Read Online Outside the Ordinary World by Dori Ostermiller - Free Book Online Page B

geography of lines around my eyes, gray hairs starting to spring from my part like electric wires—stiff, untamable, even more unruly than the usual auburn coils. So this is how it begins, I’d thought, the slow unraveling. I was feeling my body’s inexorable descent, the slight thickening of upper arms, the now-prominent veins on the backs of my hands, just like my mother’s.
    I felt a stab of remorse. It had been weeks since I’d spoken to her, offering my usual list of excuses about why we couldn’t come west—work, money, the renovation, how the girls had their summer camps and recitals. They were all good reasons, and she’d heard them all before. We hadn’t been west since before Emmie was born.
    Tai had sat back down and was talking about his work—he was a landscape designer who wrote books on indigenous gardening—and how he’d starting giving himself Tuesdays off, because he realized that work had taken over his life. He spoke in hyperbole; things were amazing or wretched, taking over his life or totally omitted, and I watched the thick bow of his mouth, wanting to untie it.
    “I’m talking too much.” He drew his left hand over his brow. “Sorry. I do that when—”
    “It’s my birthday today,” I interrupted. “And I keep thinking that’s why I’m here, because I needed to do something special, for once. Something different.”
    “Well.” He leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms. “Where do you want to go?”
    “To go? ”
    “Clearly we have to go someplace, on a day like this.” He cocked his head toward the window. The clouds had, in fact, parted. Strands of mottled sunlight illuminated the steam now rising from wet pavement.
    “Oh, I couldn’t. I have so much work, and—”
    “You said it yourself. You need to do something different.” He shrugged and tipped his chair back as if he could take or leave this outing, but his eyes glowed like they would burn holes through the glasses. “You’ve already taken off the watch.”
    We were silent for a solid minute, regarding each other. I remembered twenty years ago, stopping at the Grand Canyon at dusk on my way across country: how I’d inched out onto a thin, triangular precipice that jutted irresistibly over the chasm, my legs dangling into blackness, toes tingling with catastrophe.
    “Listen.” I leaned forward. “I’m just wondering, you know, what this is about.”
    “About?” His chair scraped back down as he planted his elbow on the table, cupping his bearded chin in one hand.
    “I mean, clearly this meeting wasn’t about Eli, or my artwork, and, well, I just want to know if I’m supposed to be feeling guilty or something, because—” I was breathless and tongue-tied, my words bumping into each other like logs in a jam while Tai just stared, those bright eyes unnerving. “Well, because I’ve got enough guilt in my life,” I concluded, cheeks blazing.
    He nodded, drew in a long breath, then reached out and placed his warm brown hand over my freezing pale one. “Look, Sylvia, I don’t want you to feel guilt. It’s a useless emotion.”
    “Oh?” I laughed. “Some would argue that it has a purpose.”
    “Hmm. Good for upholding traditional institutions, I guess.” He smiled.
    “Yes, just think where we’d be without it.”
    “Everyone would be like me—divorced, no scruples.”
    “I wasn’t suggesting—”
    “I just find you sort of insanely lovely. If you haven’t figured it out.” He dropped his eyes to the tabletop, though his hand remained. My breath caught in my chest, stammered there like a cupped moth. “What is it, thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?”
    “Forty-two,” I said, face scorching again.
    “Okay, then. Happy forty-second. We don’t have to go anywhere after this teapot is empty.”
    “Good. That’s good.” Air rushed back into my lungs, a pulse in the back of my hand where the skin pressed lightly against his. I thought of Emmie’s paper butterfly mobile, translucent wings