Lies My Mother Never Told Me Read Online Free PDF

mild children’s formula. I searched for another pharmacy within riding distance but couldn’t find one.
    I worried obsessively about whether or not I’d be able to sleep, and indeed, for a second night, my sinuses swelled and ached and blocked off the air. The mild children’s spray had no effect. Why was this happening to me only at bedtime and not during the day? Was my mother right, and it was all in my head? For the summer my parents had hired a housekeeper named Madeleine, a very nice fat lady from Le Mans who’d spent the war hiding Jews and stranded American fighter pilots from the Nazis. She had the medals to prove it. She loved Americans and sometimes shouted out the expressions she’d learned from the pilots, such as “Hi there, beautiful!” or “That’s swell!”
    I liked Madeleine a lot, but I wasn’t about to go find her in her little, alien-smelling bedroom under the eaves and explain my problem. Finally, sitting up in bed, I heard the first birds beginning to chirp and was relieved that dawn was nearing. The darkness began to turn blue, and I thought, It’ll be daytime soon andeverything will be all right. Finally I dozed off before my parents returned from the casino.
    That morning, I decided to go to my father. This was not a decision I made lightly. I was keenly aware that his writing came first, and that we were never to disturb him while he was working. He could be interrupted in an emergency, of course, and this, certainly, was not a normal emergency. But I was scared enough, and upset enough, to climb the stairs and knock timidly on his closed door.
    He probably hadn’t gone to sleep at all, I now realize.
    He’d taken over one small room under the eaves, as was his wont. He’d turned the desk to face a blank wall, away from the window with the magnificent view of the open field that led to the boardwalk and the golden sand and the red beach parasols and blue Channel beyond. He wasn’t sitting at the desk, I remember, but reading in an armchair and balancing a large mug of black coffee on the armrest with two fingers. The room already smelled of him: pipe smoke, the black coffee, and 4711 cologne, a scent that still causes a knot in my throat.
    â€œWhy don’t you put the desk in front of the window?” I asked him.
    â€œIt’s too distracting,” he said. “What’s up?”
    I told him the whole truth—how I couldn’t go to sleep without the adult nasal spray from Paris; that I’d gone to the drugstore but the man wouldn’t give it to me and I couldn’t find another drugstore. I told him I was really, really scared because I needed the spray. I tried to keep my composure and not burst into tears. He looked at me, concern written in the wavy lines of his forehead.
    â€œWhat you need is to clean your sinuses out,” he pronounced after thinking it over for a minute. Then he told me that when he’d been a boat hand on a yacht in Florida back in the forties after the war, he’d caught a terrible cold. One of the yachtsmen was a doctor and told my dad to get in the ocean and tilt his headback and let the ocean water fill his sinuses, that it would cure his cold in a day. And by God, my dad said, it did!
    I considered this doubtfully. There were few things more terrifying than jumping into a pool or the ocean and having your nose fill up with water. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant. “But doesn’t that hurt?”
    â€œNot really.” He said he’d take me down to the Piscine de Deauville, an Olympic-size, heated saltwater pool just down the street, when he quit work in a couple of hours.
    At the pool, in the shallow end, we were the only ones in the water. “Lie back,” he said, “like this, and hold your breath, but let the water flow right up your nose. If you relax and just stay calm, it won’t hurt. And I’ll be right here, holding your hand.