An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [92]
The dressed children on the terrace looked with longing down on the tanned and hilarious children below. The children below wouldn’t leave the pool, although it was seven-thirty; they knew no parent would actually shout at them from the flagstone terrace above. When these poolside children jumped in the water, the children on the terrace above could see their shimmering gray bodies against the blue pool. The water knit a fabric of light over their lively torsos and limbs, a loose gold chain mail. They looked like fish swimming in wide gold nets.
The children above were sunburnt, and their cotton dresses scraped their shoulders. The outsides of their skins felt hot, and the insides felt cold, and they tried to warm one arm with another. In summer, no one drank old-fashioneds, so there was nothing for children to eat till dinner.
This was the world we knew best—this, and Oma’s. Oma’s world was no likely alternative to ours; Oma had a chauffeur and her chauffeur had to drink from his own glass.
My forays into Oma’s world changed. I was working in the summers now. The summer I sold men’s bathing suits, I ate lunch alone in a dark bar and played the numbers for a quarter every week, right there in the underworld. I no longer went to the Lake with Amy. But for a few spring vacations after our grandfather died, Amy and I visited Oma and Mary in their apartment in Pompano Beach, Florida.
On my last visit, I was fifteen. Everything I was required to do, such as sit at a table with other people, either bored me to fury or infuriated me to a kind of benumbed lethargy. I was finding it difficult to live—finished with everything I knew and ignorant of anything else. I woke every morning full of hope, and was livid with rage before breakfast, at one thing or another.
Oma and I argued that year, over a word. Because something I was talking about seemed to require it, Oma said the word for padded, upholstered furniture was “overstuffed.” I wouldn’t hear of it, having never heard of it. “It’s not overstuffed; it’s stuffed just right.” Oma pointed out that it was just barely possible that she knew something on earth that I didn’t. I couldn’t quite believe her.
In Oma’s Pompano Beach apartment, I lounged on the bright print bamboo furniture and looked at the Asian objects she had been collecting all her life: gaudy Chinese cloisonné lamps, lacquered chests, sentimental Japanese porcelain figurines—women in whiteface with cocked heads and pink circles on their cheeks—gold, bossed mirrors, foot-long yellow ashtrays shaped like carp, and a pair of green ceramic long-tailed birds, which took up the breakfast table. It was years before I learned that Asian art was supposed to be delicate.
In Florida, Mary Burinda drove the machine. Oma rode in the front seat; Amy and I sat in back. That year, Oma’s current, roseate Cadillac had an extra row of upholstered seats, which folded against the front seat’s back—like, but not very like, the extra seats in a cab. An especially long distance stretched between the front seat and the back.
One day, we were driving back from Miami; Oma had been “looking at shoes.” (Oma had announced at breakfast, “Today I want to look at shoes,” and I repeated the phrase to myself all morning, marveling, to learn what it might feel like to want to look at shoes.)
Without provocation, she broke down, grieving for our grandfather. She rubbed her round face in her hands. Mary, at the wheel, expostulated, shocked, “Missus Doak. Oh, Missus Doak.” She