How to Breathe Underwater Read Online Free PDF

telling the truth. That was a mistake. They sat me down at a café and made me talk about her for half an hour. Joseph wondered whether she planned to complete her schooling or follow her career, and Drew had to know whether she suffered from eating disorders and skewed self-esteem. It would have been easier if they’d just stood in front of the billboard and drooled. At least I would have been able to anticipate their mute stupor when they actually met her.
    Aïda rolls her shoulders and lets her hair fall forward, hiding her face in shadow. They can’t take their eyes off her. Uncle Claude would scold her for removing her sun hat. I have picked it up and am wearing it now. It is gold straw and fits perfectly. What else of hers could I put on? Not even her gloves.
    “Now stand perfectly still,” Joseph says, extending his thumb and index finger as if to frame Aïda. He snaps a few pictures, then lets the camera drop. He looks as if he would like to throw a net over her. He will show these pictures to his friends back home, telling them how he slept with her between the grapevines. This will be a lie, I hope. “Dance again,” he says, “this time slower.”
    She rotates her hips like a Balinese dancer. “Like this?”
    “That’s it,” he says. “Nice and slow.” Surreptitiously he adjusts his shorts.
    When Drew looks at my cousin I imagine him taking notes for future paintings. In Wisconsin he works as a professional muralist, and here he is the best drawing student in our class, good even at representing the foot when it faces forward. I am hopeless at drawing the foot at any angle. My models all look like they are sliding off the page. I’ve seen photographs of Drew’s murals, twenty-foot-high paintings on the sides of elementary schools and parking structures, and his figures look as though they could step out of the wall and crush your car. He does paintings of just the feet. I can tell he’s studying Aïda’s pink toes right now. Later he will draw her, at night in his room, while his upstairs neighbor practices violin until the crack of dawn. “If she didn’t live there I’d have to hire her to live there,” he tells me. She may keep him up all night, but at least she makes him paint well.
    There are certain things I can never abide: lack of food, lack of sleep, and Aïda. But she is here in Italy on my free week because our parents thought it would be fun for us. “Aïda doesn’t get much rest,” my mother told me. “She needs time away from that business in France.”
    I told my mother that Aïda made me nervous. “Her name has an umlaut, for crying out loud.”
    “She’s your cousin,” my mother said.
    “She’s been on the covers of twelve magazines.”
    “Well, Mira”—and here her voice became sweet, almost reverent—“you are a future Michelangelo.”
    There’s no question about my mother’s faith in me. She has always believed I will succeed, never once taking into account my failure to represent the human figure. She says I have a
style.
That may be true, but it does not make me the next anybody. Sometimes I freeze in front of the canvas, full of the knowledge that if I keep painting, sooner or later I will fail her.
    My cousin always knew how important she was, even when she was little. Over at her house in Indiana I had to watch her eat ice-cream bars while I picked at my Sunmaid raisins. I tried to be nice because my mother had said, “Be nice.” I told her she had a pretty name, that I knew she was named after a character from a Verdi opera, which my mom and I had listened to all the way from Chicago to central Indiana. Aïda licked the chocolate from around her lips, then folded the silver wrapper.
    “I’m not named after the
character,
” she said. “I’m named after the
entire opera.
”
    The little bitch is a prodigy, a skinny Venus, a genius. She knows how to shake it. She will never be at a loss for work or money. She is a human dollar sign. Prada has made