Things You Should Know Read Online Free PDF Page A

turns around and looks over her shoulder—she is pruny in the back, from lying on the wet raft.
    She opens the cabinet—jars, tubes, throat cream and thigh cream, lotion, potion, bronze stick, cover-up, pancake, base. She piles it on.
    “Make sure you get enough water—it’s hot today,” her mother says. Her parents have one of those beds where each half does a different thing; right now her father’s side is up, bent in two places. They both want what they want, they need what they need. Her mother is lying flat on her face.
    She goes back out to the pool. She dives in with a splash. Her mother’s potions run off, forming an oil slick around her.
    Her father comes home. Through the glass she sees thefront door open. She sees him moving from room to room. “Is the air filter on?” His voice is muffled. “Is the air on?” he repeats. “I’m having it again—the not breathing.”
    He turns on the bedroom light. It throws her parents into relief; the sliding glass doors are lit like a movie screen. IMAX Mom and Dad. She watches him unbutton his shirt. “I’m sweating,” she hears him say. Even from where she is, she can see that he is wet. Her father calls his sweat “proof of his suffering.” Under his shirt, a silk T-shirt is plastered to his body, the dark mat of the hair on his back showing through. There is something obscene about it—like an ape trying to look human. There is something embarrassing about it as well—it looks like lingerie, it makes him look more than naked. She feels as if she were seeing something she shouldn’t, something too personal.
    Her mother rolls over and sits up.
    “Something is not right,” he says.
    “It’s the season,” she says.
    “Unseasonable,” he says. “Ben got a call in the middle of the afternoon. They said his house was going downhill fast. He had to leave early.”
    “It’s an unpredictable place,” her mother says.
    “It’s not the same as it was, that’s the thing,” her father says, putting on a dry shirt. “Now it’s a place where everybody thinks he’s somebody and nobody wants to be left out.”
    She gets out of the pool and goes to the door, pressing her face against the glass. They don’t notice her. Finally, she knocks. Her father opens the sliding glass door. “I didn’t see you out there,” he says.
    “I’m invisible,” she says. “Welcome home.”
     
    She is back in the pool. Floating. The night is moist. Vaporous. It’s hard to know if it’s been raining or if the sprinkler system is acting up. The sky is charcoal, powdery black. Everything is a little fuzzy around the edges but sharp and clear in the center.
    There is a coyote at the edge of the grass. She feels it staring at her. “What?” she says.
    It lowers its head and pushes its neck forward, red eyes like red lights.
    “What do you want?”
    The coyote’s legs grow long, its fur turns into an overcoat, it stands, its muzzle melts into a face—an old woman, smiling.
    “Who are you?” the girl asks. “Are you friends with my sister?”
    “Watch me,” the old woman says. She throws off the coyote coat—she is taller, she is younger, she is naked, and then she is a man.
    She hears her mother and father in the house. Shouting.
    “What am I to you?” her mother says.
    “It’s the same thing, always the same thing, blah, blah, blah,” her father says.
    “Have you got anything to eat?” the coyote asks.
    “Would you like a carrot?”
    “I was thinking of something more like a sandwich or a slice of cheese pizza.”
    “There are probably some waffles in the freezer. No one ever eats the waffles. Would you like me to make you one?”
    “With butter and syrup?” he asks.
    The girl nods.
    He licks his lips, he turns his head and licks his shoulder and then his coyote paws. He begins grooming himself.
    “Be right back,” she says. She goes into the kitchen, opens the freezer, and pulls out the box of waffles.
    “I thought you were on a diet,” her