Read Online Swimming by Nicola Keegan - Free Book Online Page A

usual eye language. Everything starts with a let’s: Let’s swim at the QAC. Let’s have melon for dessert! Let’s take the top off the car!!!
    This annoys Bron. Quit talking to us like we’re retarded .
    Leonard’s temper surges at the strangest times. He gets up, slaps both hands down hard on the table, opens his mouth, closes it, looks at her, looks out the window, pounds his hands down hard on the table again, leaves. Mother refrains from both eye contact and speech.
    Bron looks at me. What?
    I look at her. What, what?
    She makes her eyes unusually round: What what what what what what .
    She’s very unpleasant, but I won’t take the bait. I stand up, grab my jacket, lace up my sneakers, and go. I walk down to Indian Creek. There’s a small stream there with frogs that blend into the grass so well you don’t even know they’re there until they croak.

Paris Is as Paris Does
    We’re on our way to Paris to uncover our inner Bouvier. Bron’s sitting next to me writing in her dream book, long fingers forming long words, wrists as slim as pencils. She covers up the page with her hand, says: Do you mind . Jets start reverberating in my innards, decibels rising as the hostesses strap themselves in, their orange faces set underneath their triangular caps. Leonard looks at me, nods. They’re revving the jets .
    The guidebooks he’s checked out are lying on his lap, and although he can stretch his legs out in the aisle, he doesn’t; he’s sitting straight up in his seat, exactly where they put him, thinking we’ll confuse his outward calm with a certain form of inner serenity. We don’t. We make looks over his head. Roxanne says: Don’t you find Dad unusually boring? She’s wearing a striped shirt, a striped skirt, black-and-white bowling shoes, fingerless gloves, a red beret.
    I hold my legs in a bent-kneed, open-armed, slope-shouldered surf stance so I can ride out any unexpected turbulence. I stand in the aisle looking down at them and say: Look at what gravity has done to my face .
    Bron says: What are you doing? You look like a … Sit down and shut up .
    Roxanne says : Your face looks like modeling clay .
    I say: Like I don’t know it, twerp .
    We look like a game show family flying to Paris with tokens in our pockets—except for Dot, who sits between Mom and Leonard sketching animals in peaceful positions. Mom’s motion sickness miraculously disappears upon contact with jet. She’s dressed in a pair of white jeans with a colorful smock, lips chalked peach. She looks up from her magazine and waves at me as though I were far away.
    I find Paris stinky, unusual, exciting. It doesn’t seem part of real life but like a funny parallel life where I don’t exist, thus nothing real can happen, good or bad, happy or sad. I take a break from caring about my absent womanhood, pick my nose in public because I don’t know anyone, thus don’t care. I travel well, like a sophisticated thoroughbred, but Bron is too tired. Too tired to eat breakfast. Too tired to take the steps down into the metro, too tired to walk back up. Leonard changes the subject by offering $20 to the first person who spots a Dalí mustache in the flesh. The competitor in me awakes and I concentrate on the hunt, looking through a swamp of naked faces, searching for the waxed tendrils under some unknown nose. My eyes start to roam museums, skim the city, hunting.
    We are staying in a snazzy hotel off the Champs de Mars. One-third of the Eiffel Tower shines through our window before the Eiffel Tower tenders flip the switch and turn it off. We sleep heavily at the wrong times, lightly when it’s dark. Bron’s restless. She moves her feet around, is prone to violent flips, her thin appendages knocking into me like cruel hammers. She is one of those sleepers who emit heat and wake up sweaty. I’m a cool sleeper who drools. I can’t stand it.
    I push her: I’m going to sleep on the couch .
    She pushes back: Like I care .
    I pull a sheet over