Losing It Read Online Free PDF

you’d wake her up, drag her out of bed. You were all ready to go. You just wanted to get there. How you begged them to let you sign up at the swim team.”
    â€œShe said that?”
    Viv nodded.
    â€œThat I begged them to sign up?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBut”—I shook my head—“that’s . . . They were the ones who wanted me to do it.”
    She shrugged, chewed.
    â€œI thought, because of Mom’s failed horse-riding career. I mean,
she
was the one who signed me up, you know, initially.”
    I thought of my mom watching me from the bleachers at practice, biting her thumbnail, her face knitted with inner calculations. I thought of the subtle way she’d let me know if she thought I’d done a good job or not: if I could watch television in the living room when we got home, the meted-out dessert portions after dinner, the grade of affection in her voice when she said good night. Had I imagined all that? Everything tilted ominously as I considered that a huge portion of my life may have been based on a misunderstanding.
    â€œAnyway,” I said, trying to figure out how to change the subject.
    â€œWasn’t there talk of you going to the Olympics?” she said.
    â€œI went to the Olympic trials in Tallahassee,” I said.
    She nodded, and I was annoyed by the way she gingerly avoided probing any further, as if it was something I was sensitive about, some huge failure that I hadn’t made it to the actual Olympics. People didn’t know. They didn’t know how good you had to be to even get to the trials. I wrenched apart a roll.
    â€œDo you do a lot of crafts?” I said. “I noticed a few knickknacks around the house. Like that frame, in the living room?” I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me. She was methodically pulling something apart on her plate. “With the seashells on it? Or is that from— Do you travel a lot?” I said desperately.
    Viv cleared her throat and looked up. “I took a class,” she said.
    â€œOh, okay.”
    â€œOn frame decoration.”
    â€œI see.” I waved my fork around. “So, they said you could do pretty much whatever you wanted? With the frames?”
    She glanced up at me. She straightened her shoulders. “Yes,” she said primly. She repositioned a piece of chicken with her knife and fork. I mashed a pea on my plate.
    I looked up at the chandelier and said a little prayer that it actually would come crashing down.
    â€œI did used to travel, quite a bit,” she said. “In fact, I recently went to Orlando.”
    â€œFlorida? What was that like?”
    â€œVery lively.” She finished chewing and again dabbed the sides of her mouth. “I stayed with a friend there. A very nice apartment complex. It had balconies with”—she shaped the air with herhands—“flower boxes. And”—she continued shaping the air—“all different colors, as if to get the effect of a village. One evening a young man, he turned out to be divorced, invited us into the courtyard and we had teriyaki, all together there.”
    She looked at me expectantly.
    I nodded frantically. “Great,” I said. “Cool—so, he was a chef?”
    â€œYes,” she said. I felt as if I had disappointed her in some fundamental way. “More or less.”
    â€œGreat.”
    The rest of dinner, we couldn’t find a toehold. I gave her an update about how Mom and Dad were doing. I talked blandly about my old job at Quartz. She perfunctorily told me about her duties at the hospice where she worked, talking to families and dealing with patients. I worked hard to keep her going about this, pumping her with questions, because it seemed like safe territory—work. And it distracted us from what I think she must have been feeling, too. That we’d lost whatever ease we’d had when I was a kid and she came to visit us in