The Visible World by Mark Slouka Page A

supposedly been dragged to hell through a hole you could still see in the ceiling, and she told me how very well she still remembered that square along with a certain churchyard a few minutes away, and when a particular burst of laughter carried over the water, she looked at me and said, “People can be silly, can’t they, complicating their lives for no reason, don’t ever complicate your life, promise me that,” and though I didn’t know exactly what she meant, I said I wouldn’t. Later, as we were planting the pinwheel flowers in the new pots, pressing down the soil with our fingers so the roots would take, she told me she had made some mistakes in her life but that it was never too late to understand things and that she understood things now and that she had never been happier than she was at that moment. She suggested we take a break for lunch, but later, when I found her in the hammock, smoking, she said she was a little tired, and it wasn’t until the next day that we finished, and by that time some of the flowers in the cartons, which we had forgotten to water, had wilted badly.
    I was reading in my room that evening after dinner when I heard my mother get up from the wicker chair and go into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and close, then the quick clink of glass against glass. I heard the water in the sink, then the creak of the wicker again. “What time is it?” she asked my father.
    It took a second for my father to move his book to his left hand and, holding his place with a finger, push up the sleeve of his sweater. “Half past nine,” he said.
    “Almost time for him to go to bed,” my mother said. There was no answer. A few minutes later she was up once more.
    “You think she’ll do it again?” she said from somewhere by the window.
    “I think she might,” my father said in his “I’m reading” voice.
    “What could she be thinking?” said my mother.
    “Pretty much what you’d expect, I imagine.”
    “I don’t think it’s just that.”
    “I never said it was.”
    “Time for bed,” my mother called. I pretended I couldn’t hear. “What’s he doing in there?” said my mother, and walking over, she knocked on the wood plank door to my room. “Bedtime,” she said. They were quiet for a few moments.
    “She’s a fool,” said my mother. “I thought she had more sense, throwing everything away like this.”
    They were quiet for a long time.
    “I don’t know that you want to stand by the window like that,” my father said.
    “I’m not the one who has to worry about being seen. And him,” she said, after a moment. “Him I can’t understand.”
    “What would you have him do?”
    “Something. Anything.”
    Again they were quiet. I heard a page turn.
    “And for what?” she went on after a while. “Nothing.”
    “I don’t imagine she sees it that way,” said my father.
    “You don’t?”
    “No.”
    “How does she see it, then?”
    “Differently.”
    “So you’re saying there’s nothing wrong with him sitting there reading like an idiot while his wife...”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Christ, you’re understanding.”
    “Am I?”
    “You go to hell.”
    I heard my father get out of the wicker chair, then whisper something I couldn’t make out: “I’ve never asked...little enough...to blame...fault.” And then I heard my mother crying and my father saying, “All right, there, come now, everything’s all right. It’s just a date on the calendar. Nothing more.”
     
    The next morning my mother woke me while everything was still cool and fresh. She had made a big plate of
palačinky
so light and thin you could see the bruise of the jam through the sides of the crepes. She’d set out two deck chairs in the middle of the old garden plot, she said. We would eat breakfast outside, a special treat. She put the
palačinky
on a tray with two cups of sweetened tea, and together we walked up the steps away from the lake to the garden, where we sat