Free The Hazards of Good Breeding by Jessica Shattuck Page A

fruitful adolescence. But the drive to make a goal or slam a serve or score a point has always eluded her. This is perhaps not unrelated to her father’s relationship to athletics, which bring out a severe and terrifying enthusiasm in him, not dissimilar from greed. He was actually banned from attending her older brothers’ Little League games in Lexington because of the time he screamed, “You fat fucking idiot,” at a chubby boy who tagged out one of the twins in a controversial double play.
    Caroline takes a left onto Liberty Street, past the North Bridge Visitors’ Center. Everywhere she is aware of the scrim of her childhood obscuring the lines and contours of the pres-ent—transforming the trees, the street signs, the telephone poles and boxwood bushes, the open vistas and stands of wood into complex forms with double meanings—the overlay of childhood vision onto the here and now.
    Here is the Kittridge house, the Dellars’ field, the famous intersection in which the little Dorchester girl bused in to Alcott Elementary School was hit by a car. Here is the patch of woods where Silas Kittridge used to lead violent games of capture the flag and where Clare Whiteside claimed to have lost her virginity. Here is where her older brothers used to fashion cruel and elaborate worm factories out of sticks and paper cups and stones that dropped from mini-parapets to sever worms in two. Here is the Concord Rod and Gun Club she was afraid of as a little girl—for good reason, it occurs to her; what kind of person joins a club dedicated to using rods as a hobby?
    On the left, the row of weeping cherries and then the neat white picture-book gazebo in front of the Tooleys’ house emerges. And up ahead, Caroline can see the green oblong of Concord Circle, complete with its—not two or three—but five monuments within eyesight. Below the “War of the Rebellion” obelisk in the center of the pretty green traffic island, there is a patch of scarred black earth riddled with stones that makes the rest of the manicured grass look like a hastily unfolded picnic blanket—not quite big enough to cover up the dirt beneath.
    The stitch in Caroline’s side has blossomed into a full-fledged cramp and her lungs hurt now, too. Keep running or you will die , she tells herself. Keep running or you will be stuck here forever . The threats are effective. She is a superstitious person. There is a pain in her chest that might be her heart, although, of course, statistically it probably isn’t. She is unlikely to drop dead of a heart attack or heat exhaustion. But there are always those freakish cases: the long-distance runner who jogs every day and then, rounding his favorite corner one bright, beautiful morning, collapses—dead; the woman who walks out of her split-level ranch house in the safest town in Iowa, into the arms of a gun-toting madman and off all the charts of sociological probability. Caroline is at the top of the pyramid of data on heart disease and life span, rare viruses and violent deaths; she lives in that slim, coveted triangle of money and health and education where the odds are always in your favor. She is young and white and female. She uses birth control and takes vitamins and has health insurance. She eats vegetables and wears sunscreen and does not work with heavy objects or chemical products. She lives in a Western country with calcium in the orange juice and fluoride in the water. And even so, she feels unsafe! What if she were at the long, squat bottom of this same pyramid? What if she woke up every morning knowing she was twice as likely to have a heart attack or get AIDS or die in her sleep or be the victim of a violent crime? She would probably be bedridden by the sheer horror of anticipation. But then, if she was on the bottom, would she even know the pyramid existed? Isn’t it the people on top who are aware of statistical probabilities and