LAUREN SMALL
Imaginary Houses
Jeanie and I were playing our water game. I dragged the hose from the
house to the top of the driveway and turned it on. The water ran down
through the dirt and sand in little rivulets: a web of interconnecting
streams. Gradually the dirt washed away, revealing tiny ravines studded
with shiny bits of grey and pink and white gravel. At the bottom of the
driveway, the dirt formed a wide, muddy delta that spilled over the
sidewalk and into the street.
Jeanie made a town along the banks of one of the rivulets. She piled
up some gravel for a school and, in the corner where the rivulet bent,
scratched out a playground in the dirt with a stick. I built a row of grass
houses near a cliff of pink rock and watched as bits of twigs and bark, a
schooner and a yacht, sailed past.
I was not supposed to be doing this. The last time I did Rhoda, my
stepmother, shouted from the doorway, "You get out of that mud."
And then my father came through the garden gate and said, "I told you
not to waste water like that."
But that was on a weekend, and my father and Rhoda were home.
Today they were at work, so the only person I had to watch out for
was my brother, Ricky. He was liable to come sneaking around the
corner of the house, grab the hose, and send Jeanie and me running, wet
and shrieking, into the street. But the last time I checked on Ricky, he
was still asleep. All summer long, ever since we arrived at our father's
house, he'd been perfecting sleep, like an art. Sometimes he made it until
the nLiddle of the afternoon.
So I let the water run. I imagined I was floating in its cool currents
instead of suffering in the heat, in the heavy, humid air that rose off the
nearby lake - so different from the thin, dry mountain air I was used to
at home . I dug out a trench with a stick, a canal connecting two of the
rivulets. Jeanie made a barge out of bark. She was lucky; no one both–
ered about what she did. Her mother worked and her grandmother,
who was supposed to watch over her , never left the house. She was
blind and sat upstairs all day, listening to the radio , mostly big band mu–
sic and singers with low, husky voices. Even now, as I worked, I could
hear the sound of her radio, tinny, distant, drifting down from an open
window on the second floor ofJeanie's house.
