Calamity and Other Stories Read Free Page A

mother put her bare feet up on the wicker ottoman and took another sip of white wine. My father was returning to his old self now, and looked around with little jerks of his head to see if anyone had noticed the kiss. “Yeah, the Delaware Water Gap is nice,” Jerry Waslick was saying, “but the mosquitoes will kill you.”
    Mr. Curtin was closing the piano now. He turned to me and Callie and said, “Nothing I could ever play could come near to the beauty of what we’ve just witnessed. That’s the tragedy of my life.”
    Old Edna LeBlanc, who had woken, was making her way onto the porch with her sister.
“Tragedy,”
she said to Millie, as Mr. Curtin laid his head on the covered keyboard. “It’s like I always say: these young ones don’t know the meaning of the word.”

A Brand New You
    He sang in the shower—was singing, right now, in her shower. Annie didn’t remember him ever doing that before and couldn’t help feeling annoyed, not because she had anything against singing in the shower, but because in Ben’s case it seemed calculated, to make her think how cute he was for being the sort of person who sang in the shower. But Annie knew his ways all too well, knew that if she weren’t around to listen he probably wouldn’t even hum.
    And yet she had married him. Fifteen years ago she had married him, and eight years ago she had divorced him. And now here he was singing in her shower, having just bedded her for the first time in nine years.
    She had found him that afternoon on Bleecker, where she was killing time after her final class of the day, a summer seminar with a professor who bored her but who was supposed to be one of the greatest minds in modern philosophy. There she was, enjoying the June warmth and grime and people all around her, when she saw a man who looked like her ex-husband, with thick, wavy gray hair and matching gray eyes, and then saw, as he approached, that it indeed was him. Because she was feeling generous, she said, “Hey, you asshole!” and gave him a big kiss on the cheek.
    She could tell that he was pleased by her looks. Sure enough, he said, “Annie, Jesus, you look amazing!” but then of course had to shake his head as though he hadn’t thought it possible. Well, that was the most she could expect from him; it didn’t matter any more. A week ago she had turned forty, and she felt better than she had in years. Her dark hair was newly permed, and she was wearing the stretchy rainbow-striped tube top that made the most of her broad bust. Her close-fitting Jordache jeans, a birthday present to herself, showed how strong her legs were now. She had quit smoking and even briefly considered quitting drinking, and her skin looked the better for it.
    For a year now she had been heeding the advice of a health guru named Caleb Crantz, author of
A Brand New You
and
An
Even Better Brand New You.
Together his books prescribed an entire way of living that was basically impossible to follow but a diverting challenge nonetheless. There were special foods to purchase and a special order in which to eat them, and there were suggested ways to move and to breathe. To protect the spine, for instance, Caleb Crantz advised against carrying anything. Anything. Not a shoulder bag, not a backpack, and even though Annie was now in graduate school and should have been carting wheelbarrows of books around campus like everyone else, she had made it through two semesters taking Crantz’s advice to heart. He also proposed drinking nothing but filtered water, cooking only with organic ingredients, eating eight small meals—instead of three regular ones—a day, and walking instead of using any seated form of transportation. Annie’s job at the cultural center was only three blocks away from her apartment in Brooklyn, but on class days she walked all the way to NYU, nibbling a bulgur-wheat scone at the prescribed hour and making sure to have a few small bills in her pocket in case she was mugged on the