The Translator Read Online Free PDF

really coming closer too, even though by means of the one thing nature doesn’t possess of itself, its names.
    The day before school started she came to her mother (who was washing dishes) and told her this weird thing had happened and she was scared: her stomach hurt and there was blood on her underpants.
    Well that’s not something to be scared of, her mother said (Kit remembers how she went on washing her flowered plates and standing them upright in the rack like soldiers or tombstones, not alarmed or apparently unsettled at all). She began an explanation, saying Now you know you have this hole there, not the peepee one but the other one. Kit nodded and listened to the rest of what her mother said, and accepted the hug and pat her mother offered (Big girl now, my baby’s a big girl) and then went back to her room; and as though she were catching a bright centipede in its damp crevice she discovered what she had in fact not known before, that she had a hole there: not how far it went, though, or where it led.
    How can you know anything true about someone when your memories stop just as you are becoming a person yourself? She thought Ben had been beautiful and strong, that his strength and his beauty were like a horse he rode: once a pretty pony, it grew into a tall stallion, then gone, bearing him away. That’s what she remembered, not knowing if it was true or false or neither.
    Home from high school on a day in spring, taking off his watch at the kitchen sink to wash his hands; his thick dark hair just cut, what they called then a “Princeton cut” for some reason, just long enough to part and brush to one side. Pink button-down shirt, a Gant, only one of 28

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    the brand names he was loyal to; an inch of white undershirt showing in its cleft, its sleeves turned back one graceful turn. People say I can remember as though it were yesterday, but you can never remember yesterdays as clearly as these moments that are not yesterday or any day, but always now. His pleated gray slacks, pegged at the ankle, revealing now and then like a mockingbird’s flicked tail another inch of white: his socks between the black loafers and the breaking flannel cuff. She remembered his clothes better than she remembered her own. A slim gold belt, buckled (it was the style that season) at the side.
    But what is he saying? It’s easier to see than to hear. She might have been kidding him about his weekend dates. She did that a lot in that year, trying under the guise of teasing to understand his life apart from her, his feelings about girls and dates and making out. She was like a color-blind person trying to guess the names and imports of colors; she knew these rituals were of vital importance and that she would have to begin on them soon. Yet she didn’t think to connect them to the huge feelings she did feel, feelings that could be started by a summer storm or a violin sonata or a thousand other things. And she feared for him: feared losing him.
    “Isn’t she taller than you?”
    “Maybe a little taller.”
    “But that’s ridiculous, going on a date with a girl taller than you.”
    “It’s not a date.”
    “She’ll have to wear flat shoes. It says so in the magazines.”
    “Okay, maybe she will. We’re going to a riding stable, though. I think she wears boots.”
    “And how can you go out with somebody taller than you whose name is Earp? Greta Earp?”
    “Geraldine. Greta is her sister.”
    “Geraldine!” Collapsing in laughter. “With a riding crop, smacking her big leather boots, looking down on you!”
    “She’s going to teach me some riding.”
    “Oh my God! Teach you riding! Oh no!”
    In school he never played team sports, and maybe that too was

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    because of how often they moved: he was never inducted into the male fraternity of a particular time and place, a team’s forming and knitting over several summers and school years. Instead he took up sports he could