Sea Creatures Read Online Free PDF Page B

promise.”
    Lidia’s blue eyes were a little glassy, her cheeks high in color. She was one of these women who had never had a manicure or needed one. Her nails were white-tipped and grew naturally in a squarish shape. Her thick dark hair winged out in a wide, feathery bob—a style, I gleaned from old photos, she’d been wearing for decades. She wore chunky cork platform sandals every day of the week, even with her swimsuit while lying beside her pool, a wide-brimmed hat over her hair and a muslin cloth over her legs. She was attractive, if slightly outmoded. More attractive than my mother in some ways, less so in others. Where my mother had been slim-shouldered and large-breasted, wide-bottomed and thin-ankled—floral in shape, like a tulip—Lidia was a little plump but vigorous and strong. She had curvy calves beneath her culottes, round hips and high breasts, shoulders and biceps that resembled plump fruit. Her skin was sun-darkened and freckled at the collar of her blouse. My mother’s skin had been ivory, unblemished, her thin hair ash-blond, her nose narrow and long in a way that on a man is considered potent, but on a woman is perhaps sexy but not very pretty. My mother had hated her nose. Lidia’s nose bloomed at the tip, like a new bud. She wore very red lipstick almost all the time.
    â€œI think my mother said he went crazy,” I said to Lidia. “Is that right?”
    She raised her eyebrows. “I doubt your mom used the word crazy .”
    Lidia had known my mother, too, but barely. I’d gone to school with Lidia’s son, Roberto, who was now a real estate agent in California. He had five young kids—their names were, I promise, particularly impossible to recall—and didn’t visit often. He wanted Lidia to move to Fresno. She’d told me this in a way that communicated that the prospect was not only unfeasible but appalling. When she spoke of Roberto and his family, she didn’t try to hide her sadness, which was something I liked about her.
    â€œI can’t remember what word she used,” I said, thinking that it was true that it would have been unlike her. My mother had been something of an armchair psychologist. She’d told me she thought a neighbor who talked a lot and left trash on our lawn was a narcissist, that her estranged brother, who lived in Key Largo, was a depressive. Where she got this information—surely not from the pediatric office—I don’t know. She had antennae for that kind of thing, as people do. But her self-training on the subject would have kept her from using the word crazy . Not only was it unkind, but it was also unspecific.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with him, exactly?” I said to Lidia.
    â€œIf you don’t count living alone in the middle of the bay,” she said, “nothing.”
    â€œIs it safe to take Frankie?”
    â€œWould I recommend it if it wasn’t?”
    â€œYou’re sure?”
    She didn’t have much patience for reassurance. “Look, run a few errands and take him some supplies. Put it on your credit card and keep the receipts. His lawyer handles the money. Give it a week. You don’t want the job, I’ll find someone else.”
    I was too old to take on a second mother, but the way she treated me, in this instance and in others, smacked of maternal doublespeak, as if circling around what she really wanted to tell me, which was to buck up. My own mother had danced around the truth enough for me to recognize the behavior. One afternoon at the start of my mother’s long illness, I’d visited for the weekend, and she’d needled me into helping her sort something—photographs? silver? I don’t recall. I’d recently spent my time in Detention and was dizzy with thoughts of Graham. I took a break from the sorting to show her a photograph of him. “He looks like a silent-film star,” she said, staring closely. “You