Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

next morning she’d have on pleated trousers and a tight-waisted blouse, a steel barrette at the back of her head. Sometimes she talked differently, laughed differently, trying out a new voice.

“You all have a purpose in life,” she reminded us when she convoked an evening talk—a recent idea of hers, since communication was important.

As she had for years, she spoke not to middling students but seminal thinkers. My sister had music in her blood. She could pick up an instrument she’d never seen and play a song as if there’d been a cello and a piano in the womb and she’d been waiting all these years to find them again. My brother was a computer genius. He’d befriended a few rural pioneers of the Commodore 64 and scored among the best in the state math exam. Myself, I’d be an archaeologist and learn as many languages as Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered Troy.

Later that night, Dickie disagreed.

“I had lots of dreams too,” he confided, “but that stuff just doesn’t happen to everybody. I wanted to be a pilot. Look where I am now. Besides, you’re lazy.”

I shrugged. Normally I argued with him, but maybe he was right.

“I saw you rebuild that radio the other day,” he said. “You’d be a good mechanic. You should talk to the guy at the junkyard and see if he’d hire you.”

Life was so pathetic that I couldn’t formulate a counter argument. In the new age, everything would be better, but I was getting tired of waiting for Armageddon.

✴

“I HAVE SOMETHING important to say,” my mother told us at our next evening talk. “There’s a custody battle between your father and me. He’s trying to get the right to see you, and I’ve offered reasonable terms. But he’s refused, so I’m asking for full custody and no rights for him. I don’t trust him. He might take you away and run off.”

She very slowly looked at each of us in turn. “How do you feel about this?”

None of us spoke. He seemed unreal now, like something from long ago. When I thought of him, I had the same disorientation that comes after a dream—not sure what day it was, what time. At the borders of my life—in the highway fading to the gray smudge of distance, in the junior high rules that could be broken with a curse or a fight—I sensed him, as if he stood just out of sight.

The next morning, in English class, we had a substitute teacher, a goateed young prep from DC. I was reading a book about the discovery of ancient cities, and after class, I loitered and told him that I planned on being an archaeologist and a writer.

“No way, man,” he said, “don’t do that. Archaeology is boring. A friend of mine’s at the Smithsonian now, but he used to be in the desert. He said it was the most boring thing ever. He was out there four years, living off warm martinis and antidepressants.”

Though I guessed antidepressants might be like antifreeze, I was pretty sure that martinis were a sort of rodent—maybe small ones. I’d read about early North American fur trappers shipping martini pelts back to Europe, and I had no intention of eating such things just so I could be an archaeologist. Besides, I liked writing better.

In the clamor of the cafeteria, I sat with my notebook. I didn’t know how a custody battle worked, so I couldn’t write about it. I’d tried a story about running away, but I had no idea what was out there, what would really happen when I left.

My mother and brother often exchanged fantasy novels or knocked at my door, offering me tomes with half-naked elfin princesses on the cover. Like drug pushers, they kept at it until I got addicted and had to finish each epic series with them. There was always a hero with a purpose, an impending confrontation between good and evil, a world that would be made barren or that would be born again, and this appealed to me. But, above all, you could just set out, and life was a little like my father’s adventures: strangers and random fights and new landscapes.

Mandy, a pretty brunette with feathered hair and a short roller-skating skirt, sat nearby, and I told her I was writing about a wanderer with no identity. She just forced a smile, lifting her cheeks as if squinting into the sun, and then turned away.

At the next table, two boys were talking about sex, one saying that the girl, a cheerleader, had put her feet behind her head. In my notebook, I began to sketch a tiny naked woman even though I’d probably never see one in the flesh. Ever.

After school, while other boys were busy destroying their uninsured knees playing football, I sat outside, penciling more naked women, little graphite Vs between spread legs, tits like Us with a dot in them. The women were pretty realistic, I thought. I was getting excited. Maybe this was my gift.

On my way home, I passed through the makeshift flea market. When I stopped to browse the Quiet Riot and Metallica bootlegs, the man there noticed my notebook. He called the guys manning the booths of tools and Elvis statues. They laughed and snorted, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands.

“I’ll give you ten cents for every page you bring me,” the bearded, overall-wearing proprietor of the tool booth said. “But I like variety, so keep ‘em good.”

Each day after school, I brought him a few pages, but soon thereafter the booths were shut down to make way for a shopping center, and the porn market dried up.

✴

DICKIE WAS BAKING cookies for an office party. It was the only thing he could cook, and he had a pair of red socks, like ceremonial trappings, that he wore for this activity. They had rubber grips so he didn’t slip on the linoleum, as if baking were a high-risk procedure.

I was hanging around