The Goodbye Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

feature?” There was always a questionnaire about that. If you thought it was your eyes, you should “play them up,” presumably with new shades of mascara. Caddie thought her large, innocent-looking blue-gray eyes were her best feature on the basis of one comment, “You have pretty eyes,” from a boy she’d gone out with in college. So she’d asked Nana, “What do you think of my eyes?” and she’d answered, “You’ve got Winger eyes. We all look dazed.”
    As for her worst feature, she had as much body anxiety as the next person, so the list was long: big feet, veiny hands, freckles, fair skin that wouldn’t tan, dirty-blonde hair that just hung there, small breasts, not enough butt. She could go on. Supposedly men never even saw the flaws women obsessed over, at least that’s what all the articles claimed, and as proof they’d quote actual men saying things like, “I personally like seeing a girl’s panty line, I think it’s sexy.”
    She got up, restless. She felt like doing something, changing something, and it was too late to call up her hairdresser and tell her to cut everything off. Not that she would have, anyway. Impulsiveness wasn’t one of her vices; she even corrected people who said “Moderation in all things” to “Moderation in most things.” But she was in the oddest mood tonight to take a positive step toward something.
    This room. Nana’s living room. Caddie hated it. She couldn’t sit down on the couch without first having to move Paulo and Francesca, life-sizestuffed dolls her grandmother had made on the sewing machine, and she couldn’t let a student in the house without first making sure Nana hadn’t arranged the dolls in suggestive postures. Out. She scooped them up and carried them upstairs. Let them do whatever they liked on Nana’s bed till she came home.
    That was easy. The fireplace screen would be harder, because it was the chrome grille of a 1979 Cadillac El Dorado her grandmother had scavenged from a junkyard. It still had dead bugs stuck to it, or the desiccated stains dead bugs had left long ago, and Caddie wasn’t allowed to clean them off because they were the “best part.” The grille was a heavy, awkward armful, she got stuck turning the corner between the kitchen pantry and the basement steps, but she did it, retired the monster to a corner by the furnace. She’d put a big, frilly fern in its place, or some coleus, something light and colorful and alive.
    Next: Nana’s paintings, weird sculptures, and religious icons on the walls and tables and on top of the piano. Caddie didn’t have enough things of her own to replace them, but even flowers would be an improvement. And she did have a few pictures and prints she’d bought while she was in graduate school and had her own little apartment. They were in the attic—she went up and got them, dusted them off, and brought them back down. Tomorrow she’d hang them on the off-white walls. Get some pillows for the couch to replace the dummies. Bring in some of the peonies blooming in the side yard. She could see it already, and it was going to be so much better. Luckily the carpet was as neutral as the walls, so the room could accommodate styles as opposite as hers and Nana’s.
    But that was assuming she had a style. Maybe she didn’t, or only a style by default: anything that wasn’t Nana’s (flamboyant, attention-demanding, sort of willfully peculiar) was hers (quiet, conservative, so understated it was mute). She had an image in her mind of a scale between them, and it was up to her to keep it balanced. Or a seesaw, and she had to weigh more on her side or Nana would shoot her up in the air, like the big, older kid who tosses you up and you’re stuck there until he grins and flexes his knees and sends you down fast, wham, your whole backbone vibrating from the blow…. Anyway, Caddie’s job was to balance hergrandmother’s eccentricity with her ordinariness, and it had been that way for as long as she