karenika - books - carry me across the water

Carry Me Across the Water

He sat upright in the tiny desk chair and switched on the light above the shelves. The entire room still looked juvenile. A framed portrait of a stallion by the door. Two large stuffed rabbits on the windowsill. Her trigonometry and civics texts were lined up on the shelves, but next to them was a set of books that she must last have read in the fourth grade. Was she trying to tell him something? Had he not wanted her to grow up? He recalled her child's voice, the determined quietness of her enthusiasm for him, the scrabble of her slippery feet on his thighs as he pushed her through the breaking surf: three children gone. An insistent distance where once he had taken for granted their resolute claims for his affection. On the phone now Harry talked about his progress toward the instrument rating on his aviation license. Jimmy was brief with him, the remnant of his sullenness from long in the past, in truth, he preferred getting Claudine on the line. Hannah remained his daughter, but she was in Northern California, which seemed to be a culture all to itself. She was still single and had never felt comfortable telling him about her boyfriends. He picked up one of her books, The Runaway Mare of Seaside City, and glanced through the pages.

When he looked up, Ginger was at the door in her nightclothes.

"I was just looking at some of our daughter Hannah's things," he said. He made a habit of talking to her now, of telling her everything her was doing. It was the way she herself used to speak to the children, a habit Kleinman had admired wonderingly when the boys were small. "Mommy's making toast," she used to say. "First Mommy puts the bread in he toaster, then Mommy sets it down the toasted bread and butters it -" Kleinman had always envied her patience, her natural instincts were children. Now he found it easy to replicate them. In the interim, some internal drive had wound down inside of him, leaving patience. "I was looking at some of our daughter Hannah's books," he said. "Look at this. Hannah still has her baby books on the shelves."

Ginger entered the room and sat on the bed. Rosa appeared in the doorway, looking sleepy, and Kleinman gestured her back to her room.

"This is the story of the runaway mare of Seaside City," Kleinman said.

Ginger lay back on Hannah's pillows and stared dreamily at the ceiling. "'In a house by the sea, in a town on a curve, lived a mare and a colt, and the man that they served.'" Kleinman wiped his eyes. "'Of the names that one heard, in this town on a curve, were the strangest and longest and oddest of terms.'" He ran his fingers back and forth on her hair. At one point, when the mare leapt the hedges and ran into the sea, Ginger raised her legs and actually scissored them above her, the very gesture Hannah used to make when he used to read her these lines before bed.

Another book that I picked off of the summer reading list. I've meant to read Ethan Canin for quite some time, so I figured Carry Me Across the Water would be a good start. I absolutely loved this novel. I read it in one sitting and enjoyed the fluidity of Canin's writing and the permanence of his characters.