Read Online The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners by Luanne Rice - Free Book Online Page B

I was little, my father said I was lucky there was both day and night. Because I loved the flowers by day and the stars by night.”
    I loved that, and it surprised me. I didn’t associate soul or poetry with the Nicholson side of the family.
    “I used to want to be an astronomer when I was little. Before I wanted to be a gardener,” she said.
    New information. I leaned on the stone balustrade, waiting for her to say more. But she didn’t, so I had to press.
    “Why didn’t you?”
    “One didn’t,” she said.
    The phrase was straight out of my grandmother’s mouth. One doesn’t go to such places, one doesn’t associate with such people, one didn’t attend graduate school, one didn’t follow one’s dreams when one already had a trust fund. Here, I’ll conjugate it for you: one doesn’t, one didn’t, one never shall.
    “What about after you married Dad? Wouldn’t he have been happy for you to become an astronomer? Or whatever you wanted?”
    “I think the moment had passed,” she said. “I was a mother by then. I had you and Lucy.”
    I gave her a sharp look, unable to help myself. Did having children mean you had to give up your life? There was no such thing as a woman who was both a mother and a scientist? I could have said, but didn’t want to be contentious, What about after you left us? She must have felt it herself, because she blushed. She looked down, her white-streaked dark hair falling across her eyes.
    “Did we have the telescope in Michigan?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she said, looking grateful that I’d let her off the hook. “You loved it when you were little. I’d pick you up and you’d hold on tight, look through the lens, and we’d pretend we were explorers.”
    “It’s so odd,” I said. “I remember everything, but not that.”
    “Everything?” she asked.
    I nodded solemnly. It was a curse, really, having Velcro brain. There are so many memories I’d like to wipe out. My mother is the exception: I want to remember more about her, but can’t. The ones I have get fuzzy and sometimes slip away. This sounded like one I would have loved, a scene of mother-daughter happiness.
    “Tell me one thing,” she said.
    “That I remember?”
    She nodded.
    “About you?”
    “About us,” she said.
    Oh, the possibilities. I had this secret trove of memories of my mother. I’d stored them away, just as if my mind were an attic. A place to put clothes that didn’t fit anymore, broken toys, old furniture—stuff you never used anymore, but weren’t quite ready to toss. I never went up there. But I did now, opened the door, and the rooms were overflowing.
    “You taught me how to do somersaults,” I said. “Out in the backyard while Lucy took her nap. She was in her playpen under the crabapple tree, and we were on the grass, and I got stuck on my head. You helped me over. I can still feel your hand on my back. And once that happened, I got it.”
    “And you kept going, all across the yard,” she said.
    “You did too,” I said. “Together, side by side, somersaulting to the fence and back. We laughed … and Lucy woke up.”
    “And you wanted to show her how, but I told you she was too young.”
    “A baby,” I said. “You told me she could have hurt her soft spot. Then you showed me, and I kissed the top of her head.”
    “You were a good big sister,” she said.
    I still am , I wanted to say. My eyes welled up and I stared at her, wondering what she thought of my tears. They were a combination of remembering the mother I’d loved so much and the worst hurt in the world. How could she have left me? Left us? I was fine—but did she have any idea what this had done to Lucy? Sometimes it seemed to me that my sister had been rent asunder; the phrase came to me, oddly, from earth science class: “galaxies rent asunder in a gigantic cosmic collision.”
    “Tell me another,” she said.
    Another memory? I didn’t feel like it, think I could. I shook my head. The feelings coursing