The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,24
send you away for something as silly as this?” she asks, pointing to my belly.
She has a good point, so I shut up. For a few minutes it feels like we are standing on opposite banks of the same river.
After a while, almost as if she is reading my mind, Dumpling asks in a quiet whisper, “Remember the flood?”
The flood, I think, and of course I remember it. It was years ago, but I can still hear the sound of the river—too close, too fast. The skiff picking us up on the doorstep of Gran’s house, the sound of the outboard. The smell of fuel. I remember seeing a dead baby moose float past. You can’t unsee something like that once you’ve seen it, no matter how hard you try. It had deep brown eyes and huge paintbrush lashes, just like Selma’s.
Less than an hour ago, George said Selma’s eyes reminded him of a seal, and now I’m comparing them to a moose. I would laugh if it didn’t make me suddenly miss her.
Selma, who had been so stoic about getting shots with a humongous needle during the flood. It had impressed me. I wanted her as a friend because she was unlike anyone I’d ever met. But I don’t say any of this to Dumpling when she asks if I remember the flood. I just say, “Sort of.”
Dumpling smiles. But she’s already back there, I can tell. And when she speaks again I can hear the sound of the river in her voice.
It’s not civilized for a river to jump its banks. It’s like having a friend turn on you, and I see Ray’s face as I think this. I rub my belly and think about how clueless I’ve been about things like babies and floods, and all the other ways the world might turn uncivilized when you least expect it.
“My dad put us all in the skiff,” Dumpling is saying. “We were headed to the high school like everyone else, but there wasn’t room for all of us in one boat. So my mom stayed behind. I waved to her as we pulled out and watched her get smaller and smaller, like a tiny planet that was suddenly a million miles away.”
This is the most I’ve ever heard Dumpling say at one time.
“All kinds of things floated past us: gas jugs, rubber boots, old tires. There was an entire refrigerator with its door swung open, spilling out ketchup and mustard and jars of pickles right next to the library, when it was in that old cabin on First Avenue. Do you remember that?”
I do, but I’m thinking about the refrigerator with all of its secrets spilled out for the world to see, like the hookers who used to flash little bits of themselves just one block away. We used to go to the log cabin library on First Avenue, and like the flood, sometimes the hookers jumped their banks and strolled too far south, and we would catch a glimpse of a fishnet stocking, or the flash of a feather boa peeking out from under a parka.
“Then we passed a red silk slip, stuck in a fence.”
Wait. I remember this, too. “We laughed at that,” I tell her. “All of us. Gran got so mad, I thought she was going to smack us.”
“Really?” Dumpling says. “You remember it?”
I nod, wondering who it might have belonged to and what had happened to her. Was it one of the Second Avenue hookers? They had never seemed like real people when we were kids, just part of the scenery. Little girls stayed on First Avenue at the library, with our picture books and quiet voices, and the hookers and drunks stayed on Second, like a movie that stayed on a screen; everyone in their places.
I can see this clearly now, from where we sit on the steps of the little white church. If you don’t follow the rules—even one single time—there might be floods and earthquakes, or worse.
“I thought it was so fancy,” Dumpling is saying, “I pointed it out to my dad and he got this huge grin. ‘Your mother would look like a beautiful salmon in that,’ he said. My dad loves salmon.” She smiles as if the memory is a peppermint stick and she’s licking it, slowly savoring every bit.
“He dropped us at the high school and then went back to get my mom. The National Guard told him it was too dangerous—not to go back because the