The man turned, sulkily, imperious, and then a shift went over his face, as if he’d found an old friend in a crowd of strangers, and he said, “I don’t believe in packing much, thank you. Look here, I have all I need in this hamper.” He opened one hinged lid and pointed out the contents, obviously delighted by his own thrift.
Grace put her arm in mine and whispered, “Harold’s writing a book, but he hasn’t actually written anything yet because he’s rich. Would you believe it, Midge?” She affected a pained expression. Behind her, the chartered plane gutted the lake and lifted over far trees. “I’m moneyed people.”
For the first time that summer, the lodge was nearly full. We put the boys in one room and their governess, a tanned woman with a Texan accent, in the room next door. We gave Grace and Harold the room over the porch, with a view of the lake at sunset. Unlike Goldie, the Wilsons were loud and busy guests, inexhaustible. The boys brought turtles to the bathtub, pebbles to the dinner table, an antler to bed. They had an idea about the physics of air and were determined to build a craft that could float them over the lake like a balloon. I talked with them about this at length and could never determine the extent to which they knew they were playing. Jasper was six, and he became furious with his little brother, Jake, at any suggestion that the venture was not possible. On the shore there were complicated arrangements of thistle and jars. For days, they claimed their failure was due to sabotage by locals: sometimes Indians, sometimes wolves. Then one morning they came to the dining room before breakfast almost sobbing, saying they had done it, they made it to the other side.
“Why are you crying, then?” their mother pointed out. She was mocking them because all of us were watching, and I think Grace knew she was better at winning a crowd than raising children. Jasper reddened at his mother’s words, clearly crushed. He explained, putting his face into his armpit and taking it out again, “Jake’s crying because he’s a baby!” Grace turned to scold the governess for negligence, but the boys were sopping wet, breathless, and I believed they believed that they had done what they said.
I told them this. That night I went to their bedroom and touched their heads. I said, “Good job, boys!” but they looked at me in a sickened way, barely tolerating my presence. I realized I’d made a mistake, but I had trouble sorting out what it was exactly.
I won’t say we became friends with Harold and Grace, but something else happened that was a little more complicated. A week after they arrived, I ran into Harold smoking a pipe and he asked me to help him out of his marriage. He was sitting in the woods under a line of laundry I was drying, and he spoke simply, his mouth around the neck of the pipe. His words sounded lazy and offhand, almost unintentional. Then he took the pipe from his lips and put the warm mouthpiece against my ankle.
That night, I lay with my husband in our bed and gently stroked his throat. He liked that, and it frightened me a little how vulnerable he was with his chin thrust up—how bony and ridged it was there, like the spine of a small, extinct reptile. “We should think of ways to draw more people here,” I told him, fingering the hump of his Adam’s apple. “We should advertise in the paper. We should make signs for the road.”
He said for the second time, “People will come when they do.”
“But what for?” I felt a lurch of desperation. It was as if he refused to understand the basic machinery involved in being human, how one thing led to the next. He had a fixed notion that all lives were as pure as his own, born of unqualified, disciplined intentions.
In the next weeks, I took pains to avoid face-to-face conversations with Harold and Grace. They were spoiled and self-involved, and though I didn’t approve of them at all, I found I enjoyed watching them from a distance. I grew interested in their diets, for instance: in Harold’s taste for slightly soured milk and the way Grace picked at her fish. She slid her fork between the bones as if performing surgery, totally absorbed, frightened whenever she took a bite. I kept serving fish so I could watch her at this task, which made her seem vulnerable like nothing else, strangely animal and vital. I grew fascinated by the way Harold and Grace derided each other, rarely speaking to each other in public, but always lightly narrating the other’s faults for audiences. They seemed pleased rather than discomfited by the disorders they pointed out, announcing them like accomplishments: “Grace thinks books are for propping open windows,” or “Harold, bless his heart, never learned to leave his mosquito bites alone. Look! He’s like someone with pox.” I liked best to hear them in their room at night, shouting. “You’re unnecessary to my happiness,” I once heard Grace say, and though I didn’t hear the context, the phrase struck me as so ruthless, so wonderful, it ran through my head whenever Erich’s disappointment in me showed. I imagined him saying it to me, the clean shard I’d become when he hissed in my face, You’re unnecessary to my happiness. Of course, my husband was tender and formal most of the time. After the Wilsons came, he wore his suit every day again, like a man at an everlasting funeral. At night, he almost begged me to get pregnant; touching each other was like sitting in the empty lodge waiting for guests who never arrived; we were humiliated to find the other always present for our personal failures.
He kept saying, like a man purchasing milk, “Thank you!”
“Don’t say that,” I told him, annoyed because I didn’t want to be held accountable. I wanted his anger or forgiveness, but not his false gratitude for this: the baby my body refused to bear.
Once, the Wilsons wanted a picnic excursion, and when I went out to untie the canoes, I saw something beneath the dock. Not a broom or a fox pup, but Leif’s kite, the one Erich and I gave him. It was caught beneath the planks like a sea animal, a thing from school books, not from lakes: yellow, red, and green. I got down on my knees to fish it out. For just a moment with my hands in the water, I believed that Leif was down there with it, floating white beard and blind newt hands, but then there was a gulping sound and water streamed down my arms. The kite was a wet heap in my hands.
“What you got there?” Erich called from the bank.
What could I say about this? I suppose we could have laughed together—what had we been thinking, giving a grown man a kite?—but I still felt something of Leif in my arms, which was disconcerting, unbearable in fact, so I lowered the thing back into the water. I didn’t want Erich to see it, to worry about what had happened to our first brief guest.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a shirt, someone’s lost laundry.”
He called, “Bring it up, we’ll dry it off,” because my husband had industry enough to cast on any object at hand, wayward guest or washed-up trash, any irrecoverable article.
But I said, scolding, guilty: “No, it’s ruined.”
I went to him myself. I climbed the rocky bank and smoothed his moustache with a finger still wet with lake water. He lifted his eyebrows but did not move his face an inch, his breath coming through his slightly parted lips, like the minute, barely discernible current through two logs in the lodge. Gently, I put my mouth over that fragile draft, kissed him. His lips were papery, desiccated against my own.
Was it then that possibilities began to dawn on me that hadn’t before? I’d been so certain for so long that it was some failure in me that kept Erich from the family he wanted. That it was me, and not him.
Of course that day’s suspicions were only confirmed much later, long after the Wilsons left. So it’s possible I’m rearranging the order of my feelings now to justify what I did to him.
The circus in Duluth was Grace’s idea. Somehow she got us all to go with her. It was a long trip—six hours in a hired car on logging roads, then another lengthy stretch on the Superior steamer—and I’d grown restless, I suppose, weary of the barren lake, the immaculate order of pines. I craved some adventure and disorder. Goldie wore her hair in yellow ribbons, and the boys put on shoes again for the first time in a week. Even Erich went along, though he got carsick on the drive and had to sit with his head hanging out the window like someone’
s forlorn dog. We all stayed two nights in a ramshackle Victorian hotel in a residential neighborhood. The place had running water and electric lights, but Erich and I could not help but feel a vague competitive dislike for the rumpled maid and diminutive doorman. I’m not proud to say we colluded in disparaging the place whenever the Wilsons were around, affecting a businesslike scorn at every attempt at convenience. We took pleasure in pointing at a crusty orange formation beneath the porch and making Grace put her hand to her breast. “Yuck,” I lamented. “What on earth could that be?”
The circus was a few miles out of town at the county fairgrounds. We sat together on bleachers under the sun, balancing our hats on our heads and squinting like people who’d lived for a long time underground. I couldn’t tell if all that squinting and sweating behind the ears made me feel oppressed or ebullient. I remember Goldie spent the day with the boys, shunning the governess who was reading a newspaper and eating a snow cone. Grace and Harold settled in next to each other on the bench, argued for a moment about whether the seats were any good, and didn’t speak to each other for the rest of the show. Erich and I sat on either side of them.
If you’ve been to a circus, you know how they manage to make preposterous things seem ordinary, even dispiriting. We saw three midget children riding hounds, for instance. The children had shiny leather saddles and clown noses, and though everyone clapped, I kept expecting something more thrilling to happen. It was like a trail ride, the way those big-boned dogs lumbered their figure eights, the way the midget boys gripped their tiny pommels. Then a portly man in a wedding dress rummaged in his sleeve for a crumpled bouquet of daisies. After dancing about on his toes, he plucked the bouquet, petal by browning petal, and ate it. I felt like I was watching something I’d done myself—though in private, abashed—and I admired his shameless regurgitation. The bouquet came out of his mouth whole, reconstituted, wet. When he bowed and gave it to a woman in the audience, she held it far away from her body with two fat fingers.
Beside me, Harold offered up a piece of popcorn. I set the foamy, tasteless thing on my tongue and let it dissolve to its kernel. He positioned his knee so it lined up with mine.
“That’s disgusting,” I told him, stoutly, pointing out two scantily clad obese women doing the polka. But it wasn’t at all. It wasn’t disgusting or even strange, just one of the ways the universe worked. If you were very fat and a twin, you learned at a young age to dance for audiences.
During intermission, Goldie took the boys to look at the horses, and the governess stayed absorbed in her newspaper comics. The rest of us wandered over to the auction set up beneath a canopy across a dusty field. Circling in silence the tables of linens and bicycles, I had a curious, nervous feeling, as if we were waiting for something to happen: as if we’d all set our marbles rolling down a ramp and we were now just watching to see how they’d collide. Grace and my husband were discussing the merits of putting a bid down for a painted wicker throne, which Grace thought would look good on the porch of the lodge. They were almost bickering over it, actually, the way Grace bickered with Harold, and I was about to join in when a man in suspenders distracted me. “What’s this?” he kept saying, a little too loudly. I followed his gaze until we were both looking into a cage of sorts, but what was inside perplexed me for a moment. I wanted to say, Bear, but it wasn’t exactly. It was a couch, an old man, a wilderness. It was the first thing that had really surprised me in a long time, and before I even realized it was dead, I knew I could use it.
“Is that thing for sale?” the man asked.
Harold took my elbow and tugged it. “Do you want to take a walk outside?” He was not suave so much as needling. I looked at him impatiently and saw his hair was greasy. It was flat as a swimming cap over his eyebrows.
He started talking about his book. It was to be an exploration of the rift between loggers and conservationists, he said, a lesson on, no, a love letter to the wilderness. This was a new idea, something he’d discovered while sitting on a rock in our woods, and he’d already come up with many good metaphors for pine needles. Rodeo tassels, he said, shyly now, as if offering me a choice delicacy from his plate. The fringe of a lady’s dress. For goodness’ sake. Why was there no machine to lift boys over water, never any real artists, but always some fop of a husband dreaming his commonplace dreams of adultery? Rodeo tassels could not interest me, could interest no one.
I looked him square in the eye and said, “You’re unnecessary to my happiness.” I meant it to be kind, honestly. I meant it to release him from whatever responsibility he felt to impress me.
But it was only after I had said it—and felt its correct and appropriate violence—that I realized that the comment was neither original nor true. Of course, I needed him. It was childish to think otherwise. I needed his money before the end of the month; I needed him to tell his wealthy friends about the lodge and its comforts; I needed his wife to cheer my husband when I could not. I looked over at them assessing the wicker throne, Grace sitting in it like the queen she was, Erich rolling his eyes like a man who knew exactly what she was and was not bothered by it.
I pulled a strand of hair from Harold’s shirt, apologetic now for what I’d said. I knew how to flirt as well as anyone. I said of the strand of hair, holding it up and leaning in: “Hers or mine?”
He was relieved and smiled, almost winningly. It was then that I let him grope for and take my hand. Of course, I didn’t outline any plan for him, nor promise right then to be his mistress, but you how the human mind works. I did a quick calculation: there were still three and a half weeks of summer and two unused beds in the lodge. And what is logic, after all, but the way the mind takes control of facts and arranges them to suit its own interests? I wanted some measure of control over my husband’s and my circumstances. I wanted that most of all. And Harold? He wanted to be flattered.
We got the bear carcass for almost nothing. I thought we should stuff it right there in Duluth, as the thing had been dead a full day already, but Erich said he knew a good taxidermist outside Grand Marais. We found an empty logging truck that was going up north that afternoon and paid six dollars for the bear to go with it. It took three men to sling the thing onto the pallet, wearing leather gloves and cloths around their noses. Flies were already distorting its face, nursing its rear end. Grace was horrified, but the boys were ecstatic, absolutely jittery with love for the thing. Both these reactions pleased me very much. Before it drove off, the boys kept skipping around the truck, stroking the bear with sticks and touching its clipped, opal claws.
I could not stop talking at dinner that night, working out the details of my idea for the bear’s new life as a feature in our lobby. I thought we could hire a photographer to take a picture of it, put ads in papers in Minneapolis and Chicago, draw rich, outdoorsy people with the spectacle their unexceptional imaginations desired. I drank a lot of coffee, and found my hands were shaking when I lifted my mug, as if my body had been starved and was finally being fed again. Everything was so pleasant and unnerving. I wanted Erich to feel this as well, wanted him to see how things were going to work out for us now, but he was too worried about how much dinner would cost. I saw him peering at the bill over his spectacles, ever innocent. Very tenderly, I corrected his math.
Our guests last summer were our children, I raised every one of them myself: Leif Williams, Goldie, the Wilsons. By fall, we had other types of people, drunk fishermen who were standoffish and strangers to me, but the summer guests were mine. On the last leg of our journey home from Duluth, paddling across the lake, we sang impolite logging songs the boys had picked up over their weeks in our woods. Fellows at the grand ole gates, say hello to your bosomed fates! We pitched in our canoes, but I don’t think I was alone that day in feeling vouchsafed against danger. Even the moose in our garden was hard to take seriously. We stood with our bags on the dock, a little uneasy, yes, but then Jasper and Jake went up so close they could have touched its black muzzle. They raised sticks to prod its h
indquarters.
“Stay back,” Erich warned them, but the moose was docile as a donkey, knock-kneed, a circus pet. For an instant, I confused him with the bear we bought and felt sorry. His obdurate gentleness made my heart sink, because I knew there was something sick in him we couldn’t see, a malignancy that softened and destroyed his nature. A murky layer of film wobbled over each eye. He walked in a nice circle, very showy and staged, and then everybody clapped when he took a step back and shambled into the woods. My pounding heart grew too loud, and I had to put my hands on my knees, prevent a spinning sensation from pulling me down, and then pretend it didn’t happen, pretend I was fine, and the moose was just another entertainment, and the bear—a thing that walked on a leash and balanced a ball—was once a vicious beast. And who was to say they were not.
All winter Erich has been splitting wood till dusk. Nights, he holds onto my strange, new body out of practical necessity, for warmth, teeth chattering in my ear. I can feel his worry going through me in shudders. But under that worry I can sense how pleased he is. He must be happy in his way, grateful to have the future coming so smoothly now, or else why does he fall asleep before I do, giving me up to the cold, forgetting everything?
I feel I just need to get to spring. In a few more weeks, the ice will be pulling away from the shore and mallards will be returning. Guests will be coming back for walleye. The doctor has promised I’ll be back to my old self by then, but he’s country people and doesn’t even bother to shave properly. Whenever he bends over me, I can see the stubble on his face like dirt. I haven’t told that stubble-faced doctor that I barely feel any kicks. I think I understand the baby’s silence. I’ve prepared my own silence for her, after all. She’ll have her life and her father, her future with its fine logic, ah, maybe even my good skin, my small, dark eyes. But her secrets, those are mine. I’ll carry them for her and I won’t mind. I’m proud of them.
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