand beside him, hoping to see my own urine arch triumphantly next to his, only to see it trickle away languidly.
    â€œI’m leaving the Barn,” he announces, still pissing, his broad back to me. The Barn is the Unitarian Church, only they don’t call it a church. I’m stunned — not so much by the news, but because when Geordie speaks to me, it’s always a bit stunning.
    â€œWhy, Geordie? What happened?”
    He shrugs. It’s just like Geordie to throw a bomb like that and follow it up with a shrug. I don’t press him, knowing if I do he’ll just clam up more. He wants the information to work on me, likepaint remover. He zips his fly, packing his penis away like a travel accessory. He smiles, pleased that I’m not saying anything. I’m learning. “Poor Mrs. Wolff,” he says,