The Entire Predicament by Lucy Corin Read Free Book Online

Peanut in a study. Peanut was really good at the test where you predict where pool balls will go. The one where you say whether the item is dead or alive, she had trouble with clay. She wasn’t sure. It sort of moved, and it sort of changed, but it sort of didn’t. She had trouble determining agency.
    People who both like to cook shouldn’t marry each other. For example, the two of them like cooking, so they start cooking constantly. One gets into one country’s kind of cooking and takes pleasure placing special orders and pronouncing them correctly. The other calls pies: I do pies, she says. She builds a marble counter, and learns all about carpentry.They’re trying to be variations on a theme. Pie girl can’t win. Pies are in the other’s country along with lots of other dishes, and she feels like a minor cooker, doing pies. She quits cooking,
nauseated, and takes up collecting exotic plants. Cooking is like the baby in the chalk circle, and they pull and pull, but when, finally, one gives up, it’s not for love, it’s for exotic plants. Then budgets are stretched, because they both need so many accessories, cooking, plants, cooking, plants, and it starts to feel like there’s an elastic cord between them. They’re forty-five degrees to the ground like plow horses, pulling in opposite directions. Sometimes they get exhausted and smack into each other, sometimes face-to-face but mostly rump first. Birds flying backward into windows.
    When she grew into an old person, Peanut turned this over on her deathbed, in her mind, after having lived the life of a bright girl, but also particularly a bright girl with simpleton parents, if you can imagine that. She pictured her thinking, her turning, like the golf ball-size globule of mucus she’d recently produced, which was incandescent, white, and motable. It seemed alive, it was not alive, particles of it could be alive, and it meant death. One time she’d been sitting at a sidewalk café and saw a mother and child, holding hands, walking by. The mother had protruding from her forehead an egg-shaped lump. The child, too, had one bulging from his forehead, a slight variation on egg, his mottled like cauliflower. There are many possible explanations. Some things are given, and you don’t know how.

Wizened

I: OTHER PEOPLE
    I begin with what I see plainly, before and around me. There is much to curtail. To one side, my neighbors are a family, extremely nuclear in a contemporary way. There’s a mother, a father, a girl, and a boy, both children from previous marriages, the girl blonde, the boy brunet, both juniors at the local private high school, both athletes (soccer). The kids, Jeff and Amie, own (that is, were given for Christmas) a basset hound named (by Jeff) Spliff, a word his parents pretend they don’t understand.
    A good family: Mrs. Craven runs an antique store, and Mr. Craven is a corporate-theft deterrent specialist. Amie plays clarinet, and Jeff’s hair is longer than Amie’s. Spliff runs in small circles and bays like a donkey, true to his breed. When Mr. Craven goes to another town to deter theft, Mrs. Craven goes along. She says they are taking the opportunity for a
romantic getaway. She says instead of missing each other, they are making applesauce and lemonade, so to speak.The kids say, “Yeah, mom, you just don’t want him screwing around.” Mom says, “That’s me, I smother,” and points at her cheek for a kiss.
    I see it all through my sharp eyes, hear it all with my keen ears, and I’m mired by experience, dense with inaccessible wisdom. Mr. and Mrs. Craven pull out of the driveway, and soon a dozen private high school kids, along with a dozen of their friends who were kicked out in seventh grade, and a dozen of their friends from public school, and a dozen of their friends who dropped out last year . . . dozens and dozens of kids arrive. I am the one who waits until the two-foot water pipe is pulled from under the bed and passed around,