The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,21

this one. I would say, it looks funny. Should the skin look like that? All white like that? Don’t judge a book by its cover, ma’am, and he would laugh politely, this here is the arctic white and I might say it’s finer than the rest of them. Oh, really? Why? Well, first you’ve got less fuzz, he’d say, and I’d acknowledge this with a huh and hand on my hip. They’re just about the sweetest peach you’ll get, but they ripen more quickly, so you eat these guys up once you get home, ma’am.

I force myself to remember, now lying on my side: freestone: the flesh falls away from the pit when you bite into it. Clingstone: it refuses to.

Inevitably my peach facts run out and I lie awake, feeling unsettled, knowing that there’s so much I’m forgetting. I get up.

In the bathroom I undress and examine myself. I arrange myself horizontally in the bathtub, and I turn the shower on and wrap my arms around myself, feel the water from its great height of origin. I try, this time, to remember nothing at all.

The first time we touched each other, I was seven, Jackson eight. My father, in a particularly good mood, had offered to take the boys off Julia’s hands, take all of us to a swimming spot he knew of. She hated my father, or maintained that she did for a large chunk of my childhood, but there was nothing Julia valued more than a moment away from the physical and psychic tugs that issued from her sons’ mouths day in and day out. (T is for Tired, read the alphabet book James would be assigned to write in school that year. If we are bad Mom gets tired. It was accompanied by a drawing of Julia, her hair in curlicues branching in every direction, her eyes the X’s that signified dead, and three pink triangles that represented a bathrobe. In a moment of black humor she taped it to her bedroom door, and we heard her and a girlfriend cackling about it late one night in the kitchen.)

School had started, but the weather had not changed: an unbearable incongruity. In protest, I wore my blue bathing suit, which had begun to pill around the crotch, underneath the brand-new denim and gingham blouses my father had bought me for the first week of classes. The first days, as always, seemed like a sort of play: surely they were not asking us to add and subtract numbers when just days before we had reigned the uneven sidewalks with games that lasted after dark. My father was nothing if not indulgent, and sensing this, put us in his large boat-sized car with bouncy seats the Sunday before the second week began.

We made our way up the winding hills of Marin County, me sticking my head out the window pretending I was a happy golden Labrador, my father singing along to radio. Buddy Holly. Every day, it’s a-gettin’ closer: I could tell he loved that song, and had for a long time. James sang it: Everyone says go ahead and catch her, instead of ask her, as if it were a ballad of capture the flag.

We had to park on the edge of the road, which sat essentially on a cliff, and get out of the slightly tilted car on the side of traffic. We all chained hands and pretended not to be scared of the cars whizzing by, appearing from around the curves. The path down was sometimes uneven and at those points my father reminded us: “Three points of contact.” That meant have at least one hand and two feet, or two hands and one foot, on the ground or a steady rock or whatever you can find. This phrase still comes to me, sometimes, my father’s voice didactic but soothing. Three points of contact.

They were called the inkwells, the pools of water that flowed into ones below them by miniature waterfalls. We took turns jumping off the rocks into the deeper pools, marveling at being suspended, if briefly, in the air above the water. James played a secret game with himself up by the trees, his lips pursed and spitting sometimes as a result of dramatic sound effects. My father, treading water, placed his hands on the small of our backs while we floated and looked up at the early September sky: it was better, somehow, than our beloved August’s and July’s had been. I remember