Read Online Desire Lines by Christina Baker Kline - Free Book Online
Authors: Christina Baker Kline
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home to find boxes of shoes piled up in the hall, transparent makeup bags filled with tubes and vials on the table. She redecorated the living room and had the yard landscaped, charging it all to her husband’s credit cards.
One night at dinner she told Kathryn and Josh that she had decided to become an interior decorator. “So I’ll be taking night classes,” she said. “And I’ll need you two to do your part around here.”
After that, everything changed. When their father left, their mother had continued to run the house pretty much as she always had. She fixed the kids a hot breakfast before school, picked them up on time when they had to get to piano lessons or track practice, and put dinner on the table at six. But now that she was a student, too, the old family structure crumbled. They ate cold cereal standing at the sink, and Kathryn and Josh arranged rides to after-school activities and learned to do their own laundry. Kathryn started cooking dinner, strange and creative combinations of whatever she could find in the fridge. On the evenings when her mother was home, the three of them did homework together at the kitchen table.
Now that she was out and about, their mother became known as one of the cool moms, the type who wore brightly colored turtlenecks tucked into Guess jeans and flirted with the coaches at their kids’ baseball games. She always looked stylish and put-together—a lot more put-together than her kids did. She often complained, half jokingly, that she was the kind of mom who should’ve been rewarded with cheerful, straightforward children who organized bake sales and homecoming rallies, instead of the bookish, reticent ones she got. “I don’t understand you,” she’d say when she found Kathryn lurking in her bedroom on sunny afternoons. “Have you looked outside? It’s a beautiful day!”
“I’m reading, Mom.”
“Don’t you want some exercise?”
“Maybe later.”
“Are your bicycle tires pumped up?”
Kathryn would sigh exaggeratedly, a finger marking the place in her book. “Don’t know.”
“I’ll check,” her mother would say brightly. “It’s a nice day for a bike ride. Maybe I’ll go, too.”
Josh became very protective of their mother. He even refused to visit his father and Margaret, but Kathryn dutifully went when they called. When she visited them in their stark new house with its vaulted ceilingsand hot tub on the deck, she felt like a nun in a bordello. She disapproved of everything.
“For chrissakes, Katy, lighten up a little,” her father would laugh at her cloudy expression. “Did you bring a swimsuit? No? Maybe you can fit into one of Maggie’s.”
Margaret was wary around her, careful to be polite. She made perfectly balanced dinners out of gourmet cookbooks, substituting juices, she explained, for the salt and fat. Kathryn became a spy, searching for clues about what it was that made her father happy, what he had found with Margaret that he couldn’t get at home. Margaret, she discovered, was trying very hard. The shelves of her nightstand were full of titles like Wine Made Easy, A Beginners Guide to Classical Music, and Understanding Opera; home-decorating magazines with pages pinched down were arranged by month in the kitchen. Jars of vitamins lined the kitchen counter. Under the sink in the master bathroom Kathryn found a variety of douches—Lemon Fresh, Summer Sunshine, Floral Breeze. In Margaret’s dresser were lacy negligees, silk teddies, sheer French-cut underwear and a see-through black merry widow. Kathryn fingered the pieces slowly and then shut the drawer, imagining Margaret on top of her father in that outfit, moving her lithe gymnast’s body, completing the fantasy he’d constructed for himself out here in the countryside, far from the ruins of his life with them.
Margaret had stopped teaching gymnastics, but she still knew the names of Kathryn’s friends. “How’s Jennifer?” she’d ask, taking a long drag on a cigarette as
One night at dinner she told Kathryn and Josh that she had decided to become an interior decorator. “So I’ll be taking night classes,” she said. “And I’ll need you two to do your part around here.”
After that, everything changed. When their father left, their mother had continued to run the house pretty much as she always had. She fixed the kids a hot breakfast before school, picked them up on time when they had to get to piano lessons or track practice, and put dinner on the table at six. But now that she was a student, too, the old family structure crumbled. They ate cold cereal standing at the sink, and Kathryn and Josh arranged rides to after-school activities and learned to do their own laundry. Kathryn started cooking dinner, strange and creative combinations of whatever she could find in the fridge. On the evenings when her mother was home, the three of them did homework together at the kitchen table.
Now that she was out and about, their mother became known as one of the cool moms, the type who wore brightly colored turtlenecks tucked into Guess jeans and flirted with the coaches at their kids’ baseball games. She always looked stylish and put-together—a lot more put-together than her kids did. She often complained, half jokingly, that she was the kind of mom who should’ve been rewarded with cheerful, straightforward children who organized bake sales and homecoming rallies, instead of the bookish, reticent ones she got. “I don’t understand you,” she’d say when she found Kathryn lurking in her bedroom on sunny afternoons. “Have you looked outside? It’s a beautiful day!”
“I’m reading, Mom.”
“Don’t you want some exercise?”
“Maybe later.”
“Are your bicycle tires pumped up?”
Kathryn would sigh exaggeratedly, a finger marking the place in her book. “Don’t know.”
“I’ll check,” her mother would say brightly. “It’s a nice day for a bike ride. Maybe I’ll go, too.”
Josh became very protective of their mother. He even refused to visit his father and Margaret, but Kathryn dutifully went when they called. When she visited them in their stark new house with its vaulted ceilingsand hot tub on the deck, she felt like a nun in a bordello. She disapproved of everything.
“For chrissakes, Katy, lighten up a little,” her father would laugh at her cloudy expression. “Did you bring a swimsuit? No? Maybe you can fit into one of Maggie’s.”
Margaret was wary around her, careful to be polite. She made perfectly balanced dinners out of gourmet cookbooks, substituting juices, she explained, for the salt and fat. Kathryn became a spy, searching for clues about what it was that made her father happy, what he had found with Margaret that he couldn’t get at home. Margaret, she discovered, was trying very hard. The shelves of her nightstand were full of titles like Wine Made Easy, A Beginners Guide to Classical Music, and Understanding Opera; home-decorating magazines with pages pinched down were arranged by month in the kitchen. Jars of vitamins lined the kitchen counter. Under the sink in the master bathroom Kathryn found a variety of douches—Lemon Fresh, Summer Sunshine, Floral Breeze. In Margaret’s dresser were lacy negligees, silk teddies, sheer French-cut underwear and a see-through black merry widow. Kathryn fingered the pieces slowly and then shut the drawer, imagining Margaret on top of her father in that outfit, moving her lithe gymnast’s body, completing the fantasy he’d constructed for himself out here in the countryside, far from the ruins of his life with them.
Margaret had stopped teaching gymnastics, but she still knew the names of Kathryn’s friends. “How’s Jennifer?” she’d ask, taking a long drag on a cigarette as
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