Sweet Talk Read Online Free Page B

watched him through the doorway. Often he looked away from the book and gazed toward the window. He would strike a match and let it burn to his thumb and fingertip, then wave it out. He would raise the glass but not drink from it. I think he must have imagined himself to be in the Arctic during those moments, a warrior tracking across the ice for bear or seal. Sometimes he was waiting for me to join him. He wanted to tell me about the techniques the Eskimos had developed for survival, the way they stitched up skins to make them watertight vessels. Hebecame obsessive on the subject of meat. The Eskimo diet was nearly all protein. “Eat meat,” he said. Two professors at Columbia had tested the value of the Eskimo diet by eating nothing but caribou for a year and claimed they were healthier at the end of the experiment than they had been before.
    Later, when I went to college, he developed the habit of calling me long distance when my mother and grandmother had gone to bed and he was alone downstairs with a drink. “Are you getting enough protein?” he asked me once at three in the morning. It was against dorm rules to put through calls after midnight except in cases of emergency, but his deep, commanding voice was so authoritative (“This is Gemma Jackson’s father, and I must speak with her immediately”) that it was for some time believed on my corridor that the people in my family were either accident-prone or suffering from long terminal illnesses.
    He died the summer I received my master’s degree. I had accepted a teaching position at a high school in Chicago, and I went home for a month before school began. He was overweight and short of breath. He drank too much, smoked too many cigarettes. The doctor told him to stop, my mother told him, my grandmother told him.
    My grandmother was upstairs watching television and my mother and I were sitting on the front porch.He was asleep in the green chair, with a book in his lap. I left the porch to go to the kitchen to make a sandwich, and as I passed by the chair I heard him say, “Ahhhh. Ahhhhh.” I saw his fist rise to his chest. I saw his eyes open and dilate in the lamplight. I knelt beside him.
    “Are you okay?” I said. “Are you dreaming?”
    We buried him in a small cemetery near the farm where he was born. In the eulogy he was remembered for having survived the first wave of the invasion of Normandy. He was admired for having been the proprietor of a chain of excellent hardware stores.
    “He didn’t have to do this,” my mother said after the funeral. “He did this to himself.”
    “He was a good man,” said my grandmother. “He put a nice roof over our heads. He sent us to Europe twice.”
    Afterward I went alone to the cemetery. I knelt beside the heaps of wilting flowers—mostly roses and gladiolus, and one wreath of red, white, and blue carnations. Above me, the maple pods spun through the sunlight like wings, and in the distance the corn trumpeted green across the hillsides. I touched the loose black soil at the edge of the flowers. Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog. I could remember the beginning of the alphabet, up through Mike and Nan. I could remember the end. X-ray, Yoke, Zebra. I was his eldest child, and he taught me what he knew. I wept then, butnot because he had gone back to Ohio to read about the Eskimos and sell the artifacts of civilized life to homeowners and builders. I wept because when I was twelve years old I had stood on a snowy riverbank as he became a shadow on the ice, and waited to see whether he would slip between the cracking floes into the water.

Sweet Talk

    S ometimes Sam and I loved each other more when we were angry. “Day,” I called him, using the surname instead of Sam. “Day, Day, Day!” It drummed against the walls of the apartment like a distress signal.
    “Ah, my beautiful lovebird,” he said, “My sugar-sweet bride.”
    For weeks I had been going through the trash trying to find out whether he had other