Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

world.
    Dish washing doesn’t make money but I like it at home when I’m alone. I’m so used to being with Termite, he feels like alone to me. He’s like a hum that always hums so the edge of where I am is blunt and softened. And when I push the dishes under I don’t even look at them; I keep my eyes on him, out the window. He moves that clear blue ribbon with his breath, ripples it slow in front of his eyes, lips pursed. Pulls air out of air in such still heat. Sees through blue, if he sees. Or just feels it touching him, then flying out. I can hear the air at his open lips. I hear the air conditioner down at the restaurant too. Nonie is taking orders in the breakfast rush and it’s already crowded and hot, tables and stools at the counter filled, and the big box over the door is grinding its firm noise. Charlie calls it the system. Later, in the afternoon when most everyone has cleared out and Nonie is getting ready to come home, the system will be catching and pulling like it can’t quite breathe, saying sip, sip sip. All wounded. Nonie leaves while it’s sighing, when they’re setting up for dinner. Charlie wanted me to take the dinner shift after I graduated, but Nonie said I wasn’t graduating high school to be a seventeen-year-old waitress. Barely seventeen, she pointed out. I finished school early because she sent me early. No reason not to, she said, I could read, and school had to be as interesting as sitting at Charlie’s all day on a lunch stool with a pile of Golden Books. She says I don’t need a job. Termite’s my job, and Barker Secretarial, when she can be home nights to stay with Termite. The point is to make things better, Nonie says, have a future. I’m looking at Termite and the alley past his chair, and it’s funny how that piece of see-through blue he holds to his face looks how I think a future would, waving like that, moving start to finish, leading off into space.
    I’ll let him go on a few more minutes. Nonie says it’s strange how I’m satisfied to let him be, and it’s a damn good thing, because life is long.
    Life feels big to me but I’m not sure it’s long. I rub cereal off the hard curved lips of the breakfast bowls, and life feels broad and flat, like a sand beach rolling into desert, miles and miles. Like pictures of Australia I’ve seen, with a sapphire sky pressing down and water at one edge. That edge is where things change all at once. You might see the edge coming, but you can’t tell how close or far away it is, how fast it might come up. I can feel it coming. Like a sound, like a wind, like a far-off train.
    I used to be different. I don’t know what I thought. Busy all the time, like I planned on being twelve forever. Already Termite’s mother, one of them, best in school, cooking and cleaning at home like a housewife, doing my collections, like I was saving up for something. I collected seashells, not so easy since I haven’t been to the ocean. And little novelty pitchers, doll sized, pitchers with faces or place-names or scenes painted on. I guess I started collecting them because Termite liked his so much—the tiny moon pitcher Nonie says was in his pocket the first time she ever held him. She says his pitcher was used as a perfume bottle and must have had a cork once, but the perfume is long gone. My biggest collection is color postcards of Main Streets, each a few cents at rummage sales, or dug out of the card box downtown at Topsy Turvy I have two or three from every state, pasted up across a wall of my room. Nick Tucci built that wall so Termite could have a room of his own in half of mine. I wanted an archway between us, not a door, and Nick framed me the same size opening into the living room. Open arches on two of my walls, no doors. I can see and hear Termite all the time. The seashells I collected were for him. He likes it when I hold one to his ear.
    Now I feel how all my collections are just sitting there. They’re things I used to want, and I