Swallow the Ocean Read Online Free PDF Page B

up.
    “If we didn’t join, they were going to beat us up.”
    She offered no sympathy. On matters of principle she did not bend. She placed the meatloaf on the top shelf of the oven. “Then play inside,” she said, letting the oven door snap shut.
    In the aftermath of the Kitteridge-Mulligan war, my mother cast our family definitively into the hippie-peacenik camp by inviting dirty Suzie over to play with me. “Be nice to her,” my mother said. “She doesn’t have a mother.”
    I knew this, and knew I should feel sorry for her. Left on my own, with Suzie in her house and me in mine, I could get to feeling pretty sad for Suzie. But I didn’t want her in my house. I feared the censure of the neighborhood. I feared that her motherless condition, along with her famous dirtiness, would rub off on me. She appeared at the front door all the same. Her ratty white blonde hair matted, her face smudged, wearing a plaid skirt, no longer pleated and much too big, and no tights, just skinny bare legs, all cuts, bruises, and yellow down.
    Soon enough Suzie and I were sprawled on the living room floor, eyes shut tight as a man’s deep voice moved like a ghost across the room. His footsteps came darkly towards us, the sound of stiff man shoes tapping against hardwood floor. He talked about stereo sound. But I didn’t listen to what he said. That was the surface. Below that, in the calm insinuation of his voice, was some kind of menace.
    Next came the train, a whistle shout off somewhere down the street, and then a rhythmic chug coming closer, louder, stronger. Careening around the last stretch of track, it blew over the couches, over the carpet, and over Suzie and me in a final crescendo of steam and steel. We lay spent, arms and legs spread, prostrate and stunned as the train pulled away. Suzie giggled, a low gurgle. The album, Stereophonics , had come with our new, first-on-the-block stereo. I jumped up to place the needle very carefully in the first track, and we listened again.
    My mother was upstairs finishing some schoolwork before taking us to the park for a promised paddleboat ride at Stow Lake.
    “Let’s make a fort,” Suzie said, bored finally with the ste-reophonics. She eyed the fat, leafy green cushions on the two big sofas.
    “I don’t think my mother will like that,” I said. I rarely played in the living room, and knew we were only in here because my mother felt sorry for Suzie.
    “Go and ask her.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Come on, don’t be such a baby.” Suzie, dirty or not, was still a year and a half older than me. I could not say no.
    I went slowly up the stairs, taking my time, smoothing the dark wood of the banister with my hand as I went. From upstairs I could hear the music of my mother’s electric typewriter—the rapid-fire of the keys, the quick bell at the end of every line, the whoosh of the carriage as it returned. It was an Olivetti, gray, with green keys. Like the piano in the living room, like the sewing machine in the sunroom, it was one of her special things.
    That year she’d gone back to school, inspired by the women’s movement, freshly minted in 1971, which she greeted with great excitement. My father now says he’d always assumed my mother would go back to school at some point. “She was just so smart, she had to do something.” The school she chose was called Lone Mountain College, which seems apt, because for my mother any search for knowledge would have to be a solitary struggle.
    As I came into her bedroom I could just barely see the top of her desk, where the pages of her paper were resting lightly at her side. Her fingers were curled down towards the keys, which struck out at the page one at a time, as if each had a life of its own, a path it must follow. She put one arm around my shoulder as I came close to her, and with the other hand she cranked the typewriter wheel several times until the page came loose at the top of the tray. She drew it up and held it in the