Free The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman

Maisie standing at the foot of your bed waiting for the lights to change, waiting for you to wake up. If you don’t open your eyes soon, I’m going to take pliers and some tape and fix those damn kidneys myself. You didn’t know I was an expert at plunging toilets, did you?
    It’s 1967 and we’re back in the Touw River, a web of green slime floating on the surface of the water. The sand has crept up so high that you can walk across the river at its widest part when the tide is out. The golf balls are gone and forgotten and I’m in the boat. Well, almost forgotten. I’m holding an imaginary golf ball in the pocket of my shorts.
    The boat is a special red-and-white handmade wooden rowing jobbie that you bought from a furniture salesman who liked to go fishing on the Knysna lagoon not far from the place where J.L.B. Smith had his boat. The coelacanth man. You mention the coelacanth and the boat, which is a collector’s item, in one breath, and the time you went up the river with Maisie and Bunny and everyone. All the old roads. Putt-putt, goes the five-and-a-half horsepower Johnson engine, lubb-dupp, lubb-dupp goes your heart. That summer you couldn’t start the boat your heart broke, but that’s later, when I’d already flown away and the boat was empty.
    I’m sitting on the prow, my feet slipping into the water every so often and you tell me not to but it’s impossible to talk to children. They don’t listen and they don’t care. All she cares about is dipping her feet in the water so that the spray wets your arms and your sleeves and you wonder why you’re in this boat at all with your youngest child, a dreamer and a loskop . She walks into walls and once she even walked into a moving car. Sometimes you think it could be something neurological but Mrs. God says, Ag, rubbish. She’s just a loskop , that’s all.
    You and Simon and me and Simon’s friend, Andrew, went up the river after lunch, to Ebb ’n Flow, past the little white beach where you used to have picnics, where Gertrude scratched herself getting out of the boat. You always look at the white sand, and still to this day you remember the milk-white of her inner thigh revolving against your hand. The tablecloth must have rotted by now. You never let the children get out. You’re the captain of this ship and now that area is completely overgrown. It’s a thicket of tangled branches and matted leaves and you are sure there are snake holes and snake nests and snake parties in there. It looks so much more dangerous than it used to.
    Is it the web of dark-green, thickening against the flank of the mountain, the river slowly curdling, or the Sharpeville massacre four years ago when I was still a baby? Property values dropped and you and Ma bought a house in the Wilderness suddenly for half what it was worth a few months before. The couple who owned the cottage on the banks of the river left South Africa for good. They live in England now, somewhere in the North. They weren’t the only ones, of course, fleeing the pictures in the papers of black bodies strewn in the road, shot in the back by the police. Then the rioting in the townships, share prices on the Johannesburg stock exchange plunging as white people sold and left, sold and left.
    You didn’t sell. You bought. The house has a view of the lagoon as it fans out into the sea. Behind you, mountains, in front of you this glittering sweet river slowly going bad, and the roaring sea. This sea is the breath in your body, the tide going in as you breathe in, the tide going out, as you exhale. Now and forever. You are bound here, caught in this crook of land. The river runs straight into your heart, the vena cava bringing blood without oxygen, to be renewed and restored, renewed and restored. Every summer you come back here, where you follow the river up to its source, to the miracle place where you shush-shush all of us and make us sit quietly in the red-and-white boat listening for monkeys.
    You