Summers at Blue Lake

by Jill Althouse-Wood

  “I’ll have Shelly check into it for you, but maybe you won’t have to remodel. You could just sell your work at the gift shop.”

  “She has mostly country crafts, candles, that sort of thing. I’m not sure my jewelry would fit.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  The walk was short. Soon we stood before Karen’s office, a large brick dwelling with a gold-lettered shingle outside.

  “Here’s my stop. The bank is that large yellow brick building with the ATM out front.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey, maybe when I move in here, we can get together to walk or jog.”

  “Sure, that would be great. It’ll have to be when Sam is at kindergarten, though. I can’t afford a sitter just yet.”

  I continued down the street toward the appointed building. Business people scurried in an attempt to finish their errands on their lunch hour. Men in suits and women in heels brushed by me. They carried their sprout-laced sandwiches in white paper bags. Dressed in a T-shirt and khaki shorts, I felt diminished by their uniforms. I perched my sunglasses on my head and blinked away the sunspots as I entered the dark cool of the bank.

  I handed the teller my key along with the notice that showed the terms of probate. The teller pulled a long, slim box from the vault and ushered me into a private booth. Several papers, deeds, and notebooks slid forward in the box. I removed them and was about to close the box when I heard the unexpected sound. Clink-a-clink. I reached inside once more. My fingers closed on the worn velvet of a jewelry box. I brought it out into the blue-tinged light of the room and opened it.

  Inside two diamond rings and a wedding band glittered back at me. Wishing I had my jeweler’s loupe with me, I raised each piece up to the light. The cut of the stones was different than those seen at jewelry stores today. I loved vintage jewels, the way they glittered differently than their modern counterparts, as if their facets reflected a different light source. It was as if they held the glow of a bygone era, like starlight that doesn’t reach the earth until after the star has collapsed inward. Or maybe it was another source altogether. Another sun or moon or some forgotten fire, waiting to be rediscovered.

  I weighed the rings my palm. The wedding band was an obvious match to one of the diamond rings. Nonna’s wedding set, I surmised. The lone engagement ring? That inspired my curiosity. It had to be Lena’s, although there was no inscription. Even without the accompanying band, the ring felt heavy, like a broken promise.

  I twisted the rings onto my fingers. Nonna’s rings, larger than the other, fit smoothly over my middle finger, while Lena’s diamond assumed the traditional position on my ring finger. The artificial lights of the booth played darts on the surface of the gems. I clicked shut the empty ring box and put it along with the rest of the contents of the box into my bag.

  “I’d like to close out this bank box,” I told the teller. And with the increased weight of my left hand, I anchored the papers that I signed with my right hand. Barbara Jean Ellington. My smooth signature floated serenely next to the rigid X. I knew all too well that I was practicing to terminate a much bigger contract.

  ♦ 31 ♦

  1983

  I SHARE MY BIRTHDAY with Kim Carnes, Natalie Wood, and Carlos Santana, but they are not the reason people remember my birthday. I was born at 11:08 p.m. on July 20, 1969, just twelve minutes after Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon and before Buzz Aldren had a chance to join him. Moon Baby, the nurses dubbed me.

  My mother didn’t want to leave for the hospital for fear that she would miss the historic event. After the Eagle had landed on the moon at 4:18 p.m., she finally let my dad drive her to the hospital. He waited with dual anticipation in the waiting room. The nurses and hospital staff crowded behind him to watch the screen.

  My mother refused sedation so that she would be conscious to hear the shouts when the astronauts stepped on the moon. She couldn’t know that her own cries of labor would drown out the cheers. After the moment of impact, One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, and Walter Cronkite’s tears, my father sneaked past the distracted hospital staff to inform my mother of the news. He took one peek inside the delivery room, saw my blood-rusty head protruding from my mother’s body, heard her cry, “Get it out! Get it out!” and passed out cold. A minute later I was born into a world where anything was possible, into a country united to make it happen, and into a family oblivious to it all.

  When I turned ten, the anniversary of the moon landing dominated the news. But the day I turned fourteen was a year I could reclaim as my own. To celebrate, Karen suggested we meet Bill and Travis at the lake. Bill Killian had never spoken to me. I was reluctant to include him in my special day, but the alternative was the awkward threesome of Travis, Karen, and me, and I didn’t want to encourage that scenario.

  Karen gave me some red horn-rimmed sunglasses and black jelly bracelets as birthday gifts.

  “They’ll go great with your bathing suit.”

  I put them on along with my I’M A LOVER NOT A FIGHTER T-shirt, and we headed to the beach. Wednesdays were not particularly crowded at the lake. It was mostly kids and housewives, a few retirees. The weekenders, the ones who owned noisy motorboats, were trapped in office cubicles or behind assembly lines. The lifeguards grew apathetic and flirtatious in their downtime.

  Because this was a special day, Karen proposed that we pay to be ferried to the small island on the north end of the lake. We could have a picnic and go hiking. A naturalist group maintained a trail and a bird observatory on the island, but it was known more as a haven for those with romantic intentions.

  Travis arrived on time, but Bill was about twenty minutes late.

  “Sorry I’m late. I got detoured. They are having preliminaries for a box car derby on Quarry Road,” Bill said when he finally showed.

  “Hey, that sounds cool. We should go there. Wanna?” Karen said enthusiastically.

  I had a feeling that my birthday was becoming less about me and more about Karen and Bill.

  “Why don’t you two go, and we’ll meet up with you guys later at Kampmeiers,” I offered.

  “No,” Karen said. “This is your day. We’ll do what you want to do.”

  “I insist. Go,” I said. They didn’t wait for me to change my mind.

  “Would you rather go with them?” I asked Travis.

  “It would be fun to see the derby, but I can take only so much of Karen. I know she’s your friend, but she can be flaky,” Travis said.

  I laughed nervously, afraid that I was flaky by association.

  Keeping with our original intent to explore the island, we rented a pedal boat. In my bag, I had the sandwiches and chips that Nonna had packed for us while she was baking the most magnificent birthday cake I had ever seen. (She had even conceded to red velvet.)

  Travis reached out and held my hand while we pedaled the boat northward. His hand was sweaty and warm. I had an itch under my life vest on that side, but I didn’t want to move my hand. The boat inched forward, and I tried to think of something to say. I had known Travis my whole life, but that did not prepare me to sit beside him on my birthday and imagine that my wish about kissing him might very well come true before I even had a chance to blow out my candles.

  He stopped pedaling about halfway to the island.

  “I didn’t get you a present.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I wanted to, but with my lawn jobs and visiting my granddad, I didn’t have time.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t know. I wanted to thank you for listening to me. You are the only one who understands what I’m going through. I couldn’t have made it through this summer without you.”

  I took off my sunglasses, which had been sliding down my nose all day, and looked at him. I realized that I might truly be the only person who would understand. I knew how his father had been arrested for beating his wife after she turned him and his friends in for selling pot to Travis
’s friends. Travis had been only eleven years old. I knew about the divorce and the time his mother was hospitalized for depression and a botched suicide attempt. The doctor seemed to think it was a cry for help more than an actual attempt on her own life. She hid her bandaged wrists under the sheets when Travis came to see her. We waited for the razor blades to reappear, but the doctor had been right: the medication helped.

  Travis had stayed with his granddad for two weeks while she recovered, but the Reverend Ernie Platz was past eighty, beyond his child rearing years. Grandma Lena took control. She moved Travis in with her, found an apartment for Margot only blocks away, and eventually taught them how to live together. Lena enrolled Travis in a private school and shouldered the bill. She even arranged for Travis to have a Big Brother.

  Dave was an English and film major at a nearby college. Once a week he took Travis to the darkened theater on Fourth Street that not only showed current features, but oldies, indies, and foreign films. Dave taught Travis how to watch movies with a critical eye and introduced him to Shakespeare’s vulgarisms.

  “Chicks really go for the poetry of it,” Dave said.

  Travis had always been more mindful than athletic. With me, he never needed to apologize for his inability to throw a baseball or dribble a basketball. His vulnerabilities created nuance in his fifteen-year-old character that I had never known in another person. I knew how fiercely he guarded his mother, how closely he related to the great Shakespearean tragedies, the movies more than the written word.

  I never pitied Travis, but not because circumstance didn’t warrant the sentiment—it did. The fact was, he never required it. He loved his aging granddad. He was grateful to Lena and Dave and his teachers for their care. He was never a child in crisis when we played kick the can, or Ollie Ollie over, or flashlight tag. He was intense and solitary with some of his pursuits, but his isolation seemed intellectual rather than unfortunate. I squeezed his hot hand and wondered why I waited until my fourteenth birthday to fall in love with him. Maybe Karen was right. Maybe fourteen was the diamond age, when your nipples harden on either side of your heart’s quickening pulse, and kissing is something you need to do every night even if it is just on paper. Paper kisses, like paper napkins, ephemeral and disposable, wiping your mouth clean to disguise an appetite.

  I squeezed Travis’s hand again. I didn’t intend the action as an invitation, but Travis knew. His lips were as hot and moist as his hand had been and still was, but I didn’t mind. Our orange life jackets bumped into each other, making the embrace cumbersome. Travis stopped to change positions, and then he kissed me again.

  Before today, I had kissed two boys. Mostly my previous experience had been a fumbling of a lower lip or a tentative poke of the tongue, the result of a dare or mutual curiosity. But Travis kissed me for real, as my mind raced to think of adjectives for my diary. When we pulled apart, Travis looked at me with his ochre eyes, two suns burning my retinas. I felt my skin and organs blister, and I panicked.

  “Come on,” I said and let go of his hand.

  I dove deep into the sweet lap of the lake. Once underwater, I wanted to scream, to mimic a siren’s wail to unsuspecting sailors, but my life vest brought me too quickly back to surface. I would have risen anyway with a buoyancy of the spirit.

  Travis watched me surface, and then jumped in after me. We floated in orbits around each other and kissed some more. After twenty minutes, we attempted the near impossible task of climbing back onto our boat. We were heavier, waterlogged and love-logged. Together we managed to push and pull ourselves aboard and resume our journey. The island greened before us. We didn’t notice the clouds behind us.

  ♦ 32 ♦

  2000

  I WAS ONLY THIRTY—five years younger than Cancer Society recommendations—when I had my first mammogram. A technician had flattened my breasts until the three dimensions I had cultivated for so long with a well-engineered bra became two-dimensional webs on film. I understood the language of two dimensions, the illusion. I had been a painting major for two years before I switched to metals. But to see my doctor point to the images before me and hear pronouncements of my own good health startled me.

  My mother, Judy, had been forty-eight when she found her first lump—before menopause, when breast cancer tends to be genetic more than environmental. I had been adamant at my annual gynecological checkup, and my gynecologist finally bent to my demands, much to the dismay of my HMO.

  Even with the clean diagnosis, I was vigilant about my self-exams to the point of compulsion. In the shower or prone on my bed, I questioned my fullness and my health and my losses.

  Months went by when I did my exam only on the pink ribbon day, but those were rare. The more stressful my life, the more I reached beneath my bra, like a man compulsively checking his back pocket to make sure he hadn’t lost his wallet.

  The evening before I was to drive Sam back to Michigan for the rest of the summer, I read him three books and lightly covered him with a sheet. I closed the door to his room despite his sleepy protests. Then I went into my own room, flopped backward onto the bed, unbuttoned my cotton shirt, and undid the front clasp of my bra.

  The valley between my breasts pooled with the night’s perspiration. I dipped my middle finger in it as if it were holy water. But this was no self-blessing. I moved my fingers to the place where my skin became softer and the flesh yielded to the pressure. This exercise had never been erotic, but it had never been strictly medical, either. I thought of this probing as an emotional crutch even when the repetition suggested psychological malignancy.

  My fingers traced a spiral on each breast, tweaking each nipple in turn. Sequentially, I checked my underarms, velvety with the day’s hair growth. Nothing. I was dissatisfied with my lumpless condition so I repeated the process, twice, three times.

  I had nursed Sam for almost two years after he was born. I felt the smocking of stretch marks made during those days when I was so full of milk that I burned. Here, under my shirt was an account of pleasures I had received and nourishment I had given. With my fingers I checked the balance on these accounts.

  I didn’t want to find my mother here. Or did I? I longed for the days of daughtering, receiving comfort. The shared acts of shopping away a disappointment or sipping cups of coffee together. And what of my days as a wife? The cellular level of my marriage memories haunted me. The way Bryce had cupped my breasts, my bottom, even my ripening belly. The bowl of his hand opened with supplication. And in the remembering, I felt the all too familiar ripple that told me exactly how long it had been since I had been touched, measured, calmed, worshiped.

  In the bright light of a ballerina lamp, my body’s betrayal disgusted me. I lay in the lamp’s glare, stroking my breasts for the world to see through curtains as shadowy and transparent as mammogram films. I buttoned my shirt and rolled onto my belly. Reaching for my pillows, I rejected the comparison between the softness I had surrendered and the one I was seeking.

  Fuck! Why did I have to take Sam to Michigan tomorrow?

  I punched the pillows in a visceral need to connect with something other than myself. Karen had volunteered to take Jules so Sam and I could get an early start. Now, I missed him terribly. I wanted to run my hands over his tawny coat and let him lick the salt of tears that I wished would flow. I left the light on hoping the glare would cause my eyes to water, but it only burned my eyes. The bed creaked as I reached down and grasped the mattress, trying to pull myself into sleep. As I pulled, I felt a foreign object, and recovered from between the mattress and box spring, a paperback.

  Lord of the Treasure. I smiled. That book must have been under the mattress for seventeen years. I fanned the pages and scanned the back cover.

  Chase Maverick wanted nothing more than to find the ancient shipwreck that his company had spent years searching for. But now with funds diminishing and contracts running out, could he really put all his faith in the new marine scientist he had hired, especially one so lovely as Dr. Laura
Primm? Even behind her labcoat and glasses, her beauty was apparent, but so was her mystery. Why was she so desperate for this job? Chase Maverick knew what he was after, but what treasure was Laura chasing?

  I remembered the story. I couldn’t recount the details of any of the important works I had read in English class, but I knew the subtleties of this plot. Or maybe I had read so many of these novels that the formula was the cue. I opened the book and began reading. After about sixty pages the words started to mingle and blur.

  A few hours later I awoke to sense the vile damp of my own saliva and the offensive brightness of the lamp. The book lay on the pillow beside me. I straightened up and smoothed my shirt. Two a.m. I wasn’t tired, and realized if we left now, we could be in Michigan by noon. I could grab a quick shower at the house and relax before Bryce came home from work.

  I lifted the sleep-heavy body of my son and loaded him into the packed car. With any luck, he would miss the entire drive through Pennsylvania.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too, Sam. It’s not time to wake up yet.”

  I propped his head on the pillow and strapped him into his seat. He was still asleep. The skeleton keys weighed heavy in my front pocket; the metal chilled me through the thin cotton. I didn’t look at the house after I climbed into the driver’s seat. I looked back instead—one last inspection of my son in the rear seat. His head was tilted at what had to be an uncomfortable angle. Bryce would never take him from me. It was more of a hope than a thought. I started the engine, but I knew that fear would be driving my car.

  ♦ 33 ♦

  1983

  ONCE ON THE ISLAND, Travis and I held hands and hiked up the trail. It was a rocky path, and I had to look down to check my footing. Even then I stumbled a few times into Travis’s tilting body. He held me tight. In those instances, I felt how tall he had become. My head was not even as high as his shoulder, but I could still feel his breath as it quickened during our upward climb. We didn’t speak. Our silences were less clumsy now that we had gotten our first kiss out of the way. I was grateful for that.