Tigers in Red Weather Read Free Page B

Springs. She imagined his body, the blond hairs on his arms covered in a fine layer of what was once the shell of the U.S.S. Jacob Jones . She could picture him slicking his hair back under the water, turning his face up to the spray, his eyelashes like cobwebs catching fine beads. Would he be thinking of her? She wondered this only briefly. She knew he would not.
    The cottage was giving off its evening song: the sound of waterrushing through the cheap pipes, and scratchy jazz. Nick hated that cottage, hated its sameness. A rented prefab, it was just like all the others surrounding it: boxy, with a kitchen and bedroom at the front, and a large living room and dining area to the rear, with windows onto a back porch.
    The bungalows sat in rows on either side of a dusty drive, each separated by its own plot of land. All the kitchens looked out onto the drive and at any time, any number of the servicemen’s busybody wives could be seen peering out. Nick had made it a habit to walk out to the drive in her bathing suit at least once a day, just to watch the kerchiefed heads quickly disappear, one by one, as she stared them down. It had become something of a game, to see if she could catch one polka-dotted head frozen in the beam of her racy bathing suit, cut higher at the thighs in the French style. This brightened her day.
    Each bungalow on her side also had a good-sized backyard stretching all the way down to the salty canal, which served as a byway for St. Augustine’s fishermen and, from time to time, kids fooling around in rowboats.
    But theirs had one thing all the others didn’t have: a dock, tethered into the silty bank, which swayed with the movement of the water. Unlike the rest of the development, it didn’t have the look of better times to come, of new lives being started over in cheap boxes. The wood was gray and perfectly weathered, perhaps rescued from an old piece of siding or a fisherman’s ramp. Nick loved the dock, like nothing else in that Florida town. Sometimes when she was lying there with her eyes closed, she was almost sure the hammered planks had come free from their soft purchase and that she was floating away, down the canal and out to sea, back home to her island up north. Then she would open her eyes and see the ungainly house at the other end of the lawn, and realize it had only been a passing fishing boat causing the dock to pitch from side to side.
    Nick passed her days stretched out there in the Florida sun, listeningto the records that had arrived from Cambridge in a trunk lined with old newspaper, and trying to shock her neighbors. Sometimes, she tried out new recipes from a book she had bought in town, The Prudence Penny Regional Cook Book . It was divided into chapters: Pennsylvania Dutch, Creole, Mississippi Valley, Minnesota Scandinavian and Cosmopolitan, and called for ingredients whose presence on the page continued to startle her.
    Before they left Elm Street, Nick and Helena had made a small bonfire and burned their expired ration books. Helena had always had a hard time figuring out which stamp went with what food, and would sometimes return with a can of spinach instead of chicken because she had mixed up the days. And while Nick had liked the challenge of rationing for a while, it had eventually grown tedious, like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle that was missing a piece. Now, she could cook whatever she liked, without having to figure out a substitute. But she found it difficult to concentrate on the recipes, and sometimes would give up halfway through the honeyed ham or oysters Rockefeller, and go lie on the dock in the sun. Later, she would throw the remaining ingredients together into some kind of casserole.
    Hughes never said anything, but she knew he was dismayed by her uneven cooking. Listening to the shower, she tried not to think of dinner, once again left undone. She also tried not to think about her husband, who had himself become something rationed.
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