Goldengrove Read Free Page B

sick and perverted. Not the feeling so much as the thinking about my sister and her boyfriend.
    For a moment I was distracted by the red branches inside my eyelids. The sun was trying to trick us into believing that the afternoon would last longer than it would. With the first hint of dusk, Margaret would want to go inside. Once she told me that twilight was when the spirits of the dead surfaced from the lake and made party plans for the night. She loved telling me ghost stories. I knew, that is, I usually knew, that she was trying to scare me. But what made it scary was that part of her believed it.
    “What’s it like?” I persisted.
    “What’s what like?”
    “Sex.”
    “God, Nico. I can’t believe you’re asking me this.”
    After a long time Margaret said, “You know how when we go out for ice cream, you never know which flavor you want?”
    After they picked me up at the theater, we ’d drive to the Dairy Divine. I always took forever deciding, until I’d finally give up, give in , and settle on something awful. I knew it was only ice cream. But the lumpy cherry vanilla and the gross butterscotch mocha raisin seemed like a frozen symbol of everything wrong with my life. Aaron and Margaret never got impatient or made me feel rushed or embarrassed. Margaret said there was something holy about indecision and regret. She told me the French expression—the spirit of the staircase—for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with the perfect answer you didn’t think of. We even had our own code phrase: SOS, we called it.
    Margaret always ordered pistachio, which tasted like dish detergent. She thought the color was funny. She liked the way the maraschino-cherry green dye stained her lips and tongue, and when she finished, she’d smile at us, leaving me and Aaron to marvel at how someone could look so beautiful with a green mouth and teeth. Sometimes the kid behind the counter would offer her a napkin as if he wanted to ask her to sign it.
    Aaron ordered coffee swirl, sometimes butter pecan. Margaret let him taste hers, and she’d have small bites of his. Something about the easy, intimate way they traded tastes was what first made me begin to think they’d had sex while I’d been at the movies.
    When had we switched from talking about sex to talking about ice cream? I said, “I know it drives Aaron crazy. Even though he’s nice about it, he really hates it, right?”
    Margaret shrugged. “Sex is the opposite of not being able to make up your mind. You don’t have a mind. You don’t have to think. You know exactly what you want.”
    What could Margaret possibly mean? She was getting like Mom. I thought, I’ll never eat ice cream again.
    I said, “We forgot the sunblock.”
    Margaret said, “You look good with a tan.”
    “Mom will have a fit,” I said. “Skin cancer, remember?” “Mom will have a fit for a change.” Margaret leaned over the boat. “Can you see the bottom? Look, Nico. Look at that.”
    I looked until we almost tipped. A dark shape flitted by.
    “See what that was?”
    “Yes,” I lied.
    “You didn’t,” she said. “But so what. Did you know there’s a lake in Macedonia where the fish are seventy million years old? Maybe if we saw all the way down, we’d see fish that have been here that long.”
    “Each fish lives seventy million years?” Ever since we were little, she’d made up scientific facts. She told me that if everyone in the world wore their watches upside down, time would run backward. She said that turkeys were so stupid they drowned in the rain, and that you could sharpen your hearing by walking around with your eyes shut. The problem was, some of it was true. Maybe there were fish that old living in a lake like ours. Maybe that was why I was drawn to science. I liked the idea of an authority I could go to for a ruling on the stories my sister told.
    Margaret sighed. “The species, Nico. Not