(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
The life in New Hampshire was the opposite of how they lived in New York. The house was dark, a bit musty,full of primitive, mismatched furniture. There were exposed pipes in the bathrooms, wires stapled over doorsills, nails protruding from beams. On the walls were clusters of local butter flies, mounted and framed, a map of the region on a white paper, photographs of the family at the lake over the years. Checkered cotton curtains hung in the windows on thin white rods. Instead of staying with Gerald and Lydia, he and Maxine slept in an unheated cabin down a path from the main house. It was like a cell in which Maxine played when she was a girl. There was a small chest of drawers, a crude night table between two twin beds, a lamp with a plaid paper shade, two wooden chests in which extra quilts are stored. The beds were covered with ancient electric blankets. In the corner was a device whose hum was supposed to keep the bats away. There were insect carcasses everywhere. "Its a sort of like being at a camp," Maxine said as they unpacked their things, but Gogol had never been to a camp, and though he was only three hours away from his parents' house, this was an unknown world to him, a kind of holiday he'd never been on.
During the days Gogol sat with Maxine's family on a thin strip of beach, looking out onto the glittering jade lake, surrounded by other homes. He did as the family did, sitting on a folding chair, a cotton cap on his head, applying sunblock at intervals to his arms, reading, falling asleep after barely a page. He swam when his shoulders grow too warm. Occasionally they were joined by Maxine's grandparents, Hank and Edith, who lived on the lake several houses away. Hank, a retired professor of classical archaeology, always brought a small volume of Greek poetry to read, his long sun-spotted fingers curling over the tops of the pages. At some point he used to get up,laboriously removing his shoes and socks, and walked calf-deep into the water, regarding the surroundings with his hands on his hips, his chin thrust pridefully into the air . Edith was small and thin, proportioned like a girl, her white hair cut in a bob and her face deeply wrinkled. They had traveled a bit of the world together, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Iran. "We never got as far as India," Edith told him. "We would certainly have loved to have seen that."
All day he and Maxine walked about the property barefoot in their bathing suits. Gogol went for runs around the lake with Gerald. Half around the lake was a small private graveyard where the members of the Ratliff family lie buried, where Gerald and Gogol always stopped to catch their breath. Where Maxine would be buried one day. Gerald spent most of his time in his vegetable garden, where he used to carefully cultivate of lettuce and herbs. One day, Gogol and Maxine swam over to Hank and Edith's for lunch, for egg salad sandwiches and canned tomato soup. Some nights, when it was too warm in the cabin, he and Maxine took a flash light and walked to the lake in their pajamas to go skinny-dipping. They swam in the dark water, under the moonlight, out to the neighbor dock. The unfamiliar sensation of the water surrounding his unclothed body aroused Gogol, and when they came back to the shore they made love on the grass that was wet from their bodies. He looked up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which held more stars than he ever had seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems.
No comments:
Post a Comment