Read Online The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Carrie Snyder
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soon it will be full of Americans, a new delegation arriving to stay. Her daughter Marta needs to help: Food for many tonight! Juliet understands by inclination, by tilting her head and listening without her ears, but Keith understands every word and replies in Spanish. Thank you for the bebidas .
Something special for your supper, the cook promises. That means the Friesen children will eat at the guesthouse tonight, and not in a restaurant or around their own kitchen table, where sometimes they share meals with their mother and their father, though more often, lately, with their mother only.
———
Gloria is glad to get out of the house. She makes Juliet and Keith wash their faces and she scrubs Emmanuel’s until he howls (Juliet thinks there is some correlation between howling and cleanliness, some invisible rule that her mother follows: only through misery shalt thou be made clean). Gloria herself is wearing lipstick and mascara. Juliet watches her in the bathroom mirror.
“There,” says Gloria to her reflection, and smacks her lips together.
The rain has stopped and the air sticks to the skin. Gloria hustles the children down the sidewalk to the guesthouse, only to find they’ve arrived early. Supper is not ready. The guesthouse has not expanded to accept the fourteen newcomers and their oversized luggage; it has contracted, and the atmosphere tingles with nerves and confusion and mile-long questions.
Grown-ups crowd the porch, clutching plastic cups of water or — for the braver among them — of tiste .
Juliet swims like a fish into the volunteers’ bedroom: empty. She climbs up to Charlotte’s bunk and sits on the mattress in the dark. Snooping . If she were caught, that’s what it would be called. She sniffs the candles, digs her forearms into the pillow and bumps against the little black book. Her fingers travel inside its pages, exposing pencilled naked bodies in parts and whole, carefully drawn bones and muscles, and scattered words that come apart at the seams: What if freedom calls for anger and not love? Transpose your life. Sunday drive. Here is the skyline; here is the shore; my body and yours, nothing more. Don’t think, create.
Juliet startles as someone bumps into the room in error. Blinking up at her from the doorway: “Is this the bathroom?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Perhaps the person cannot see that Juliet is a child; perhaps her eyes have not adjusted to the dim. The woman looks half-blind behind owlish glasses, and terrified, as if a bomb might fall from the sky upon her head at any moment. She is waiting for Juliet to give her some direction. She is one of the fourteen newcomers: protestors from Ohio, all of them milling about, stumbling over backpacks and guitar cases, and quite shocked to discover only one toilet in the house.
DO NOT FLUSH TOILET PAPER , reads the sign on the wall, but someone will, guaranteed.
“It’s by the kitchen,” Juliet says at last.
“Thank you, dear.”
Backing down the metal ladder, Juliet leans and places her face upon the pillow, brushing it lightly with her nose. She inhales Charlotte.
She finds Keith on the porch, where he is alone — temporarily. Certain delegates make a beeline for children; others are oblivious to their existence. All possess a similar look upon entering their new tropical reality, regardless of sex or age: dazed, sweat beading above upper lips, swamped armpits, furry legs, socks with sandals, insistent bellies beneath green T-shirts.
Now one approaches and bends to asks the usual questions, which the children consider scarcely worthy of reply. How old are you? Do you go to school? Do you speak Spanish?
Juliet fakes a Nicaraguan accent; she has practised while gazing into the bathroom mirror at home. Keith doesn’t need to fake anything: his Spanish is streetwise and quick and impresses the man, whom the children nickname Old Yeller, after his teeth.
Few of the delegates speak Spanish. They are in the country
Something special for your supper, the cook promises. That means the Friesen children will eat at the guesthouse tonight, and not in a restaurant or around their own kitchen table, where sometimes they share meals with their mother and their father, though more often, lately, with their mother only.
———
Gloria is glad to get out of the house. She makes Juliet and Keith wash their faces and she scrubs Emmanuel’s until he howls (Juliet thinks there is some correlation between howling and cleanliness, some invisible rule that her mother follows: only through misery shalt thou be made clean). Gloria herself is wearing lipstick and mascara. Juliet watches her in the bathroom mirror.
“There,” says Gloria to her reflection, and smacks her lips together.
The rain has stopped and the air sticks to the skin. Gloria hustles the children down the sidewalk to the guesthouse, only to find they’ve arrived early. Supper is not ready. The guesthouse has not expanded to accept the fourteen newcomers and their oversized luggage; it has contracted, and the atmosphere tingles with nerves and confusion and mile-long questions.
Grown-ups crowd the porch, clutching plastic cups of water or — for the braver among them — of tiste .
Juliet swims like a fish into the volunteers’ bedroom: empty. She climbs up to Charlotte’s bunk and sits on the mattress in the dark. Snooping . If she were caught, that’s what it would be called. She sniffs the candles, digs her forearms into the pillow and bumps against the little black book. Her fingers travel inside its pages, exposing pencilled naked bodies in parts and whole, carefully drawn bones and muscles, and scattered words that come apart at the seams: What if freedom calls for anger and not love? Transpose your life. Sunday drive. Here is the skyline; here is the shore; my body and yours, nothing more. Don’t think, create.
Juliet startles as someone bumps into the room in error. Blinking up at her from the doorway: “Is this the bathroom?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Perhaps the person cannot see that Juliet is a child; perhaps her eyes have not adjusted to the dim. The woman looks half-blind behind owlish glasses, and terrified, as if a bomb might fall from the sky upon her head at any moment. She is waiting for Juliet to give her some direction. She is one of the fourteen newcomers: protestors from Ohio, all of them milling about, stumbling over backpacks and guitar cases, and quite shocked to discover only one toilet in the house.
DO NOT FLUSH TOILET PAPER , reads the sign on the wall, but someone will, guaranteed.
“It’s by the kitchen,” Juliet says at last.
“Thank you, dear.”
Backing down the metal ladder, Juliet leans and places her face upon the pillow, brushing it lightly with her nose. She inhales Charlotte.
She finds Keith on the porch, where he is alone — temporarily. Certain delegates make a beeline for children; others are oblivious to their existence. All possess a similar look upon entering their new tropical reality, regardless of sex or age: dazed, sweat beading above upper lips, swamped armpits, furry legs, socks with sandals, insistent bellies beneath green T-shirts.
Now one approaches and bends to asks the usual questions, which the children consider scarcely worthy of reply. How old are you? Do you go to school? Do you speak Spanish?
Juliet fakes a Nicaraguan accent; she has practised while gazing into the bathroom mirror at home. Keith doesn’t need to fake anything: his Spanish is streetwise and quick and impresses the man, whom the children nickname Old Yeller, after his teeth.
Few of the delegates speak Spanish. They are in the country
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