Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

“Pickup trucks are not — ” my mother began.

“ — elegant,” my father finished for her. “I know. But take it from me, if you want to fill that boat, you’re going to have to — ”

“ — not be elegant?”

“Well, maybe you don’t have to go that far — but you should think about dropping those little sandwiches.”

My mother knit her brows and exhibited a pout remarkably like Patti’s.

“Well,” said my father, “at least get rid of the colored bread.”

Chapter 44

Six Days

SATURDAY: When we arrived at the dock that evening, there was a crowd waiting for us. People were snapping pictures of one another standing at the edge of the bulkhead smiling, with Arcinella in the background.

“The power of the press!” declared my mother, and she and Patti and I were exultant as we piled out of the car and went about the business of preparing for the evening’s excursion.

Our work was interrupted often by questions from the assembled multitude, most of them about the dunking of the mayor’s wife.

“Where was she standing, exactly, when she went over?” asked a man about my father’s age.

“Oh, just over here,” said my mother, indicating the approximate spot.

“Mind if I get a picture of Doris standing there?”

“No, of course not,” said my mother.

She handed Doris aboard, and Doris stood in the spot where Sweetie had stood.

“Make like you’re going over, Doris,” called the man, raising his camera to his eye. Doris widened her eyes and opened her mouth and threw her arms in the air and leaned over the side and very nearly lost her balance, but her husband got the shot he wanted.

“Great! Thanks!” he said. My mother extended a hand to him, assuming that he would want to come aboard, but instead Doris squeezed past her, grasped her husband’s hand for support, and hefted herself back onto shore. They walked to their car, got in, and drove off. Some of the other curiosity-seekers drifted off, too.

I think that there must have been thirty or forty people in the crowd when we arrived at the dock. When we set out on the excursion, only eight of them came along. The rest snapped pictures from the shore as we chugged downriver.

My mother whispered to Patti, as they began passing sandwiches and pouring champagne, “I thought we’d have more.”

“Tomorrow night,” said Patti. “You’ll see.”

SUNDAY: We were ready, we were nervous, we were hopeful, and we were anxious. We were, all of us, still full of hope for our enterprise, my mother’s enterprise. My mother’s dream was still our dream, and it was still a young dream, still a dream that held the door at least half-open, still offering a view of pleasant prospects, but I had begun to suspect that hope was full of trickery and I had to wonder whether the pleasant prospects weren’t illusions, like the cardboard dioramas in sugar eggs.

Only two couples arrived at the dock to embark on an elegant excursion that evening.

“We heard it was quite an adventure,” said one of the women as my mother handed her aboard.

At the end of the evening when my mother handed the woman back onto the wharf, she said, “It was very nice,” but she sounded disappointed.

We were silent for quite a while, making Arcinella shipshape and packing up for the drive home.

“It was because it’s a Sunday night,” I said, because I felt that somebody had to say something. “That’s why only two couples showed up.”

“Right,” said my mother, eager to agree. “We’ve learned something: Sunday is not a night when people go on nautical excursions.”

“After all,” said Patti, “they’ve got to be at work Monday morning.”

“That’s why the couples who did show up were so old,” I added.

“Over seventy!” guessed Patti.

“They were retired!” said my mother, in the manner of Archimedes discovering displacement, “They don’t have to go to work on Monday!”

“But just about everyone else does,” said Patti.

My mother nodded her head and then, raising a finger to underscore the lesson we had learned, said, slowly and emphatically, “So, it would probably be best not to sail on Sunday nights in the future.”

The three of us smacked ourselves on the forehead simultaneously and on the ride home we repeated the lesson several times and each time laughed about our failure to consider the unique nature of Sunday nights.

MONDAY: On Monday, we saw no excursionists at all. We sat on the hatch cover and waited, and with each passing minute hope closed that open door another fraction of an inch, and we grew a little bit gloomier.

I looked at the sky. It was clear overhead, with a thin sketch where the moon would later shine. The sun was beginning to set, and in the distant west a cloud or two stretched lazily above the horizon.

“It’s the weather,” I said.

Patti and my mother looked up, looked around, looked at me, looked skeptical.

Pointing westward, I said, “See that bank of clouds in the west? People probably figured that they might drift over here, bringing rain. One of those summer downpours. One of those sudden summer downpours.”

“But,” said my mother, “they didn’t.”

“No,” I said, “but they might have.”

“Most people are very concerned about not getting their good clothes wet,” Patti offered, looking at my mother, hoping she’d accept the offer.

“Overly concerned, if you ask me,” I said. “Especially when you think about how little damage water actually does to clothes.”

“And rain,” said Patti, making another offer, “puts a damper on things, even just the chance of rain.”

“You said it,” I said. “The notion of rain as an agent of depression is so ingrained in our culture that we can’t really expect people to rise above it.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Patti. “Rain is so deflating. Getting wet, being wet. It’s all deflationary. Just think of the things people say, like, ‘Don’t rain on my parade.’”

“Or, ‘Don’t be a wet blanket,’” I said.

“Or, ‘It’s a washout,’” said my mother.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Patti.

The three of us frowned as one. We began packing up.