Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

He’s nine going on ten, skinny-tall, shoulder blades pushing out like things inside a paper bag, new blue bathing suit too tight here, too loose there, but what’s all that got to do with anything? What’s important is that he’s here, standing by the picnic table, the sun shining on the river, the smell of pine needles and river water sharp in the air, somewhere a shout, laughter, music from a radio. His father’s cleaning ashes out of the grill, his mother and sister are laying down blankets on the sunny grass not far from the table, Grandma’s carrying one of the aluminum folding chairs toward the high pine near the edge of the drop to the river, and he’s doing what he likes to do best, what he’s really good at: standing around doing nothing. Everyone’s forgotten about him for a few seconds, the way it happens sometimes. You try not to remind anybody you’re there. He loves this place. On the table’s the fat thermos jug with the white spout near the bottom. After his swim he’ll push the button on the spout and fill up a paper cup with pink lemonade. It’s a good sound: fsshh, psshh . In the picnic basket he can see two packages of hot dogs, jars of relish and mustard, some bun-ends showing, a box of Oreo cookies, a bag of marshmallows which are marsh mel lows so why the a , paper plates sticking up sideways, a brown folded-over paper bag of maybe cherries. All week long he’s looked forward to this day. Nothing’s better than setting off on an all-day outing, in summer, to the park by the river — the familiar houses and vacant lots no longer sitting there with nothing to do but drifting toward you through the car window, the heat of the sun-warmed seat burning you through your jeans, the bottoms of your feet already feeling the ground pushing up on them as you walk from the parking lot to the picnic grounds above the riverbank. But now he’s here, right here, his jeans tossed in the back seat of the car and his T-shirt stuffed into his mother’s straw bag, the sun on one edge of the table and the piney shade covering the rest of it, Grandma already setting up the chair. And so the day’s about to get going at last, the day he’s been looking forward to in the hot nights while watching bars of light slide across his wall from passing cars, he’s here, he’s arrived, he’s ready to begin.

Though who’s to say when anything begins really? You could say the day began when they passed the wooden sign with the words INDIAN COVE and the outline of a tomahawk, on a curve of road with a double yellow line down the middle and brown wooden posts with red reflectors. Or maybe it all started when the car backed up the slope of the driveway and the tires bumped over the sidewalk between the knee-high pricker hedges. Or what if it happened before that, when he woke up in the morning and saw the day stretching out before him like a whole summer of blue afternoons? But he’s only playing, just fooling around, because he knows exactly when it all begins: it begins when he enters the water. That’s the agreement he’s made with himself, summer after summer. That’s just how it is. The day begins in the river, and everything else leads up to it.

Not that he’s all that eager to rush into things. Now that he’s here, now that the waiting’s practically over, he enjoys prolonging the excitement of moving toward the moment he’s been waiting for. It isn’t the swimming itself he looks forward to. He doesn’t even swim. He hangs on to the inner tube and kicks his legs. He likes it, it’s fine, he can take it or leave it. No, what he cares about, what thrills him every time, is knowing that this is it, the beginning of the long-awaited day at the river, as agreed to by himself in advance. Everything’s been leading up to it and, in the way of things that lead up to other things, there’s an electric charge, a hum. He can feel it all over his body. The closer you get, the more it’s there.

Julia, thirteen, isn’t like him in that way. Soon as she’s finished laying out the three blankets, she’ll run over to the edge of the drop, scamper down, and cross the short stretch of ground to the river. She’s always been like that, throwing herself into things — piano lessons, blueberrying, hiking a trail, the bumper cars at Pleasure Beach. She thinks he’s cautious, too held-back, timid even, and it’s probably true, but it’s also something else: he likes things to build up slowly, because when it happens that way, everything feels important. Does this mean there’s something un-grown-up about him, something that’ll go away one day, like his stick-out shoulder blades and his knobby anklebones?

“Come on, give us a hand, Cap’n,” Julia says. He’s not invisible anymore. Julia doesn’t like people standing around doing nothing. He takes a blanket corner and before he knows it she’s off around the table toward the pine where Grandma’s sitting, she’s scrambling down the drop and out of sight. A second later her head appears, then she’s all there except for her feet, then she’s got heels, toes. She doesn’t stop, goes right in past her knees, bends to splash water on her arms. He can see the reflections of her red suit broken up in the water. The river has little ripply waves, maybe from a speedboat out beyond the white barrels. His father once told him the Housatonic’s a tidal river. He remembers the word: tidal. Could that be the tide he’s looking at, those ripples? The Housatonic. He likes saying it, likes leaning into that “oooo” sound, which reminds him of a train coming around a bend at night in an old movie. Julia throws herself in, begins swimming out to the barrels.

“You run along now, Jimmy,” his mother says. “I’ll be fine here.” He knows it’s time to get started, you can’t delay things forever. He goes over to the sunny inner tubes, lifts up the one lying on a slant against the other, squeezes the warm dusty rubber to make sure it’s tight. Then he begins rolling it bumpily over the grass around the end of the picnic table toward the pine where Grandma’s sitting.

It’s a short walk, in deep shade broken by spots of sun. He’s stepping on softy-crackly pine needles and spongy pinecones, which press up into the soles of his feet as though he’s walking on rolled-up-sock balls. The earth feels bouncy and hard at the same time. Grandma’s sitting next to a high pine that’s leaning a little forward, as if one day it started to fall then changed its mind. To the left there’s another pine, also leaning forward, and the two trunks form a kind of frame around the sunny river and the wooded hills on the far side. Everything’s alive with interest: that big pinecone in dark shade with one end glowing in sunlight, that cherry-stained Popsicle stick lying next to a bumpy root. Grandma’s chair isn’t the heavy long one from the porch, with adjustable positions, no, she’s got the small one with a straight back that unfolds with one easy pull. She’s wearing her dark blue bathing suit and a pair of straw sandals, toenails polish-pink, her thick hair a strange sort of whitish yellowish orange. She’s always laughing about her trouble with hair dyes. She’s sitting in the shade near the edge of the drop, legs in sunlight, book in her lap. Her fingers are bent at the knuckles. She likes holding them up and showing them to him. See: arthritis. The crisscross strips in the chair are white and lime green. As he comes up to her, she turns her head, places a hand in her open book to keep it from closing.

“So, my good man, you’re going in? Look at Julia out there.” He brings this out in people, who knows why: Cap’n, my good man. It’s something about him. His sister’s by the barrels now, swimming on her back, kicking her feet, sweeping up both arms. “That’s right, my good woman,” he says, and Grandma does what he wants her to do, gives a deep-down scratchy laugh, a laugh with approval in it. It’s a witty family, you have to be on your toes. If he gets up late in the morning his father says things like “Out drinking again last night, eh, Jim?” or “Behold, the son is risen.” Standing beside Grandma, balancing his inner tube with his fingertips, he takes it all in: the two bracelets on Grandma’s wrist, one turquoise and one silver, her fingers puffy, her knuckles bumpy, the clumps of hot-looking droopy grass on the few feet of ground that go past the chair to the edge of the drop, the thick pine-root twisting out of the slope. A piece of white string hangs over the root. These are good things to look at, but sometimes you don’t see them. You see them when they’re leading up to something.