Swallow the Ocean Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the Mulligans.
    There was something else. Something everyone knew, but no one talked about. The Kitteridges no longer had a mother. They had had one once—I remembered her messy and huge, with lank brown hair, dressed in gauzy skirts and sandals. Something bad, something very bad, had happened to her, and the shadow of her absence, a dark halo of shame, had attached itself to her children, making them vulnerable to attack.
    Late in the afternoon Patrick and Eddie rode their bikes down the block to where we played four-square in front of our house. We scattered as they came, a flurry of long hair, bell-bottom pants, and navy blue Keds. We expected them to ride straight through our game. Instead, Eddie came to a stop, planting his feet on the ground on either side of his pedals. Patrick came up behind him, took the same stance, and glared at us through the opening of the maroon football helmet he wore.
    “You’re all drafted,” Eddie said unceremoniously and then turned to go, motioning for us to follow. Patrick stood still, waiting for us to move, ready to enforce orders. No words passed between the brothers. They had an instinct for coercion.
    Among ourselves there must have been a bewildered exchange of looks. I looked to Sara. Sara and Celia looked to one another. Sara moved first; the rest of us followed. Like an egg from the shell, once the yolk is committed, everything else follows. We walked behind Eddie in silence. Scared. And excited. We’d never played with the Mulligans before. They’d never asked us.
    Through the course of the day everyone on the block was bullied into the Mulligan army. No one resisted. The Mulligans had discipline, equipment, and organization on their side; we fell in.
    The Mulligans distributed arms: squirt guns, slingshots, rubber bands, and redcaps and firecrackers for noise. They marched us up and down the sidewalk, lining us up by size, me and Jake Jeffers at the rear, chanting, “Two, three, four, hut, we’re gonna kick the Kitteridge butt.” There was dizzy pleasure in these chants—my guilt at being mean and saying bad words evaporated in the echo of a dozen other voices chanting with me.
    The Kitteridges made themselves scarce in the neighborhood; the war was really more of a prolonged hunt. Patrick marched us at a near-run, barking out a rapid “hut, two, three, four, hut.” I gripped a metal garbage can lid tight in one hand, my shield, and a majorette baton in the other, my weapon. I kept my eyes on the feet of the boy in front of me and tried to keep pace, hoping we would not find the enemy.
    The farther I got from home, the more I felt the gnawing certainty that my mother would not be happy if she saw me. She had very strong opinions about things. Back then she favored the weak over the strong. She was against candy and Barbie and television and Vietnam—fiercely and with disdain for those who did not agree with her. The candy store on the corner, the trading and gathering center of our young lives, where children went to store up reserves for the afternoon play, was directly on our route home from school, but Sara and I were not supposed to go in. And we were absolutely forbidden to watch cartoons on television because they were violent. For my sister and me my mother’s rules, aimed as they were at television and candy, at the very heart of childhood, led us to early habits of deception. Sara and I were allied in a daily exploration of the shades of disobedience. Going inside the store ourselves was crossing the line. Standing around outside the candy store while our friends went in was OK. Sneaking the TV on at our house and watching cartoons was definitely bad. But perhaps staying in the room when the TV was on at someone else’s house was OK.
    I knew we were against the war, maybe even all wars. Vietnam loomed at the edge of my consciousness: a glimpse of helicopters on TV, the sweaty faces of soldiers under hard round hats, the jowly face of the president,