Drowning Lessons (27 page)

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Authors: Peter Selgin

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BOOK: Drowning Lessons
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Snow falls as I cross Fifty-seventh. A cold gust blows. I fold up
the collar of my windbreaker, wait for the ache to pass. The sky thickens to darkness.

“I'm looking for pajamas,” I tell the salesclerk at Bergdorf's, a man with a nervous twitch to his upper lip and thick lines shooting up the middle of his forehead.

“What size?” He seems completely uninterested.

“My size. But it's the pattern and colors that concern me.”

I follow the salesclerk's dispassionate back to a display case bursting with pajamas — diamonds, shields, polka dots — and, yes, stripes.

“Any wide ones?”

“Wide?”

“I'm looking for wide stripes. Red and gray, preferably.”

With a desultory air the salesman opens drawers. From one he withdraws a stack of striped pajamas. Second from the bottom, I see them: a pair with red and gray wide stripes.

“It's a medium,” says the clerk, unfolding them. “They run a bit large. These should fit you just fine.”

I nod thoughtfully into my index finger, which I've pressed against my lips as if to suppress a painful outburst — something between a groan and the mewl of a cornered, pocket-sized creature — then take a step back, and then another, as the clerk, a toreador dangling a red and gray striped cape, fixes me with questioning eyes and the department store walls (decorated in wide vertical red and gray stripes) close in on me like the bars of a colorful jail cell. Question: how did they kill him? Answer: they gave him everything he wanted.
(He was all I had. No
—
not exactly.)
I think I'm going to die; I
know
I'm going to faint. Minutes later I'm sitting with a Dixie cup of cool water to my lips, surrounded by concerned faces, including that of the desultory clerk, who
asks me do I still want the pajamas? should he ring them up for me? My mouth goes dry. I stammer.

“Well … actually … I really wanted … pink and blue,” I say, merely to extricate myself. “You haven't got pink and blue, have you, by any chance?”

Spring. Together with my cousin I watched the magnolias in Central Park blow out again, flinging their snowy branches to snare the sky. The daffodils the gardeners had planted bloomed in sudden affray. By May's end I'd never felt better, only lighter, as if my bones had hollowed, like the bones of birds. I no longer floated; my lightness attached itself to earth. When the magnolia blossoms shivered, I shivered with them; when fat raindrops dimpled the glassy surface of the rowboat pond, my skin took their imprint, too. There was no obvious joy in any of this, mind you, only a great substantive indifference, as if the long, nearly total vacuity of the past year — my year of searching for red and gray wide-striped pajamas — had served its purpose, had scooped my longing for old comforts out like so much melon meat, had emptied me of something I didn't need
or
really want, and by emptying me had freed me — or at least delivered me from department stores.

I no longer suffer from fainting spells.

Standing on the stern of the
American Legion
, sifting my father's ashes into its wake, I watch the wind whip them into gray smears. I toss the plastic urn in; it bobs, floats.
O sweet gray banality of life! O bloody shank of day's end! O bourbon-and-ouzo-scented breath of night!
Under a red bay of sky Marcia wraps her plump arms around me.

Uncle Nick has asked me to go to work for him, setting up
his symposiums, peddling his chrome yellow manifestos. A man needs a purpose, after all.
A man without a purpose is a chameleon on a scotch plaid.
In celebration we locked arms across his dining-room table, drained each other's ouzo glasses, then hurled them synchronously into the fire grate, where they shattered like snowballs.
Stinyássas!

So I shall live on, lightening and lightening, until my body cells quaver in frequencies of every wavelength and spectrums of every hue.

Speaking of spectrums: next Sunday I've promised to take my cousin to the Rainbow Room.

Uncle Nick is pleased.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Swimming:
Literary Review
46, no. 4 (Summer 2003)

The Wolf House:
Missouri Review
26, no. 2 (2003)

Color of the Sea:
Missouri Review
27, no. 3 (Winter 2004)

Driving Picasso:
Boulevard
22, no. 1 (Fall 2006)

Sawdust:
The Sun
, no. 352 (Winter 2005)

Our Cups Are Bottomless:
Alaska Quarterly Review
23, nos. 3–4 (Fall and Winter 2006)

The Girl in the Story:
Wisconsin Review
38 (Fall 2003)

The Sea Cure:
Carve Magazine
(Fall 2005)

Wednesday at the Bagel Shop:
Oasis
6, no. 3 (Winter 1998)

El Malecón:
South Dakota Review
32, no. 4 (Winter 1994)

Boy B:
Global City Review
(Winter 2005)

The Sinking Ship Man:
Like Water Burning
(Summer 2005)

My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas:
Glimmer Train Stories
52 (Fall 2003)

David Walton,
Evening Out

Leigh Allison Wilson,
From the Bottom Up

Sandra Thompson,
Close-Ups

Susan Neville,
The Invention of Flight

Mary Hood,
How Far She Went

François Camoin,
Why Men Are Afraid of Women

Molly Giles,
Rough Translations

Daniel Curley,
Living with Snakes

Peter Meinke,
The Piano Tuner

Tony Ardizzone,
The Evening News

Salvatore La Puma,
The Boys of Bensonhurst

Melissa Pritchard,
Spirit Seizures

Philip F. Deaver,
Silent Retreats

Gail Galloway Adams,
The Purchase of Order

Carole L. Glickfeld,
Useful Gifts

Antonya Nelson,
The Expendables

Nancy Zafris,
The People I Know

Debra Monroe,
The Source of Trouble

Robert H. Abel,
Ghost Traps

T. M. McNally,
Low Flying Aircraft

Alfred DePew,
The Melancholy of Departure

Dennis Hathaway,
The Consequences of Desire

Rita Ciresi,
Mother Rocket

Dianne Nelson,
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

Christopher McIlroy,
All My Relations

Alyce Miller,
The Nature of Longing

Carol Lee Lorenzo,
Nervous Dancer

C. M. Mayo,
Sky over El Nido

Wendy Brenner,
Large Animals in Everyday Life

Paul Rawlins,
No Lie Like Love

Harvey Grossinger,
The Quarry

Ha Jin,
Under the Red Flag

Andy Plattner,
Winter Money

Frank Soos,
Unified Field Theory

Mary Clyde,
Survival Rates

Hester Kaplan,
The Edge of Marriage

Darrell Spencer,
CAUTION Men in Trees

Robert Anderson,
Ice Age

Bill Roorbach,
Big Bend

Dana Johnson,
Break Any Woman Down

Gina Ochsner,
The Necessary Grace to Fall

Kellie Wells,
Compression Scars

Eric Shade,
Eyesores

Catherine Brady,
Curled in the Bed of Love

Ed Allen,
Ate It Anyway

Gary Fincke,
Sorry I Worried You

Barbara Sutton,
The Send-Away Girl

David Crouse,
Copy Cats

Randy F. Nelson,
The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

Greg Downs,
Spit Baths

Peter LaSalle,
Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism

Anne Panning,
Super America

Margot Singer,
The Pale of Settlement

Andrew Porter,
The Theory of Light and Matter

Peter Selgin,
Drowning Lessons

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