What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day Read Online Free PDF

know.”
     
     
• 6
     
    joyce’s house, the house I grew up in, sits at the end of an oiled but unpaved road that opens out into Idlewild Lake. There are other houses scattered around the edges of the lake, but they’re spaced wide enough so that you don’t have to worry about people being all up in your business. A lot of the houses are empty now anyway. Once the white resorts started accepting Negroes, people stopped coming to Idlewild. The oldsters who put such stock in their summer cottages when this was a big-shot resort haven’t been able to interest their children and grandchildren in a place they had never seen on a travel brochure and whose name nobody had ever heard outside Detroit and Chicago.
    Our parents moved here at the very end of the place’s heyday. I was five and Joyce was ready to start high school. Anybody with any practical sense could see the handwriting on the wall, but my father had a big dream about opening a new nightclub that would single-handedly bring back the glory days. My mother, as usual, never questioned a word he said, even though they lost all their savings when the place went belly-up in one short season. My father died in his sleep, drunk and disappointed, the winter right after, and my mother never got over it.
    It wasn’t a bad place to be a kid. Having a lake at the edge of the front yard beat walking across a freeway bridge to get to kindergarten. Joyce and Mitch hooked up as soon as he saw her sitting two rows in front of him in geometry class, and once they got married, and Mom made me an official orphan, it was like having real young, real hip parents.
    I could see the darkness of the lake just a few hundred yards from where Eddie pulled the truck into the yard. I heard the whispering of the pine trees that surrounded the house and I realized I was truly glad to be home, even if the arrangement was only temporary.
    Joyce wasn’t there yet, but I probably wouldn’t have gone to Eddie’s for dinner if she hadn’t redecorated my old room. Eddie carried my suitcases down the hall for me, and when I went ahead of him and turned on the light, I thought I’d walked into the wrong house. Joyce sent me a magazine article a couple of months ago that said blue is a
healing
color, and I guess it made a big impression on her because everything in here is now
seriously
blue. Dark blue, light blue, turquoise, midnight, robin’s egg, blue plaid, blue prints, sky blue, and navy. It would be funny except it means she’s still trying to
fix it.
Like if blue was the cure, I wouldn’t be wearing blue panties, blue bra, blue blouse, blue jeans, blue socks, blue shoes, and blue contacts right now.
    I knew part of the reason Joyce was glad I was coming for this visit was so she could see if I still looked okay, which is the really fucked-up part of all this. I don’t
look
any different. I don’t
feel
any different. But everything is different.
Every single thing.
And all the blue curtains in the world can’t change that.
    Suddenly the idea of sitting in that blue room all by myself, drinking too much vodka and waiting for Joyce to come home, seemed like the worst possible way to spend my first night back. Besides, I was hungry and Eddie assured me he was a good, fast cook who could feed me and have me back home in under an hour and a half. I left a note for Joyce and stuck the vodka in my purse on my way out the door. I still wanted a drink, and at this point I felt like I had earned it.
     
     
• 7
    in eddie’s whole house , there was not a scrap of anything blue, except some photographs of the lake where the water and the sky came together, but that doesn’t really count. That’s
real
blue. Everything was sort of a soothing wheat color, except for a pile of bright red pillows stacked on the floor. There were bamboo mats, a futon couch, and a small table with two chairs. He had a couple of bookcases full of record albums. An elaborate, old-fashioned stereo system sat in the