Durable Goods Read Online Free PDF

nose, steps back. “Well,” she says. “I hardly think it’s something to talk that way about!”
    Diane takes in a breath, pauses. “I’m sorry.”
    Mrs. Conway nods, lets her screen door gently bang shut, returns to her cleaning. “What an asshole,” Diane whispers.
    Cherylanne comes out of her house, walks over to us. Her powder-blue purse matches her outfit. She reeks of Tigress. “Let’s go,” she says. “We’ll be late!”
    A s it happens, Cherylanne is right tonight: there is someone there she likes almost as much as the lifeguard. He is a sophomore, famous for his looks, and, according to rumors, recently broken up with his equally famous girlfriend. When the lights go down, he is still sitting alone. “I can’t believe this,” Cherylanne whispers. And then, “Do you mind?”
    “No,” I say. “Go.”
    And she does. She walks down the aisle as though she has just arrived, her purse swinging at her side. She slides into the seat behind him. Then she taps him on the shoulder, gives a flutter-fingered wave when he turns around. They talk a little and then she gets up and moves beside him. She gives me a hidden signal, a victory sign. I am dismissed. I watch the movie for a while, but it is only about handsome men riding around in chariots trying to put one another’s eyes out. I leave.
    N o one is home. I make a mayonnaise sandwich. For dessert I have sweetened condensed milk on graham crackers. Then I go outside and lie in the backyard, look up at the stars. I hear the back door open, and sit up quickly.
    “What are you doing?” he asks.
    “Nothing.”
    “Well, you’re doing something.”
    “I’m … I was looking at the stars.”
    “Uh huh.” He walks over, lies down heavily beside me, looks up into the sky. “Do you know the names of any of the constellations?”
    “Of course.” Careful. “I learned them in school.” Safe. I show him the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion.
    “Some of the light you see,” he says, “is from stars that no longer exist.”
    “Yes.”
    “How do you like that?” He is so satisfied, like he made it up.
    “I don’t,” I say.
    He looks over at me. “You don’t, huh? Why not?”
    “I don’t know. It makes me sad. Like when we move and right before we go I make a new friend and then I can never know them.”
    “Well.” A hard edge. His disapproval. He doesn’t like to hear complaining about the way we move so much. We are not allowed to cry when we drive away—or at any other time, either—about any place we leave behind. Sometimes it aches so hard, the thought of all you can’t have anymore, your desk the third in the third row, the place whereyou buy licorice, the familiarity of the freckles on your friends’ faces, the smell of your own good bedroom. You will have to be the new girl again, the one always having to learn things. But you cannot cry about it in front of him. You have to hold it in, hold it in, stare out the car windows at the cows in the fields and the endless telephone poles and the hopeful buildings in the small towns you pass through and you have to hold it in. Later, in the luxury of aloneness, you can call back the sadness to let it out. But sometimes it has gone somewhere. You have not lost it, just the ability to get rid of it by crying. It will be part of you now, steal up on you at unexpected moments. You will be watching your team play baseball, yelling for them, and all of a sudden feel a jag in your throat. You will be reading, lying on your side on one elbow, and you will have to stop and lie flat and stare into space for a while. That is how that sadness is, insisting on a place in you, but never quite cooperating.
    “I like that there are comets,” I say to my father. “And I like the planets, especially Saturn.”
    “The rings, huh?” he asks, and I am so pleased that he knows. We lie still for a while. The grass isblue-green in the dark, rich smelling. I wish suddenly that I could have a horse standing