Either Side of Winter by Benjamin Markovits Read Free Book Online

world, and, stranger still, the place she would make for herself in her own personality. ‘I was telling Harry Edwards about you,’ Joanne was saying, ‘and I was saying I didn’t know anything about…’
    ‘You remember Harry Edwards?’ Jack cut in. ‘Our friend at the Indy Record?’
    ‘Anyway, I showed him one of your pieces and explained that it takes some getting used to. At least it did for me but once you do…’
    ‘He said you should send some of your work to the arts desk there. He said it’s a long shot but you’ve got quality and they might take a second look at a local kid. He said…’
    Amy stopped listening, and Andy glanced at her, raising an eyebrow. She was dropping cut potatoes in a pot of cold water, one by one, watching them drop and noting the splash of each, absorbed in the rhythm of the repeated act. Andy came through the arch of the kitchen and took her by the neck and side of her face with his large long-fingered hand. She felt a ring at her cheek as he said, ‘I got you a present, big sis. I don’t know if you’ll like it. Something for a windowsill maybe. A little odd.’
    He turned to root through his duffel and brought out a strange wooden figure, often handled and well oiled, as tall perhaps as the bone between his elbow and wrist. ‘Artists use them, but I found this at a market.’ He spoke in short sentences; had the slightly unnerving controlled air of a boy who has decided to refrain from excess, and with the enthusiasm of youth, extended the dictum to all, even the least, parts of his life. ‘From the twenties, they say. I’ve got one myself. I justlike the look of them, so light.’ How brown you’ve gotten, she thought, in California – not quite healthy, he’d always been so pale, but unwashed-looking and slightly moly. The kind of boy who doesn’t mind where he sleeps. His vanity lies elsewhere. ‘For putting up with us this weekend. For putting us up.’
    She noted that ‘us’ as she set her gift under the window by the oven. It stood superimposed against the brick of the apartment opposite and the thinning trees above, the brown and green of the leaves losing way against the brown and green of the park coming through behind them. The figure was composed of segmented limbs, jointed at ankle, elbow, knee, wrist, each adjustable, so that it could assume and hold any variety of pose. A thin steel rod rising from the centre of a wooden base supported it from the bottom, so his feet (and the shape suggested a man), didn’t need to touch ground, but could perch as they pleased on air. His legs, for example, were now spread wide in a bow-legged swagger; one arm hung back by his side, and the left reached out in front as if leading a charge. His face was a blank, a knob; his torso, split into three unequal caterpillar segments, could be twisted as required. ‘We use it to get the proportions right. Only it’s got no gravity, so things come out a little light-footed. I think they’re pretty.’
    ‘We met Charles,’ Joanne said archly, folding her hands between her knees where she sat. ‘A very nice young man.’
    Jack stood up, warming up. ‘The thing about class is that it is what it is. There’s no point pretending that it isn’t.’
    ‘A looker, I would say, if that’s a word the girls still use nowadays. A real looker.’
    Amy for once didn’t mind their teasing. I’ve nudged them a little bit more my way, she thought; a little way in my direction again.
     *
    Charles couldn’t make it to Thanksgiving dinner. He had an ‘engagement in town’; but that dinner passed as it alwaysdoes, in a great sweat and hurry at first, and a slow sweat and languor afterwards. They teased Andy about his girls. ‘Every girl I know wears boots,’ he said, ‘up to here’, and struck his fist halfway up his shinbone. ‘And rubber belts. It’s like they’re preparing for the Day After.’ No one had met these girls, and Amy explored at some length the possibility