668: She hesitated . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 10 continues
SHE HESITATED, pacing up and down in the gravel at the edge of the roadway, and she suffered a failure of will. She decided not to bring the matter up, not to upset the harmony of a family evening, not to risk being turned down. Dejectedly, she started up the plank walkway that led from the edge of the road to the front door. The planks bent and rebounded as she walked along them, as they always did, and the bouncing buoyed her spirits.
The planks led from the edge of the road to the front door, but no one ever used the front door—in fact, it had been bolted shut for years, and in the living room, furniture stood in front of it, making it more wall than door, so no one could go in that way. Instead, Ariane walked along the porch that wrapped around the house to the back door (where I used to stand on those days when I would come over to watch television with her, after school, when I was eleven, stand with my little heart beating, trying to calm myself before knocking, hoping that she would be at home, and that she would be alone).
The sky was overcast now, and the sun had begun to set. In the gray light, this familiar setting, her family home, seemed featureless and dull, a place to escape, but down the river she could see, gleaming white and inviting against the livid sky, the outline of the resort motel, the place to be, the place to go, the place to grow. She stamped her foot once with rediscovered determination, and she burst through the back door, already speaking.
“I got a job at the new motel,” she said. “Resort. The new resort. The Seagull’s Rest—Starfish Key—Jellyfish Shallows—who knows? They haven’t named the place yet. But whatever they call it I’m going to be working there.”
She stamped her foot once and dropped into a chair at the kitchen table, exhausted from the effort of this declaration.
Her father didn’t look up from his work. He was standing at the chopping block in the kitchen, repairing one of his clam tongs, trying to straighten the steel fingers by whacking them with the backside of a hatchet.
“We’ll see about that,” he said, taking a vicious swing at the thing.
“Daaaddy,” she said.
Her mother was skinning eels at the kitchen sink. She shook her head, slashed an eel just behind its head, thrust her fingers into the cut she’d made, and with a single mighty rip, peeled the skin from the entire length of the eel’s body. There was no mistaking her meaning.
“Aw, Ma,” said Ariane.
Big Ernie was loading charcoal into the eel smoker, out back on the rear porch. He said something that sounded like “Huh, huh, huh.”
“You shut up, Ernie,” said Ariane.
“That’s a motel, isn’t it?” said Little Ernie. He was holding the clam tongs in his enormous hands while Mr. Lodkochnikov smote them with his hatchet.
“Yes, it is,” she said, with defiance in her voice.
“What are you going to be working at?” he asked. He snorted and laughed and Mr. Lodkochnikov swatted him on the ear.
“I’m not sure,” said Ariane, “but I hope—I think—I could be the hostess in the dining room.”
“Or the mattress tester,” said Little Ernie.
Ariane swatted him herself this time.
[to be continued]
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