Read As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel for Free Online

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    “This is where I feel I can breathe,” my mother always said of Woodmont—always showed as well—and it was there, in the cottage with her sisters each summer, that I would watch the usual knot of her brow unwind, the taut vein lines in her neck slacken, the apron strings, inevitably wound round her waist in our Middletown kitchen, fall by the wayside. Wearing her daily housedress, one of her many shapeless cotton shifts, her mass of hair pinned haphazardly behind her head, and her beloved wedge sandals, oddly stylish given the rest, she could look almost comic. Yet she was content, even happy. For in Woodmont she gained a kind of autonomy over her life, something she lacked in Middletown. For one thing, as co-inheritor of the cottage, she was on her own turf. And she loved that ownership, loved taking stock of the place at the beginning of each summer, scouring the building—as my father did in our Middletown home—for any needed repairs, any further upgrades. She even loved the smaller acts of day-to-day maintenance such as sweeping the cottage’s ever-sandy front porch. On many a morning I would find her there, humming. When she finished, she’d lean the broom against a wall, sit herself down on one of the porch’s chairs, and hum—as she never did while doing housework in Middletown—even louder.
    Then again, at Woodmont the daily work of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and watching over us was shared. That was another feature of summer so different from life in Middletown. Our cottage was a kind of commune, and if my mother ever had any ambitions outside the home, the live-in help she had at Woodmont in the form of her sisters could have allowed her the time for it. She could have taken up painting watercolors, for example, or studied shorebirds. Like Nina, she could have read an extremely long book. But Ada had no such ambitions. Years ago, when she’d used her keenest wiles to steal my father from Vivie, she realized all the ambition she’d ever had. She’d got her man. Her life, she knew then, despite the eighteen years of it already lived, was about to begin.
    Odd, then, how during those childhood summers the five weekdays when the men weren’t there were the most relaxed of her adult life. I remember the sound of her waking each morning, early, not long after daybreak, along with Vivie and Bec. That Friday morning of our first week was no different. I was still snuggled under the cotton blanket on the sofa bed I shared with Nina, my eyes heavy with sleep, when I heard the creaking upstairs begin. Even before there was any movement in the boys’ room it was clear that at the front of the house Ada had risen. At the other end of the upstairs hall Vivie had too. In the sunporch beyond the living room Bec was rising, and the glass doors separating her room from Nina’s and mine squeaked as she opened them to make her way to the toilet near the back door. Soon she returned, and in what I imagined as perfect synchrony the three sisters then stepped into their identical bathing suits, black one-piece suits with skirts that covered the tops of their thighs. These were their morning suits, to be replaced later by lighter-colored ones, or even floral-printed ones, suits that they would wear in lieu of underwear under their inevitable housedresses. But the black suits were what they stepped into each morning for what they referred to as their daily dunk.
    For all their years at the beach their parents had dunked, first thing in the morning, walking hand in hand from the cottage porch, around the Isaacsons’ cottage in front of them, to the sands of Bagel Beach, and finally to the water’s edge. When Maks and Risel died, they bequeathed to their daughters not just the cottage and its contents but also so many years of Woodmont-only traditions: the cottage cheese and fresh fruit salads Risel favored for lunch, the Saturday evening rounds of rummy, the early-morning dunk.
    The stairs, creaky as the