Body Surfing by Anita Shreve Page A

before she does.
    Her smile is instantaneous. Her eyes peer inward, seeing only the person at the other end of the line. She laughs, asks a question, seems reluctant to say good-bye. She is, Sydney discovers, remarkably gifted at extending a conversation. Sydney pretends to be examining a callus on her foot. See you soon, she hears the matriarch croon. Mrs. Edwards waits a second longer in case the person at the other end has something more to say. Finally, she hangs up the phone and tightens the sash about her robe. She looks in Sydney's direction.
    "That was Jeff," she says with immense satisfaction. "Got home fine."
    In the back lot of the row house in Troy, old vegetation. Lilac and hosta and walnut. Violets and mulberry and hydrangea. Everything wild and unkempt, nothing trimmed or neat. Sydney's mother set out milk bottles with the first roses of the season on the sill in the kitchen--ancient pink rugosa, flat-petaled and treacherously thorned.
    Red plaid wallpaper over the sink. Yellow curtains at the windows. Where did that ocher Bakelite clock go, the one with the frayed cord? Sydney remembers the brown Norge fridge; the day her mother had the washer and dryer installed. The cellar floor was still dirt. A week later, her mother was carrying a basket of laundry to the washer and saw a rat as big as a small dog. Sydney's mother cornered it and beat it to death while Sydney watched. An act of frenzy and violence that left Sydney speechless for hours.
    Sydney remembers crumbling plaster walls. The narrow floorboards, unvarnished and nearly black, that ran the length of the long hallway. Linoleum in the kitchen. There were two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom, and, at the end of the hallway, the kitchen. In Sydney's room, she had a bed, a desk, and a wall of cupboards. She had shimmering purple curtains and a pink duvet. She had a plastic bedside table with drawers in which she put her nail polish, her diary, scribbled notes from friends, and recent birthday cards. As she climbed up the cement stoop each day after school and made her way to her bedroom, it seemed to her that she had swum briefly through the past and emerged safely into the present.
    When Sydney was thirteen, she came home from school one afternoon to find the apartment unusually tidy. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for her. She asked Sydney to sit down.
    "Did you clean up?" Sydney asked, glancing at the bare shelves.
    "Sort of," her mother answered.
    Her mother announced that Sydney and she were leaving, that they were going to live in a real house in Massachusetts. Her mother made it sound like fun. Sydney would have two homes to live in, two sets of friends, two rooms of her own. She would go back and forth from Massachusetts to New York.
    What her mother didn't say was that she was fed up with the brown Norge and the cement stoop, with having to wait for her husband to fulfill his artistic promise. She didn't say that she had met another man. She didn't say that she hadn't told Sydney's father yet.
    That night, after Sydney and her mother moved into the Massachusetts house with its dishwasher and microwave and spiffy new laundry room, the telephone rang. Sydney picked it up and listened. Her father was crying.
    This is how Sydney thinks of her parents now: a border runs up from Manhattan; the topography is clear but for two stick figures, one on the left side, one on the right.
    Sydney makes the trip into Portsmouth on Monday morning and returns with an easel, a sketch pad, canvases, drawing pencils, oil paints, and two books, one on how to draw, one on how to paint. Mr. Edwards tries to give her money to pay for these supplies, but Sydney explains to him that this is her experiment.
    Later that evening, Sydney sees Mr. Edwards enter Julie's room. When he emerges, pink-eyed, he fumbles for his handkerchief in his pocket. Sydney notes that he visited Julie while Mrs. Edwards was at a cocktail party. Mr. Edwards was invited as