Object lessons Read Online Free PDF Page A

get your hair wet? Does that make sense?”
    “You don’t understand because you don’t know how to swim,” said Maggie. “Everybody does it.”
    “If everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do that too?” Connie said, without even thinking.
    “You always say that.”
    “Hang this on the line before you leave,” Connie said, unrolling the towel with a snap. The red suit fell on the floor, and with it a flutter of damp dirty paper. Connie stooped down. It was a twenty-dollar bill. She picked it up between two fingers as though it was a bug. “How is your grandfather Scanlan?” Connie said.
    Maggie took the money and her wet things and turned away. “He said we’re all going to the house on Sunday. How come?”
    “On Sunday I am cleaning the linen closet,” Connie said, turning toward the sink. “Go hang up your suit.”
    From the window she watched her daughter fumble with the clothespins and slip the money into her pocket. It enraged her that even without being present John Scanlan could ruin her day. “Don’t you wake your brother up,” Connie hissed, as her daughter came back through the kitchen on her way upstairs.
    She looked at the sink filled with cereal bowls, coffee cups, Mickey Mouse glasses with low tidelines of orange pulp. Upstairs she could hear Joseph humming to himself. “Damn it,” she said, spraying detergent onto a sponge.
    A thousand times Tommy had told her she was doing it wrong, that you were supposed to fill the sink with water and let the dishes soak. A thousand times she had shut her mouth and done it her way. She’d been doing dishes since she was seven years old, standing on the red leatherette seat of a stepstool, when there had been only her own plate and glass to wash. She’d washed her own cereal bowl before school and her own plates after dinner, while her father and her mother worked. Nobody was going to tell her how to do a dish.
    Suddenly there was a stultifying silence, oppressive as the heat, as the last earth mover working in the fields behind the house quieted, rumbled once like a death rattle and was still.
    Connie was a short woman, low to the ground, and even if she stood on tiptoe, she could not quite make out how much work had been done, except that there seemed to be great gashes in the reedlike weeds, and here and there a massive pile of fresh brown earth. A half dozen of the big machines stood at rest. For the first time Connie noticed that someone had placed two portable toilets at the far end of the field. The man who had been driving the last earth mover was almost at the back door before she realized he was coming to her house. Connie noticed that his gray undershirt was stained black beneath the arms with huge half-moons of perspiration. He peered through the screen at her, blinded by the dim indoors after the glare of the day.
    “Hello?” he said.
    “Yes?” Connie’s voice was cold.
    “Could I trouble you to use the phone?” he asked, still peering through the screen.
    Connie opened the door a bit. The man had glossy hair, like an animal’s pelt, and eyebrows so thick that they looked like an amateur theatrical effect. He looked at Connie and Connie looked at him; for a moment they just gaped at one another, and then both started to laugh.
    “Connie Mazza,” he said, smoothing back his hair.
    “Oh,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Don’t tell me, I’ll get it. Don’t tell me.”
    He laughed again. “Martinelli,” he said.
    “I knew that part.”
    “Joe,” he added.
    “Joey. Joey Martinelli. I would have had it in a minute. Come in. Use the phone. Do you want a beer?” She started to laugh again. “It’s nice to see a familiar face.”
    “I knew you lived in the neighborhood,” he said, “but I swear to God I didn’t know this was your house.”
    “You’re working on this project?”
    “I’m the foreman. But we’re in such a big hurry that I’m driving the backhoe part time. We did six foundations