Body Surfing by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online Page B

Is it all over? And if so, what will she do with herself? Become a doctor? Could she do well enough on the MCATs? Could she learn to fly?
    A puzzle has been dumped upon a table in a corner of the living room. Julie is bent over a thousand pieces. Privately, Sydney hates puzzles--the frustration, the headachy sense of having nothing better to do, the disappointment at the end when the final image is not a Bonnard or a Matisse after all, but instead a saccharine landscape reminiscent of Thomas Kinkade. (The stupefying boredom of summers on the cement front stoops of Troy, the games of hopscotch and marbles and jump rope exhausted, the change from the errand to the corner store already spent. Midafternoon, the dead hour, her friend Kelly whining about the heat, her mother napping upstairs. The public pool was slimy underfoot; Kelly wouldn't go there. One afternoon Sydney walked to the end of the street, looking for shade. She crossed to the next street and then to the next and then to the next until she found herself in a vacant lot with a chain-link fence. A boy tried to sell her cigarettes and then asked her to pull her shorts down. Just like that. He would give her a dollar. A dollar would buy an ice-cream cone. Sydney walked slowly away, hunching her shoulders for a blow from behind, moving toward a corner of the fence where there was an opening through which a slender girl could slip. When she reached the corner, she saw, to her horror, that the gap had been repaired. She turned. The boy had his own pants down and was touching himself frantically. Sydney, panic rising, scooted around him and ran as if for her life, and it wasn't until she was married to Andrew that she could even say the word penis.)
    "I'm finding all the border pieces," Julie announces.
    "Can I join you?"
    "You can help."
    Sydney sits opposite the girl and studies the cover of the box. A house is perched on rocks overlooking the Atlantic, the painting bearing enough of a resemblance to the one they are in to suggest the motives of the purchaser.
    "I'll do the house," Sydney says. "I'll find all the white ones and put them together."
    Sydney feels dull-witted and slow. Too many decisions, she discovers, have to be made. Is this part of the house or part of a seagull? Is that a bit of a whitecap or a cloud?
    Sydney glances up and notices the speed with which Julie spots a piece and flicks it to one side. Within minutes, it seems, Julie has assembled all the straight edges. She begins to work them into a plausible frame.
    Sydney watches in amazement as Julie's nimble fingers build a border.
    "Julie," Sydney says. "I want you to try something."
    Julie looks up at her, her frown of concentration flattening out.
    "I want you to switch seats with me and find all the pieces of the house."
    Julie tilts her head. She doesn't understand.
    "I love doing the border," Sydney lies. "It's my favorite part."
    "Oh," Julie says with some reluctance. "Sure."
    After each is seated in the other's chair, Sydney makes a half-hearted attempt to connect part of the border. Surreptitiously, she observes Julie. With a sharp eye and a deft touch, Julie accurately spots the relevant shards of white and within minutes has a house in bits. She begins maneuvering them into place. Whenever she has two that match, she snaps them together.
    "You're very good at this," Sydney remarks.
    In her room, Sydney finds a packet of photos she recently picked up at the drugstore in Portsmouth. Most are pictures of the beach, of the village, of the exterior of the house. She takes them down into the living room and makes a neat stack on the coffee table.
    "Julie, I just want to try something else," she says to the girl. "If you could come over here?"
    Julie turns and stares at Sydney, as if gradually bringing her into focus. "Sure," she says. She joins Sydney on the couch.
    "These are pictures I took with my camera," Sydney explains. "I was thinking of getting a frame and making a collage. You know what