Grand Union: Stories - Zadie Smith Page 0,1

guilt whatsoever.”

“Well, then it has nothing to do with the animal itself,” said the girl pertly, unwrapping her towel finally and revealing her precious, adolescent body to the sun and the gawkers she now believed were lurking everywhere, behind every corner. “It’s just about you, as usual. Black again! Mama, costumes come in different colors, you know. You turn everything into a funeral.”

The little paper boat that had held the barbecue chicken must have blown away. It seemed that no matter how warm Sopot became there would always be that northeasterly wind, the waves would be whipped up into “white horses” and the lifeguard’s sign would go up and there would never be a safe time to swim. It was hard to make life go the way you wanted. Now she waved to her boys as they waved at her. But they had only waved to get their mother’s attention, so that now she would see them as they curled their tongues under their bottom lips and tucked their hands into their armpits and fell about laughing when another great wave knocked them over. Their father, who could very easily be—as far as anyone in Sopot was concerned—around the next corner, buying more refreshments for his family, had in reality emigrated, to America, and now fixed car doors onto cars in some gigantic factory, instead of being the co-manager of a small garage, as he had once had the good fortune to be, before he left.

She did not badmouth him or curse his stupidity to her children. In this sense, she could not be blamed for either her daughter’s sourness or her sons’ immaturity and recklessness. But privately she hoped and imagined that his days were brutal and dark and that he lived in that special kind of poverty she had heard American cities can provide. As her daughter applied what looked like cooking oil to the taut skin of her tummy, the woman discreetly placed her chicken wing in the sand before quickly, furtively, kicking more sand over it, as if it were a turd she wished buried. And the little chicks, hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, pass down an assembly line, every day of the week, and chicken sexers turn them over, and sweep all the males into huge grinding vats where they are minced alive.

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

Back then, she unnerved men. But couldn’t understand why, and sought answers from unreliable sources. Women’s magazines—women themselves. Later, in midlife, she came to other conclusions. Lay on the grassy pavilion above the Serpentine café, admiring a toddler, her own son, as he waded in and out of the paddling pool. Suddenly her daughter appeared at her shoulder: “You look at him like you’re in love with him. Like you want to paint him.” This daughter had just emerged from the lido, she was covered in duckweed. The toddler wore a huge soggy nappy hanging behind him, hardening like clay. It was something to consider. In the river Christo had placed a flat-topped mastaba, eighty feet tall, formed from many red and purple oil barrels, set atop each other. Pedalos shunted round it. Bold women in wetsuits swam by. Seagulls perched on top of it, shitting. This was also meant to be something to consider. The clouds parted and the late summer sun embraced Christo’s eternal house and everything else, even her daughter’s furious green face. Both the women’s magazines and the women had placed their emphasis on lack and error. The problem was you were “missing” something. Now, a quarter of a century later, she saw that what had looked like a case of lack was in fact a matter of inconvenient surplus. A surplus of what? Can you have a surplus of self?

But it was true: she’d always thought of men as muses. Always treated them that way.

* * *

• • •

Darryl was the first to like it. He wasn’t very tall. But so beautiful! He had the African backside she wanted for herself; he was compact and muscular all over. Adorable cock, nothing too dramatic, suitable for many situations. She liked it best when it pressed flat against his belly, pointing to a woolly line of hair that thread upward and then spread in two soft plains over his symmetrical chest. His nipples were alive to the world, crazy about it, they were like an insect’s quivering antennae. The only bit of her body like that was her brain. She especially admired the hair on his head,