Summers at Blue Lake

by Jill Althouse-Wood

  I shook my head, appalled that I had actually committed such a crime of fantasy. I was worse than my college roommate who had bought the current issue of Bride magazine after every first date.

  “Peach moiré,” she would say in reference to her bridesmaid dresses du jour. I grimaced. Lynne was twice divorced, and here I was, still married, and having a peach moiré moment over Travis.

  But in spite of my misguided musings, I couldn’t help wondering, What would my dad think of him? I almost wished I could ask him. Dad always spoke plainly when it came to my friends. His insights would have saved me much heartache if I had only learned to accept his accurate character assessments. I could take months to see what my father did at a first meeting.

  My father, with his scrutiny, would discover a different kind of man in Travis than the one he saw in Bryce. If I could ask him for his opinion of Travis, I would know for sure. But just the fact that King Richard stayed his judgment gave me some assurance. If he had anything negative to say, he would have pulled me aside and told me at once. Neither one of them seemed as bothered as I was. Maybe it’s about time I relaxed, too.

  Travis and I covered the playhouse with the old tent that Sam had used previously in his play. We would have an unveiling after he woke from his nap.

  “Dad built me a swing set when I was little. It was nothing like this, though. It was a shiny metal type,” I said, trying to spark informal conversation.

  “Yes, and I cut my leg on one of those metal pieces, and had to go to the emergency room on a Sunday to get a tetanus shot.” Dad tied the tent string around a post.

  “I think that is the day I learned how to cuss.” I laughed at the memory of my four-year-old self running up to my mother and repeating Dammit all to hell.

  “That’s why I don’t work on a Sunday,” Travis said.

  “So you won’t swear?” I asked.

  “No, so I don’t get all uptight.”

  “You don’t need to pretend you are religious just because my father is here.”

  “Unchurched doesn’t mean I’m not religious. A man must have a Sabbath.”

  I waited for Dad to lecture Travis, but he didn’t. “Aren’t you going to give him the speech about church?”

  “I’m just getting reacquainted with Travis, Barbara Jean. Besides, he knows what he thinks. I worry more about the folks who can’t seem to make up their minds about God.”

  Once again, Dad managed to focus on my failures. He had this ability to manipulate my beliefs by trapping me with my own words. Once, after a semester of philosophy, I came home from college espousing the tenets of fatalism. Dad rebuked me by saying that the Bible then could be accepted as truth because God had fated it to be. I never won an argument with my dad. I looked to my mother for support. But Mom couldn’t (or wouldn’t) save me. She had married my dad and all his beliefs. And my youthful self had hated her for it.

  I had always wanted to trick her, to ask my mother how she could grow up in a household with a lesbian couple and then turn around and embrace the religious conservatism that surrounded Dad. I never did ask that question, though, and it boiled in my thoughts now, quite unexpectedly.

  “Dad, how did you feel about Grandma Lena and Nonna?” I asked before I could censor myself.

  “What about them?” He shrugged, noncommittal.

  “You know what I mean.”

  Travis answered. “Mom never approved of the two of them together.”

  “Really?” In the years before the split, Margot had at least seemed congenial.

  “My grandfather was a minister, after all. He was really steamed when Lena broke off her engagement and took up with Anja. My mom grew up hearing how corrupt they both were.”

  “Lena was engaged?” I asked. “Then that was her wedding gown in the attic.”

  “I don’t know about the dress, but, yeah, she was engaged. It was some eleventh hour deal. She didn’t leave him at the altar, but close to it.”

  “Do you know anything else?”

  “No, that’s about it.”

  I looked at my dad to confirm what Travis just told me.

  “News to me,” Dad said. “As people, I liked Lena and Anja, just fine. But I probably know a little more about the situation your mother grew up with, and I know she struggled with it.”

  “How so?”

  “Being different from other families, not feeling she fit in. I think she craved an ordinary life, and I was just the ordinary guy who could give it to her. So in that way, I am grateful to your grandmothers that things were the way they were, at least until you came along.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You weren’t rebelling against them. You were rebelling against us. If you had thought that I harbored any negativity toward them, I would have lost you to them forever. I just tried not to make a big deal about it.”

  “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have become a lesbian,” I said, intentionally avoiding Travis’s gaze.

  “I don’t know,” Travis said. “I hung around them a lot in my youth, and I have found that I am really attracted to women.”

  The humor smoothed away any uneasiness of our conversation. In the thoughtful lull that followed, I excused myself to wake Sam. I didn’t worry about leaving the two of them alone to talk. Neither of them could trump the dialog we had recently concluded. Sex, religion. We had traversed all of the taboos of conversation, save politics.

  Sam was asleep in his bed. The sweat of his afternoon nap glazed his temples. I watched as his long eyelashes fluttered in response to my presence in the room. He sat up and talked as if he had fallen asleep in mid-discussion and now was resuming where he had stopped two hours ago.

  “Hayden wants to see the playhouse when it’s finished. Can you call his mom?”

  “Sure, bud. It’s finished now.”

  Sam vaulted into my arms with a force that caused me to fall onto the bed. We crashed in a warm pile of arms and legs, just begging to be tickled. I pinned Sam to the bed and started my torture, but he got loose and found a ticklish spot under my arm.

  “You’re going to get it now, you scalawag.”

  Our laughter carried outside to the two men, who I imagined to be stuck for conversation and awaiting distraction.

  ♦ 29 ♦

  1983

  THE PORCH SWING GROANED as I turned. I had spent the night in its cradle but awoke before even the early July sun had a chance to prod me.

  Nobody else was awake when I entered the house. I checked the clock, five a.m. Back home, my mother would be waking for early church in another hour. I missed her. On Nonna’s desk, a black phone beckoned. It had a hard, rotary dial and a thick, ropy cord that was on its way to extinction. My fingers knew the sequence, and soon I heard my mother’s voice, rough with sleep.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Barbara Jean, are you okay. What’s wrong?” I heard my father in the background, echoing her concerns.

  “I’m fine. I just wanted to talk to you.”

  To my dad, “It’s okay, Richard. Go back to sleep.” To me she said, “What are you doing up so early? Aren’t teenagers supposed to sleep until noon?”

  “I fell asleep on the porch. My friend Karen is in my bed. She wasn’t feeling very well last night.” I told my mother the story of Macy Killian’s wedding, including the parts that Karen couldn’t tell her own mother.

  We laughed in hushed tones, and my mother confided how she had once drunk too much at a college party and had peed in her best friend’s bed. “That was before your father reformed me. You won’t do anything so stupid will you, Barbara Jean?”

  “No, I promise,” I said naively.

  “So your friend Karen has her eye on someone. What about you? Anybody special?”

  “Not really,” I said. I could talk freely to my mom, but there was nothing to tell.

  I heard footsteps in the dining room. Nonna entered the kitchen and made a beeline for her coffee percolator. A
fter she plugged it in she mouthed, “Who?”

  “Mom,” I mouthed back.

  She took the phone from me. “Judy, I didn’t even hear the phone ring.”

  “Oh, she called you. I’ll have to deduct it from her pay.” Nonna winked at me.

  “Well, yes, we did have quite a situation yesterday. Barbara Jean took care of most of it. I was proud of her.” Nonna raised her voice intentionally for me. “She knows if she ever came home in that condition we’d hang her naked from her toenails.”

  I laughed and put some bread in the toaster. Nonna was a talker. Lena was the disciplinarian in the family. Nonna conversed affectionately with my mother, but ended the call when the perfume of dark-roast coffee filled the room. Nonna always drank her coffee out of a small bowl, no handles. She liked the feel of the warm liquid cupped in her hands. She poured two such bowls, lacing mine with plenty of cream and sugar, the way I liked it; hers, she dressed merely with sugar.

  We took the toast, some marmalade, and the coffees to the porch rockers where we cradled the warmth and invited the sun to join us. The morning was chilly, but not unbearable, with the warm coffee resting on my cool thighs. Birds were starting to wake with their usual noisy banter, announcing the light as it peeked out from the roofs of the neighboring houses. Nonna and I sat in silence, enjoying the sunrise, but we had a comma between us where my mother should have been, where her voice still reverberated.

  ♦ 30 ♦

  2000

  I MANAGED TO GET one solid day of studio work while my dad was in town—he took Sam to a fishing hole he had heard of at the lumber store. Finishing two commissions was my first priority. I needed to take them with me when I drove Sam back to Michigan. Both were necklaces, classically draped without the distraction of stones. They were easy pieces, but time-consuming all the same. Tyler School of Art had asked me for a representative work to showcase in their alumni show in early fall. I had not even begun to design that piece, but that would have to wait, at least for now.

  For a job like this, I had to clean up the cast components and construct decorative links to join the pieces. I had hired out the cast portions. Initially I had carved wax into the shapes I required, but the casting company now had the mold. At any time, I could call in an order and have it shipped to me the following week. It was efficient, both in time and money, to let commercial jewelers handle that part of my craft.

  I attached an abrasive wheel to my flexible shaft and cleaned the surfaces, especially around the area where the sprues had been snipped and filed. Most of the task went smoothly until I started to let my mind wander while working on one of the smaller elements.

  “Damn it,” I said after I gouged a fingernail with the rotating disk.

  Looking down at my hands I saw what others must see—the dingy nails, chipped and dirty. I tried soaps and lotions and occasionally polish, but my hands were a resume for my crafting profession.

  I evened out my nail with the same abrasive tool that had cut into it, as close to a manicure as I was likely to get. I resumed my work, acting swiftly, turning the ugly gray scraps of metal into things of beauty, miniature sculptures. The Talking Heads blared from my portable CD player. It was one of those songs I could not get out of my head once it was there. I had listened to the Heads during my college studio days. Don’t you want to make him stay up late?… Make him stay up all night. They, along with the Eurythmics and 10,000 Maniacs, had pulled me through the all-night working fogs that ended in harsh morning critiques.

  The necklace required two kinds of links, one long and twisted, the other classic round. I wrapped wire around the mandrels and slid off the coil. Then I clipped and twisted the pieces where appropriate. As was the practice, I soldered the first links with the hardest solder and a little flux. The smallest tip of my acetylene torch worked for the delicate undertaking. I took my expertise for granted and coupled all the links quickly, not losing any of the precious links to the heat of the flame. After turning the torch off, I threw the chains together into the pickle, a warm chemical bath, where they would brighten in anticipation of the final polish.

  I stretched and rubbed my neck, trying once again to familiarize my muscles with my workday. Reaching for a door that pushed out instead of in. Carrying the huge skeleton keys around in my pocket. And figuring where I had located everything in this new studio of mine.

  “I can’t lose these again.”

  Carefully I replaced my pliers in the red tool cabinet, but I knocked something over on the shelf above it. I righted the toppled picture frame, a drawing of the goddess Brigid. Why had I brought this with me from Michigan? It had probably gotten mixed in with my important tools or fallen into a box. The picture had been a gift from a gallery owner in Detroit. Delia Kaminiski was her proper name, but her pagan name, as well as the name of her gallery, was Dawning Moon. I was wary of any religion that took Catholic saints and fashioned them into personal goddesses.

  “You Catholics took your St. Brigid from us,” Dawning Moon hastened to say.

  But I heard the need for acceptance in her voice, and I disregarded her testimonials until a week later when, at the opening of my show, Dawning Moon handed me a present wrapped in blue paper, freckled with stars. I tore the paper to find a picture of a woman with red hair and three faces—only one of which turned to confront me. Beside this triple woman sat a well of water, a flame, and a spotted cow. The title read, “Bride.”

  “Bride?”

  “Bri-dee. Another name for Brigid. She’s Irish. Of course, you know that. But did you know that she is the goddess of crafts, especially smithing? I thought she would consecrate your studio at home.”

  “Why does she have three faces?”

  “She’s a triple goddess. In addition to crafts, she is the goddess of healing and writing.”

  “And is she the saint of those things as well?”

  “You’re the Catholic, you tell me. I am just a former yenta turned priestess. Ask me about Leah and Rachel or Lilith and Eve. I am not so good with mother Mary and her posse, though we consider Mary as a goddess, too.”

  “Mary?”

  “Well, all except the ex-Catholics in our group. They are a little sore about having to grow up with that whole model of the Virgin Birth being shoved down their throat. Unattainable perfection, and all of that.”

  I looked at Bride, Brigid, saint and goddess. “I am Scotch-Irish on my father’s side.”

  “Good, she’s a match.”

  “Yes, thank you, Delia.” I couldn’t bring myself to use my friend’s pagan name.

  JULES SCRATCHED AT THE DOOR of the lean-to. It had been three hours since he had been outside. I opened the back door for him. Grabbing a can of Diet Coke from the fridge, I followed Jules out into the yard. Immediately he ran to the fence and barked.

  “Jules, no! Come back here.”

  Karen entered the gate, and I scrambled to pull Jules from his earnest intention to slime our guest. Karen didn’t mind. She dropped to Jules’s level and got in his face with a string of gibberish designed for dog ears only.

  “Wazza good boy? Lookie zeeze ears. Oh, you like when Auntie Karen rubs zoze ears? Zzyes. Dat feels so-o good.” She looked up at me. “Where are the other boys?”

  “They’re gone for the day, so I could get some work done.”

  “I won’t interrupt you then. I just came by to drop off the keys for Anja’s safety deposit box. I forgot she had one until the estate received her yearly bill yesterday. I believe it just contains personal items, but if you have any questions you can call me.”

  “I don’t see your car.” I craned my neck to see over the bushes.

  “I walked. The office is only a mile away, and I needed a break,” Karen said. “You can walk me back if you are interested. The bank is only two blocks past my door.”

  I never wore a watch while I was working. The sun was high overhead. Noontime. I had accomplished more than I thought I would this morning. I could take a break and grab a salad f
rom the farmers’ market that resided in the former Woolworth department store.

  “Let me crate Jules and double check my acetylene tank. Can I get you a drink?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  I locked the door to the house with the ancient skeleton key. I had wanted to get a locksmith out to the house to put new locks on before I drove Sam back to Michigan, but time was getting short.

  Karen directed me west on Mulberry Street. The sidewalks were strewn with the berries for which the street was named. Neither of us cared, and we walked the pink-stained sidewalks as though the walks were red carpets, and we, the dignitaries. How many times had we traversed this path as teenagers? We used to walk barefoot and squish the berries between our toes until they reddened us as with the sacred oath of blood sisters (which we were). And with our sisterhood came the walking secrets of adolescence—secrets that, at the time, seemed so important, but now had faded with the other trivia of the times. The solution to the Rubik’s cube. Lyrics from a Hall and Oates song. The date that John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan.

  “So what’s new?” I asked Karen in opposition to these visions of the past.

  “I’m buying my dad’s practice.”

  “What about your brother?”

  “He’s moving to Atlanta. His wife got homesick. He just got a job as a corporate lawyer down there.”

  “So what does this mean for you?”

  “Dad’s going to stay on in a limited capacity for five years. Shelly and I are going to buy the house from him and live there with the office. It’s not our dream house, but Shelly knows a contractor who works miracles.”

  “Isn’t it funny, the two of us living in houses from our childhood. Please tell me that we are moving forward with our lives.”

  “Of course we are. So you are definitely staying?” Karen asked.

  “Yes, I’m about ninety percent sure,” I replied. “You’ll have to give me the name of your contractor. I was thinking of putting a showroom into the house for jewelry sales. The woman down the block has a gift shop in her home, so I’m sure I have the proper zoning.”