Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [49]
Something inside me squeezes up tight, like a sponge that is being wrung out.
“She was beautiful,” my father says behind me.
On the morning of Clara’s first birthday, my father took me down to the cellar, where we fitted colored balloons to a tank and filled them with helium that made my father’s voice, when he inhaled it, sound like Donald Duck. We brought the balloons upstairs, where they bounced around the various rooms and settled in clumps, depending upon the drafts. By nightfall they hovered two inches from the ceilings, and by noon the next day they had fallen onto the floors and chairs and behind the television, occasioning an impromptu lecture from my father on the nature of gases and air pressure and gravity. Before the accident my father was famous for his lectures, which he’d deliver in an earnest way, expecting earnest attention in return. Occasionally my mother would roll her eyes and say, with evident fondness, Here we go again, but I enjoyed them, being as I was, for the duration, the hot focus of his attention. Sometimes the lectures were about scientific or historic matters, but often they were moral in nature. I had the You can do it lecture a number of times, usually before a test or a game about which I was anxious. Memorably, I had the Your reputation is priceless lecture after I got invited to my first girl-boy party. And periodically I’d get the Practice makes perfect lecture when I complained about a math worksheet or a piece I was sick of playing on the clarinet. By the time I was nine, I could recite my father’s lectures in my head as he gave them, but I was still enough in awe of him then that I didn’t dare to be disrespectful. I have often wondered what would have happened to us had I reached the teenage years uninterrupted by catastrophe, at what point I’d have tried to convince myself that my father had nothing left to teach me.
The day before, my mother had driven me downtown to pick out a present for my sister. It was the first time I’d ever gone into stores by myself, and I was both excited and nervous. My mother recited a hundred rules and cautions and made me repeat the place and time we would meet three times. I was to buy the present with my own money, ten dollars I had taken from my piggy bank.
I started at a store my parents called the five-and-dime, even though nothing in the store could be purchased for five or ten cents. I wandered the aisles of the toy department, touching dolls and puzzles and board games. The problem with Clara, I decided, was that she couldn’t actually do anything except put blocks together or fit plastic rings onto a cone. I left the store and went into a children’s clothing store next door, where they sold smocked dresses and linen bonnets and where a single pair of socks cost six dollars. I tried the drugstore on the off chance there might be a terrific game in the baby aisle, but when that turned out to be a bust (save for a box of Good and Plenty), I went back to the five-and-dime. As I wandered the aisles, I began to develop the notion that what Clara really needed was a present she could grow into, something that would last and last, a toy that somehow I had missed along the way but that I could play with and then teach her how to use.
I was at the meeting place five minutes ahead of time, and so was my mother.
“What did you get?” she asked.
“Etch A Sketch,” I said.
My mother made a birthday cake in the shape of a train. She let me decorate the separate cars in yellow and green and blue frosting, saving the red for the caboose. The train had a marshmallow smokestack and Life Saver windows and rode on licorice rails along the dining room table. By the time we were done, it looked like a toy, and neither one of us wanted to cut into it after we’d blown out Clara’s single candle.
Clara had awakened that morning with an earache. She alternately shrieked or whined the entire day, fraying my mother’s nerves and causing my father to sigh heavily and repeatedly