Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

84 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Donna Hemans
to the one in front, through the windows that were slightly open,
through the holes built into the wall just below the thatch. Wasps were
building nests on the thatch.
Brad dropped his bag. “Cool,” he said. “I always wanted to stay in
a rustic cabin.”
I wondered where the Brad I’d known had gone. Perhaps he hadn’t
realized yet that there was no switch by the door that would magically
pipe current into the room, no bulbs hanging overhead, no television
in a corner below a window, no refrigerator, no microwave, no stove.
“Cool,” I said too, and turned to look at the bathroom, just outside
the door. “Simply cool.”
Inside the bathroom, the concrete floor was painted red. Even the
shower stall, concrete as well, was painted red. The pipes worked. The
toilet looked fairly new. Mom had long threatened to send us from our
Hempstead, Long Island home to a country house in Jamaica so we
could learn what life was really like. For a while her threats worked.
We behaved. We turned off lights and wasted nothing. We were still
young then. But the nearly bare cabin was more than I expected. We
hadn’t turned wasteful again and there was no sin I could think of
that would have prompted this retreat. Mom didn’t know, for instance,
of Brad’s girlfriend or the things they did in the early morning after
Dad left for work and before she returned from the overnight shift. I
wouldn’t be the one to tell of Brad’s senior class slide.
My mother was moving around downstairs, and, when I looked,
her room was as bare as ours.
“There’s a kitchen next door,” she said. “I’ll have to show you how
to use the stove.”
I didn’t want to see a stove that my mother had to show me how
to use. I’d seen kitchens. I’d seen stoves, but never any that required
lessons.
“Mom, why are we here?” I tried to keep the whine out of my
voice. “What did we do?”
“What do you mean?”
“This place…it’s not a hotel. There’s no electricity, not even a phone.”
“You children are lucky,” she said again. “Anyhow sometimes we
all need a change.”
I heard Brad outside asking about the beach and before she said
anymore about how little we understood of the hardships of life, I said,
“I think I’ll go to the beach, Mom.”
“Okay,” she said.