Portable Childhoods Read online

  “We really should have salads,” her mother says, scanning the menu of the hotel restaurant. “But your dad says it’s not safe to eat anything raw down here, even in the hotel. I think I’ll try the grilled chicken. Nosotros no quiermos, gracias,” she says to the waiter, waving the basket of chips away.

  Kritter sinks down into her chair and doesn’t look at the waiter. Her mother has been learning Spanish from cassettes, playing them on the tape deck in the station wagon. After two months she sounds exactly like the woman on the tape—Bweh-noz Dee-ahz. She says when you travel you should make an effort to fit in. She frowns at the people at the bar who order their drinks in fractured Spanglish, “Uno more Margarita, okay?” and tells Kritter they are Ugly Americans. But Kritter is more embarrassed by her mother’s textbook Spanish. Her consonants are too precise; she sounds like she is reciting a lesson instead of talking to real people.

  After they have ordered, her mother pulls a guidebook out of her book bag. “While we’re waiting for our food, why don’t you show us what you saw in the lagoon.” She puts the book in the middle of the table.

  Kritter makes no move to pick it up. “Just fish and stuff,” she shrugs, but inwardly her stomach squirms. She doesn’t want to talk about the lagoon.

  “You want to learn about what you’re seeing, don’t you, Krissy?”

  Her mother says it in a soft voice, but it’s a loaded question. If Kritter says anything but yes, lunch—maybe even the rest of the afternoon—will become an unspoken lecture. She sighs wordlessly and opens the book.

  As she turns the pages, pretending to look for something familiar, she stops at random and points out interesting-looking fish and shells. “What’s that one?” Beth Ann asks, and her mother smiles and puts her arm around the younger girl’s shoulder. They pull the book between them and read the text out loud. Kritter looks away.

  “Krissy, look! This one looks just like your bathing suit,” Beth Ann says excitedly. “I wish I could see one of those!”

  Kritter turns and is startled by a full-page photo of one of the pink and blue-green fish that played tag. She reaches to turn the page, quickly, before her fish can be identified and captured. Her mother puts a red-nailed hand down and keeps the page open.

  “It’s called a parrotfish. Scarus guacamaia.” She pronounces the Latin name in the same precise, textbook tones. “Such pretty colors. And, look, it has an overbite.”

  Kritter feels her face flush and waits, emotionally braced for the inevitable “just like yours,” but her mother says nothing aloud. She just smiles and looks at Kritter, who squirms again, the unspoken words hanging in the air around her like a toxic cloud that dissipates only when the waiter arrives with their food and gives her mother something else to focus on.

  Each day their routine is the same. An hour after breakfast, they all change into their bathing suits. Kritter goes immediately into the lagoon to swim with the parrotfish. Beth Ann plays in the shallow water while their mother watches from the shade of the porch. She doesn’t like to be in the sun, and she never goes into the water, except to wash the sand off her feet. She just sits on a lounge chair in her bathing suit with her iced tea and her book. Kritter wonders why she would want to come all the way to a resort like this to do the same things she does at home.

  After lunch, her mother always announces “Es el tiempo por una siesta.” She seems to think this is a wonderful custom. Kritter hates it. She isn’t tired, but she isn’t allowed to go swimming alone or explore the island by herself. Until her mother gets up from “resting her eyes,” Kritter is trapped on the porch of the bungalow, alone except for Travels with Charley.

  On the fourth afternoon, she lays her groundwork all through lunch—pretending to be interested in the history of some historic church on the island that her mother wants to go see. Being a good girl. When the check has been signed and they are gathering up their things, she makes her move.

  “Mom, while you’re taking your—siesta—is it okay if I stay up here by the pool and read?”

  Her mother looks surprised. “You don’t want to come back to the bungalow with us?”

  “I, uh, I thought I’d swim some laps in the pool. For the exercise?” She doesn’t have any intention of swimming laps, but she thinks it’s a nice touch. Her mother approves of exercise. Especially for Kritter.

  “Oh, Krissy, that’s a wonderful idea!”

  The response is a little too enthusiastic for Kritter’s comfort, but it’s a Yes. They’ll meet back at the bungalow at 3:30. Her mother hands her three two-peso coins so that she can get a soda from the bar if it gets too hot. “Diet Coke, remember,” she says. Una cola dietetica. It sounds even more like a punishment in Spanish.

  Kritter nods dutifully at every instruction, and can hardly contain her excitement. When her mother and Beth Ann leave, she walks over to the pool, but it is full of the bikini-girls and their boyfriends. She could swim and ignore them, but they will ignore her first and she is not in the mood for that.

  She hesitates for a few minutes, then goes over to the pool bar and orders a Coke—a regular Coke—and a basket of chips, because her mother isn’t here. She runs the Spanish words together just a little, trying to match the accent and the cadence of the waiters.

  The bartender smiles and nods. “Cinco pesos, por favor.”

  She hands him the three coins, and when he proffers the single peso in change, she waves her hand in a gesture she has seen her mother make. It is the first time she has ever tipped anyone, and she feels incredibly sophisticated and worldly.

  Miguel, the towel boy who is sometimes a waiter, gives her a second towel, and she lays it down on one of the white plastic lounge chairs, adjusting the back so she can sit up and look out over the ocean. The other towel she drapes over her body. From her beach bag she pulls the pair of leopard-spotted sunglasses that she bought at Mitchell’s Drugs back home the week before. Her mother forbid her to pack them because they were cheap and tacky. Kritter puts them on and feels like a grown-up.

  The hotel and the pool terrace are built on top of a sheer bluff. One side overlooks a string of bungalows on a wide, white sand beach, the other the enclosed oval of the lagoon. There is a huge rock formation, an irregular, flat triangle out in the ocean, a short distance from the mouth of the lagoon, but invisible from their beach. With her father’s binoculars Kritter can see that the rock is studded with sea lions sleeping in the afternoon sun. As she watches, one of them slides into the water, a brown animal sleek as an oiled puppy.

  She wishes she could show them to Annie. They would laugh and talk with accents, and tell each other that it’s a boring little island, but they are only here for a few days while their ship is being repaired. Taking on supplies before moving on to Rangoon. Kritter has no idea where Rangoon is, but she likes the sound of it. She says it quietly, but out loud: “We’re sailing for Rangoon at the end of the week.”

  Their ship is sleek and white, with blue canvas tarps and brass fittings. She and Annie will pat the sea lions on their way out to sea, and by nightfall they will be far from Diet Cokes and impending orthodontists. They have a crew to do the complicated parts of sailing, of course, but they work the lines themselves. Kritter wears a black Speedo and a pair of cutoffs so soft and faded they are barely blue anymore. She is tan and lean, and her straight brown hair has turned golden in the sun. Windblown and tousled. It is cut very short because she cannot be bothered.

  The sun is hot, and they often stop in mid-afternoon to swim, then tell each other stories until the sun sets red and flaming at the horizon. The crew has names like Pete and One-Eyed Sal and Old Rusty. They call her Cap’n.

  When the clock at the bar says 3:30, Cap’n throws her beach bag over her shoulder, salutes the bewildered Miguel, and sets off down the path to the lagoon, whistling a sea chantey—actually the theme from Gilligan’s Island—and walking with a bit of a pirate swagger.

  She is thinking about monkeys and coconuts and rumors of long-buried treasur
e, so she is halfway across the sand before she sees her mother in front of the porch. The red eye of the camera winks in the tropical sunlight. Cap’n tightens her grip on the bag and continues her march across the sand.

  When she is ten feet from the bungalow, the winking eye goes dark and her mother lowers the camera with an audible sigh. “Kristine? Do you have to walk that way? You look like a duck. Go back and start over, by the stairs. Daddy will splice this part out later.”

  Cap’n vanishes. Kritter stands motionless, her face burning with embarrassment, her feet burning on the hot sand.

  “C’mon, Krissy,” her mother coaxes. “I bet you’ll be glad when we watch the movies later.”

  It is not a good bet. Kritter knows that she will never sit in front of the screen without also seeing this unfilmed scene. After a minute she drops her beach bag and walks woodenly over to the stairs, then woodenly back.

  “That was much better, honey,” her mother says encouragingly. “Let’s try it one more time, okay?”

  Kritter will not be in her mother’s movie. At the end of her second promenade, she puts on her snorkeling gear and escapes into the water without another word.

  When she reaches the rocks by the mouth of the lagoon, she hesitates, then with a defiant series of kicks, tries to swim through the opening, toward the rock with the sea lions. The ocean is choppy. She struggles again and again, but each time the breaking waves buffet her back into the lagoon.

  She is treading water, catching her breath, the stinging salt water trickling into her mouth from around the rubber seal of the snorkel, when she feels something bump her from behind. Another bump, and then another. She turns and the cartoon bodies of the parrotfish shimmer all around her, playing tag. Kritter reaches out and finally touches one of the cool, firm bodies.

  “You’re it,” she thinks, and then her pale white arms begin to pulse with color. She watches in amazement as her hands wisp and filigree, fanning out to fins. Her legs and feet become a broad, translucent tail. She is delighted to feel her soft body thicken and grow compact, muscular and sturdy. The pastel flowers of the hideous bathing suit dissolve into a delicate rainbow of iridescent pink and turquoise scales.

  When Kritter is ready, the lead parrotfish motions, and the whole school turns as one and swims below the crashing waves. Beneath the surface, the water is calmer, and the school leaves the lagoon easily. The fish that is Kritter flexes her powerful, streamlined body and dives deep, breathing easily through the slits above her fins.

  They travel through a rocky crevasse studded with starfish and waving lavender anemones, blue crabs scuttling into crevices, and rich red-shelled abalone clinging to rock faces. Everything is in constant, gentle motion. They dive deeper and the sunlight becomes a bright haze far above them. As the world loses color and form and becomes light and shadow, Kritter and her new friends turn to follow the current, swimming away toward Rangoon.

  Möbius, Stripped of a Muse

  TOM O'HARA WATCHED the light wink out in the window of the tenement apartment, then mopped his chiseled brow and walked cautiously up to the old brownstone stoop. He lit a match in front of the row of tarnished brass mailboxes.

  Janet Abramowitz. Apartment 4-D.

  He swore softly. Twelve years of searching for the double-crossing redhead who’d sent his best friend to the chair, and she’d been here all along. Just a few blocks away from where it had all gone so tragically wrong.

  He unholstered his .45 automatic, and stepped into the dank hallway. He heard the click a fraction of a second before he dove for the floor. The slug tore into the plaster an inch from where his head had been.

  “Drop the gun, Tom,” said a sultry voice from the darkness above. “Drop it now and come up nice and slow. I’ve been waiting for this a long time.”

  He dropped the .45, heard it clatter on the stairs. The noise masked the rustle of fabric as he eased the .38-special out of his waistband.

  “Why’d you do it, Janet?” he asked as he thumbed the safety off. “The night you and Lucky– ”

  “Be a good boy, and I’ll tell you,” she said. “Right before you die. But first you’ve got to—”

  Got to what? Damnit, John Cameron thought. He stared at the blinking lights of his Write-O-Matic 3000. How the hell was he going to get O’Hara out of this one? Can’t kill him off—the bastard—or Janet, either. Two more books in the series. He’d backed himself into a corner.

  Frowning, he pulled the lever marked “tyPe Pages,” and walked into the galley as the keys began to clatter.

  “Beer,” he said to the vid screen. “Space City Amber.”

  The ship’s sensor blinked once and a cold bottle of beer appeared in the steel receptacle, beads of condensation forming on its brown plexi surface.

  “Peanuts?” asked the ship.

  “Not today, thanks.” Cameron snapped his fingers at the sensor panel and the screen went blank.

  John Cameron took a long swig of his beer as he walked over to the perspex slit in the curved metal wall of his module. He looked out at the black, star-studded sky. Two days until the ship was in range for his transmission to Earth, and he still didn’t have an ending. The trip had seemed like such an opportunity, in the beginning. The First Novelist in Space. What publicity there had been. The books had sold millions, and he had enough credits to live like a king when he got back to Earth. If he got back to Earth. Two more years. He never should have agreed to a four-book contract.

  Would he last another 730 more days in this glorified tin can? He wasn’t sure. Okay, he had everything he’d ever desired—any meal, any drink, any movie—all at the flick of a switch. But he couldn’t think of anything he really wanted, anymore. Not a thing. Zero. Zilch. Zipola. Nothing much, really.

  “Nothing?” said Norman Hays out loud. “Great. I’ve created a future full of nothing.” He sighed, ripped the page out of his typewriter, crumpling it and tossing it in the vicinity of his wastebasket. The ink from the carbon paper stained his fingers like the dark shadow he felt hanging over him.

  John Cameron, Galactic Scribe was just not working out. It was original, a new idea. None of the hacks at Ripping Yarns of Science or Cosmic Thrills had done a heroic space writer. They were still churning out potboilers about Captain Prime, and Dr. Logic and the Tenderizer. Sure, they were selling. But John Cameron was his ticket out of the pulps and into the big time. Two cents a word. Maybe even three? Three cents and 1938 would be a great year.

  Norman climbed out onto his fire escape and leaned against the brick wall. He lit a Lucky Strike, exhaling the blue smoke into the warm night air. Across the river, the lights of New York twinkled like jewels, and high overhead he could hear the faint drone of motors as a zeppelin moved slowly through the sky on its way to Lakehurst.

  “Tsk. Lakehurst? That simply screams cliché,” said Professor Atwood, looking up from the thin sheaf of manuscript pages. “Don’t tell me. Don’t even tell me. It’s the Hindenburg, right?”

  Elizabeth Norris bit her lip, then nodded.

  “Trite. Entirely predictable.” He dismissed the pages with a wave of his manicured hand. “Not your best work, Elizabeth.”

  “You haven’t given it a chance,” she said. “Just read a little farther. See, in this universe, it’s not really the Hindenburg. It’s an alien spaceship, and it’s drawn to Earth when it intercepts Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast, which it interprets as an SOS from another ship in its fleet. So instead of exploding, when it docks in New Jersey, battle robots come pouring out. They look like cats, except with tentacles, and they have kind of ray-gun eyes that hypnotize Earth people into becoming their slaves, so that they can—”

  “Stop,” Atwood said. “Just stop. This is supposed to be a creative literature class. There are no rocket ships in literature, Elizabeth. If you want a passing grade, you’re going to have to try and salvage something readable out of this.” He licked his thumb and leafed quickly through the pages.

  “Now here�
�s a promising bit. Where your protagonist is trying to decide whether to pawn his typewriter to buy his aged mother some cheese. It’s not much, but it has the potential for a poignant little character sketch. Have you read the sketch chapter in my book, Prose for the Heartstrings?”

  Elizabeth shook her head.

  “Ah, well, you must. It’s out of print, sadly, but I can lend you one of my copies. I only live a few blocks away. You could come over this evening. Say around seven?” He smiled at her suggestively.

  “Oh, please. Not the smile.” Marcia Browne made a face and threw the manuscript of “Writers Writing, Always” back onto the slush pile. Why would anyone in their right mind think there was a market for stories like that? She hadn’t read anything original all week, and Dan MacDaring, her boss, and the editor of Romantic Quarks, was expecting her in his office at four sharp. She had to find something to impress him. Marcia had ambitions. She was going to be an editor herself someday. Someday soon. Really soon.

  Janet Abramowitz typed the word “soon” again then hit Delete and turned out her light. She stared out the tenement window. In the darkness four stories below, she saw the brief, bright flare of someone lighting a match. She watched the afterimage for a moment, then smiled and picked the revolver up off her bookshelf. She walked to the doorway of Apartment 4-D and waited, plotting a better future.

  Time Gypsy

  Friday, February 10, 2006. 5:00 p.m.

  As soon as I walk in the door, my officemate Ted starts in on me. Again. “What do you know about radiation equilibrium?” he asks.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “That figures.” He holds up a faded green volume. “I just found this insanely great article by Chandrasekhar in the ’45 Astrophysical Journal. And get this—when I go to check it out, the librarian tells me I’m the first person to take it off the shelf since 1955. Can you believe that? Nobody reads anymore.” He opens the book again. “Oh, by the way, Chambers was here looking for you.”