Either Side of Winter Read Free Page A

liking football.’
    She almost bridled at that: she had been trying to impress him. Charles didn’t seem to notice and, somewhat abashed, Amy made a confession she’d been hoping to get to at some stage in any case. ‘I guess I’ve always been something of a Daddy’s girl.’ That set her off, though she probably left as much out as she included – saving it for later, perhaps, when she needed something vulnerable to expose for the purposes of conversation. Her father, also named Charles as it happens, though he went mostly by his middle name Jack, treated her like a boy from the start. To the point where, when heryounger brother Andy came along, being that much younger and blooming later as a boy, he couldn’t hope to keep up and turned out something of a disappointment in that respect, and concentrated on what she wouldn’t compete with him at, like painting. Jack had a try-out for a minor-league ball club after college, which when he didn’t make it he ended up in law school. Played the hot-shot lawyer in New York for five years, till Mom came along and they went home to Indiana to raise kids. They were both from Indiana, that was part of the appeal: but Amy guessed he kind of took out his ambitions on her. Not that she minded at all: going to state in softball her senior year was probably the most etc. of her life. And so on.
    But, as usual, she edited less than she had intended to. And certain phrases cropped up now and again: I guess I was always the lucky one, I totally see why he resented me. These indicated what she had wanted to indicate in any case – that she was a favourite child. However much she told herself that it was ungenerous, and worse, to bring these things into the open, that they should be the unacknowledged solace of her lonelier hours. Still, the truth insists on being told. She was blessed by the preferences of love. The natural choice of affections. The darling of hearts. The inheritor of her parents’ dreams. The one to bet on.
    Though as for that, even Amy couldn’t be sure how much of it was true any more, if it was ever true. It’s always hardest to edit out what you have begun to doubt. Her brother, in his sophomore year at Pomona, had begun to get his cartoons – his graphic art – published in some San Francisco magazines. He won a sculpture prize, including a thousand-dollar cheque, on the strength of which he spent the summer backpacking through Mexico. Aunts, cousins, old college buddies, were always ringing up her parents to say they’d come across his work or his name on a website somewhere. You couldn’t go home without seeing some magazine page tacked on to the fridge or the living-room mirror, most of it too strange or horrible to look at. She had quit the softball team her freshmanyear and the word she used for Amherst football was really the word that summed up how she had begun to think about the four years after high school: they had proved something of a wash-out. Nothing had changed, least of all her, except that everything she used to like about herself had gotten a little dusty.
    Her relations with her mother Joanne had always been somewhat prickly, on her side at least. They just didn’t get each other for a start, besides which there was no way Amy wanted to end up like Joanne: sweet and condescended to, as Amy saw it. Not that her father seemed so happy these days. Another source of guilt. Arthritis in his knees meant he couldn’t even play softball any more, and he spent too much time in front of the couch watching the TV. Two years before he had had his teeth out (after Andy left for college): the thought of that plastic smile sitting in the glass on the shelf above the bathroom sink made her want to cry. He was forty-seven: already he had the artificial cheeriness of an old man to whom no one pays any real attention. Cheaply renovated, that’s what he looked, with the hair he had left brushed back along his neck in thin strands that reminded her of