The Whore's Child by Richard Russo Page A

grammar. It’s ‘He don’t have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot.’ Try again.”
    Once I’d said it to her satisfaction, we lugged our suitcases into the lobby, where she confronted a man in a cowboy hat at the desk. “I sure hope you ain’t full up,” she said. “We just come all the way from Missour-uh.”
    Walking down the hall to our room, she chortled. This was one of the best moods ever.
    We spent the afternoon poolside, my mother in a new bathing suit, the only two-piece I’d ever seen her wear. At first we had the deck area to ourselves, but by midafternoon we had company and by four-thirty every chair was occupied, even the ones that didn’t fold down. The pool had a diving board that pretty much guaranteed my happiness. I spent the afternoon showing off, doing flips, cannonballs, jackknives and what I termed crazy dives, which were mostly a matter of making grotesque faces before I hit the water. Still, at the edge of my exhilaration was a remnant of my loneliness, and this afternoon reminded me of another the summer before when we’d visited friends of my mother’s who lived in Virginia and had a swimming pool of their own. My father fancied himself a diver, but that was because he couldn’t see himself. The rest of us could, and he had my mother and her friends in stitches. The upper half of his body worked fine, but every time he entered the water, his legs formed a wide V. Informed that his feet were not together, as he imagined them to be, he kept trying, yet each time the V got even wider. He’d emerge, beaming, and say, “Better, right?” sending the rest of us into convulsions. “I could
feel
my ankles together that time,” he insisted.
    “Then how come we saw them flying apart?” my mother said, still laughing.
    He appealed to me, the only one of the party, he seemed to imply, that he could trust. “What do
you
say? Together or apart?”
    Now, in Tucumcari, I wished I’d lied. I could tell he hated the idea of looking ridiculous. But I’d told the truth, and so, despite my daredevil excitement here in New Mexico, I worried that I, too, was a ridiculous sight, and that perhaps I might grow up to be a man like my father.
    As the deck area filled up, I could see that my mother, who seemed to possess every ounce of grace allotted to our family, was getting looks from men who found excuses to go the long way around the pool, past her chaise longue. She was wearing dark glasses and reading a magazine, but I knew she noticed them as well, and I knew how much it pleased her. Finally I quit the diving board to go over and join her, imagining that this was what my father would want me to do.
    She must’ve had a similar thought, because when I plopped myself down beside her, she looked up and said, “Hi, sweetie. You come over here to protect me?”
    “I’m tired of diving,” I said.
    “I guess this suit’s cut too low,” she said after another man strolled by with a long look. She demonstrated with her index finger what she meant. “I didn’t realize until I put it on.” This sounded insincere even to me.
    Later, as we were gathering up our things to return to our room, the same man came back. He was tall and might have been considered handsome, but his legs and torso were bizarrely pale, in stark contrast to his face, neck and arms. Talk about ridiculous men, I thought.
    “Well, I just got to ask, darlin’,” he said to my mother. “What’s with all the Band-Aids?”
    We were both dotted with small circular Band-Aids on our legs and lower backs, though most of mine had come off in the pool. To my surprise, my mother told him the whole story about the windshield. I thought she made it longer than it had to be, and funnier than she’d thought at the time.
    “It’s a crazy old world, that’s for sure,” the man agreed. “But a good-lookin’ woman like you shouldn’t be traveling alone.”
    “I’m not alone,” my mother said, which I took to be a reference to me.