They take Rainier Avenue south into a neighborhood where Taylor can’t read any of the signs. Thai and Chinese, according to Kevin. “You wouldn’t want to live down here,” he says from behind his mirrored lenses, “but they have great noodle soup at that Mekong place.”
“We lucked out with this sun,” Taylor says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to how cloudy it is here. I was thinking I might get that disease the Eskimos get from not seeing the sun enough. Where they go insane and start eating up their shoes.”
“Never heard of that one,” Kevin says, running a hand through the side of his white-blond hair. “Now this is the place to live.”
Taylor can’t argue. The lakefront neighborhood is breath-taking: elaborate houses with cedar-shake roofs and gardens of bonsai and flowering trees in the yards, banked steeply down to the street. It seems like you might need a passport to come over here from the other side of the hill.
They get out of the car and cross a long grassy area to the lake. Turtle is excited. She didn’t have a swimsuit, but Barbie, in a generous moment, sacrificed a piece of blue lamé she’d been saving for a Prom Date ensemble, and turned out a bikini with impressive speed. Taylor had argued against a bikini for a six-year-old, but Barbie ignored her. Turtle runs ahead of them now, her feet flapping duckishly in Barbie’s thongs. She pulls off her T-shirt as she goes, revealing a bony brown torso and two puffy bands of shiny blue fabric. She looks like a Mardi Gras dropout. With Taylor in tow she climbs down the concrete steps into the lake and stands knee deep on the pebbly bottom looking up with knocking knees and joy on her face.
“You like that?”
Turtle breathes in through shivering teeth, and nods.
“It’s not too cold? I’m going to pull you out when your lips get as blue as your swimsuit.”
“Okay,” Turtle agrees, hugging herself.
“Kevin and I will be right over there, and I’ll be watching you, okay? Stay here where the other kids are. Don’t go any deeper.”
Turtle shakes her head vigorously.
Taylor retreats to the beach towel Kevin has spread in the sun, without ever taking her eye off Turtle. Kids of every color run around her, screaming and jumping off the steps, but Turtle is immobile except for her shivers, only watching.
“Doesn’t she know how to play in the water?” Kevin asks.
“She always takes a minute to get her bearings.”
“So, is she one of these adopted Koreans, or what?” Kevin pulls four different tubes of sunscreen and an apple from his backpack and bites into the apple.
“She’s adopted, yeah.” Taylor sees her own stunned face in his reflectors, stupefied by the rudeness of a person who would bring a single apple on an outing with other people.
Her shock doesn’t seem to penetrate the lenses to sink into Kevin.
“Well, don’t knock it,” he says. “At least those people are industrious.”
Taylor wasn’t about to knock it. She would like to change the subject, though.
“I went out with a Korean girl once,” he says. “I repeat, once. She was the valedictorian of our high school class.
Kind of pretty. But Christ, what a tragedy, that family. You should see where they lived. Mung Bean Row.”
Taylor unpacks the sandwiches she brought to share. She seriously resents having spent fifty-five cents on a can of tuna for this guy, after she and Turtle ate peanut-butter sandwiches all week. “Don’t you think it might be possible to be a decent person but still not get anywhere?” she asks.
“Oh, sure. Some people are just not born with all that much upstairs. But Christ, if you know how to turn on the water faucet you can clean yourself up, is what I always say.”
Taylor’s stomach feels tight, like the beginning of a twenty-four-hour flu. She passes it off as merely a growing hatred of Kevin and nerves about Turtle in the water. In her mind she calculates the number of seconds it would take her to bound across the grass and down the steps, if Turtle should slip under.
“You know what I mean,” Kevin says, with his mouth full of apple. “With all the opportunities that are available, and somebody’s still sitting around staring at his navel on a park bench, you’ve got to admit they must be that way partly out of personal choice.”
He should have gone out with Barbie, Taylor thinks. The two of them could jabber at each other all day without ever risking human conversation. She watches Turtle climb slowly onto the lowest step and jump back into the water, landing stiff-legged, following the lead of two tiny girls whose swimsuits are nearly as strange as hers. Taylor wants to tell her to bend her knees when she lands.