Fadeaway Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

enough range. If I hadn’t first heard the line, I don’t think I’d have known “knee” meant “sea.”
    Then it was that Mr. Root decided to go back to Emily Dickinson, a poet he had earlier discarded as too crazy. “How does ‘space toll’? What’s ‘an amethyst remembrance’?” But now he was back with her. He read off:
    I know a place where summer strives
With such a practiced Frost . . .
    We all stood or sat there while Mr. Root debated in his own mind about this poem. He drummed his fingers on the book, stared at the sky, murmuring hmm hmm and repeating words from it. “ ‘Practiced Frost.’ Now that’s got some zing to it. Ulub, you try that right there.” He turned the book for Ulub to see.
    Ulub saw and Ulub said: “mon uh ah macused mros.”
    â€œGood,” said Mr. Root. “That’s got just the right amount of hardness to it.”
    So Emily Dickinson had the honor of just enough hardness and if she’d been alive and around I would have liked to invite her to a reading.
    Today, Ubub had gone into Britten’s and brought back bottles of Nehi grape and handed them around. Mr. Root asked Ulub to repeat the Emily Dickinson lines he’d been reciting when I came along to the bench.
    Ulub cleared his throat and solemnly raised the book.
    Nee ee ear nees er aisee ack,
Eoden eefly ost.
    â€œHot spit!” exclaimed Mr. Root. “See? That little lady knows about poetry, don’t she?” He turned to Ubub, who was drinking his Nehi grape. “What d’you think? Pretty good, wasn’t it?”
    â€œMritty wood.” Ubub nodded with enthusiasm.
    Mr. Root said, “You hear how much better he sounds.”
    I didn’t, but I said I did, then said I had to get back to the hotel to wait tables.

6
    M y mother was making soufflés, a bad sign, for it usually meant a dinner party. Vera, our head waitress, was also there, so there was definitely an increase in dinner guests. She was in her black uniform, long sleeved and white cuffed. All I ever wore was a short-sleeved blue uniform, or a white one that would have made anyone with more compassion look like a nurse.
    I said hello to Walter, who was behind his big sink, the huge dishwasher making the kitchen sound like a building site. It clattered away beside him. But if not for the dishwasher, I’d be beside Walter, dishrag in my hands. Even Ree-Jane had been forced to wash dishes once or twice before we got the dishwasher. She complained all the while and picked on Walter. But Walter wouldn’t rise to the bait; he just went on saying, “I reckon so.”
    I wondered if Walter was the exact opposite of Aurora Paradise. Maybe of all of us. I stopped poking at a lettuce to ponder this. The lettuces were, to quote Mrs. Davidow, who seemed to set lots of store by them, “personal Bibb lettuces”—baby Bibbs—for we were serving each guest a whole small lettuce. To hear Mrs. Davidow talk, you’d think they walked all the way from our vegetable garden, shaking off soil as they came.
    Ree-Jane called Walter a retard, but he wasn’t; he was just slow. He might have been anywhere from thirty to forty-five. He wore black-rimmed glasses and lived alone in a big house that sat at the curve of the highway where Spirit Lake starts to fold into the far outskirts of La Porte.
    Lola Davidow was in the kitchen with her martini, which reminded me that this was Aurora’s cocktail hour too, and now would be a good time to get her drink going, while Mrs. Davidow was not in the office. Mrs. Davidow had dressed up in pink linen and powdered her face. She had one of those wonderful fair complexions that powder lies across like a fine veil.
    She came to oversee the baby Bibbs, telling me to be careful. Careful? It was a lettuce. All I could picture was throwing one like a tennis ball across the kitchen to Walter and have him bat it