by Susan Wilson
He didn't say anything, but his fingers against the deck tapped out invisible notes.
“So, what's it for?”
“It's not for anything.” He pushed himself up and went to sit on the edge of the raft, his back to me, his fingers still tapping.
“Then what is it?”
“Just something I've been noodling around with for a while now.”
I got up and sat beside him. Once again the grown man made me think of my little boy. Yet I sensed a willingness to be pressed into telling me more. “I don't mean to be nosy, I just like it and wondered what it was.”
Ben stared across the lake as he spoke, his fingers suddenly still, gripping the coaming of the raft. “A concerto for flute.”
I dangled my legs over the edge beside him. “Sounds like an ambitious project.”
“My wife was a flautist.”
“What a lovely idea, Ben. A wonderful gift.” I didn't say “memorial,” I didn't know enough.
“Thank you.” Ben looked at me, his eyes holding my natural questions at bay. “I haven't gotten to the solo part yet. I keep going back to the orchestral parts.”
“Maybe you're not ready.” I don't know what prompted me to make such an observation and I wished I hadn't. It wasn't mildness which made Benson Turner's eyes so striking in an ordinary face, it was grief and I had trespassed on it.
Ben looked down at his moving fingers and shrugged. “I may never be ready.”
I felt as if somehow my curiosity had prodded this revelation out of Ben at a cost to him and I wished I'd kept my mouth shut. We sat quietly for a few more minutes, then stood up and dived off our different sides of the raft.
The headlights of Sean's car broadcast their arrival late that evening. I dashed out to help carry in sleepy children. Lily and Tim revived long enough to argue about going to bed, then caved in. Sean and I chose to leave most of the stuff in the car until morning, when we could see. The Volvo was filled to capacity with what the kids deemed essentials, half of which I knew no one would use. Clearly the kid's had had carte blanche in packing.
“Leave it and come sit with me on the porch.” I handed Sean a bottle of locally brewed beer and picked up my own glass of wine. “The best part of this place is this porch.”
Sean followed me outside. We sat quietly for a few minutes on the old metal glider with its musty cushions, Sean letting the buzz from the long drive subside. It was well near midnight and I felt the long day's end in the heaviness of my limbs and the grit in my eyes. I'd been up since six, eager for their arrival. Now I just wanted my bed, but I knew that we'd make love. I expected it, should have wanted it, but, at midnight, the anticipation had dropped with my energy. I shouldn't have run so far today, or maybe should have taken a nap. Certainly not be drinking wine, with its soporific effect on me.
“So, how was the drive up?” I nestled in beside Sean and he put an arm across my shoulders.
“Fine. Long. Kids slept only after we crossed into New Hampshire. Traffic around Boston was a bitch.” Sean went on in this vein, by rote, as if he'd taken the trip a thousand times. As if he wasn't engaged in his surroundings and the experience. “Look, Cleo, I'm really exhausted. I've been working a lot of extra hours to clear my desk. Would you mind awfully if I just went to bed?”
I tried to keep the relief out of my voice. “I'm beat, too. Let me just finish my wine and I'll join you.”
“Kids sleep late.” The implication.
“I'm sure they will.” The agreement. Though I had my doubts they would, I chose not to argue the point.
At some point in the night I heard Sean get up. Not long after I heard the toilet flush, I felt him return to bed.
“You awake?” His breath in my ear tickled. I could hear the first birds of the day.
“Yeah.”
Sean nuzzled my neck and pressed against my back, his right hand finding my breast. Slowly I moved into his rhythm and we made love. The light was just brightening to full when we parted. Sean was asleep again in seconds. I lay fully awake, already missing my solitude.
Even before breakfast the kids were in the water. Longtime YMCA swimmers, they were strong and confident, making for the raft without hesitation. I didn't worry too much, the raft wasn't terribly distant for kids used to laps, and it was only over their heads toward the middle. Still, I made them promise not to swim unless Sean or I was within sight and I made them promise to jump off only facing Grace's cottage. A request which effectively kept us together outside or separated while one of us did time elsewhere.
Thus our days fell into routine. Breakfast, swim, hike, lunch, swim, break up afternoon squabbles, supper, shower, and bed. Kids began showing up to play with Lily and Tim. The air was filled with screechy giggles to harmonize with the rusty bedspring notes of the red-winged blackbird. I tried to keep the kids off the raft at noontime, planning lunch and an activity so Ben could have the raft to himself. I hadn't seen Ben except from a distance since our last conversation on the raft, and I had the lingering bad taste of having said the wrong thing to him.
Sean stuck his cell phone into his shirt pocket. “I'm going to take a little walk.”
“Don't be long, lunch will be ready in a little bit.” I was shredding lettuce for Caesar salad.
“Half an hour, tops. You okay to watch the kids?”
It was overcast this morning and the kids had stayed in on the porch, playing Monopoly with the neighbor boy. Through the kitchen window which looked out on the porch, I could see three curly heads bobbing, two copper-red and one, the neighbor boy, jet black.
“Of course.” I had my hands full of lettuce. Sean pecked my cheek and bolted through the door as if he had an appointment. Watching him disappear up the well-worn path, I had to smile at Sean's inability to vacation. Not smile in amusement, but in resignation. He hadn't always been this way. Only in the last couple of years, as his client base had grown from individuals looking for protection for their cars and homes to corporate clients looking for protection against liability should their products do harm or their employees see harassment in a dirty joke. I dumped the shredded lettuce into a glass bowl and stuck it in the refrigerator. “Can I play?” I asked the kids who made room for me to sit and handed me the little car token.
Sean had been supportive of my need to come to the lake to do my work. I could hardly complain if he thought he needed to do his.
Tim pulled over his head a T-shirt I'd never seen before. It flaunted a status logo of which I highly disapproved. I did not like my ten-year-old son wearing status-symbol clothing. “Whose shirt is that?”
“Mine.” Tim held the bottom of the oversized shirt down. “Eleanor bought it for me.”
Eleanor. I never had called to thank her for her taking the time to take the kids to the zoo. Now she was buying Tim clothes.
“You know how I feel, Tim.”
“But Mom, it was a present and I would have been rude to say no.” Tim let go of the hem. “Besides, I'm not in a gang. It's just a shirt.”
“Fine. You can wear it here, but not to school.”
“Mom,” Tim said in that wonderful rationalizing tone of children, “by the time school starts, it'll be too small.”
I pressed his face to my chest in a quick, stolen hug. But Eleanor's innocuous act of kindness nagged at me. I felt my antennae quiver and I forced myself to let it go. I would not give in to it because I needed to trust Sean. He hadn't given me any cause for concern since that time—between Lily and Tim—that time when I thought my world was going to fall apart and somehow we glued it back together.
I knew that Sean was often the object of crushes among the young women in his office. One or two had told me so. He had told me so. His easy charm and brotherly teasing often led them to imagine things. It wasn't the first time one of them had overstepped her bounds in little ways. Those crushes were not threatening because Sean did not respond to them. It hadn't been a schoolgirl crush which caused him to betray our marriage. No, that had bee
n quite different.
I tried conscientiously to keep Lily and Tim off the raft when I thought Ben might be there. I tried to be sensitive to a childless person's privacy, keeping my kids at bay around folks who might not understand or appreciate the totally invasive quality of a young child's presence. Despite our almost daily conversations, Ben never once had mentioned having any children, and I rather thought it unlikely. Even grown children enter into a conversation eventually. So, to be a good neighbor, I thought it best to keep them a respectful distance apart.
Thus it was, with some embarrassment tinged with annoyance, that I looked out the kitchen window to see both my children lounging on the raft, Ben beside them. Tim was being animated about something and Lily was acting her cool best to be a young lady. As I watched, they began diving into the water with great splashes and climbing back onto the rocking raft.
“Damn it.” I stalked out onto the porch and, cupping my hands around my mouth, called out to them.
“What's the big deal? If he doesn't want to be bothered, he can leave.” Sean came up behind me, dressed only in bathing trunks, and it was hard not to notice that the frequent client dinners were beginning to have an effect on him. “Who is he?”
“Ben Turner. “As if it explained my concern for Ben's potential annoyance, I added, “He lives alone on the island over there. I'm sure he's not pleased to be splashed by the two munchkins.”
“Like I said, he can always leave.”
“He only uses the raft once a day. Surely he should have some quiet.”
“Too bad. The raft comes with the place.” Sean grabbed a towel off the drying rack and headed to the lake.
Before Sean could get there Ben had dived off. Then, as I watched, he rolled onto his back and waved at my two appreciative children, who were applauding his skillful dive. I laughed a little at myself. I was being presumptuous of Ben's feelings. I touched my lips with my fingers, plumbing my own motives for the truth, a writer's exercise. The truth was, I had presented a nicely edited version of myself and now Ben would begin to know me through others' eyes. Crabby and tyrannical mother of two. Insurance salesman's wife.
My schedule was upended by family, so I now ran in the early morning. Before anyone woke, before breakfast on the porch, good breakfasts of orange juice and eggs, slightly burned toast, the smell of which filled the cabin until lunch, before plans and decisions, I ran. The track ran between the lake and the cabins sheltered in the hillside; great old trees, mostly birch and pine, seemed to hold the brown cabins safely on their rocky outcropping ledges. The scent of coffee and the sound of birdsong, the soft, worn, humus beneath my feet, the soft early-morning air heating up as I heated up.
These images cling to me now with a sweetness some people take from childhood memories. Running along the lake, looking down between the trees and seeing Ben Turner softly stroking through the still water in his Old Town canoe, in that memory-encapsulated moment I know what happiness is, that it is like the fog, you cannot touch it, it only moves away.
I walked back the last thirty or forty yards, cooling down, listening through my fingertips to my recovering pulse. Coming down the slope, I noticed a cardboard carton on the steps leading up to the screen porch, a big carton with a well-known cereal company name prominent. I laughed out loud recognizing the very same too-sweet breakfast cereal Ben had been sent as inspiration for a new jingle. Written in black Magic Marker: “Bon Appetite, Lily and Tim. Your friend, Ben.”
Six
There was a big Cameo Lake barbecue on the Fourth of July. A yellow flyer had been stuck in the screen door, a general invitation-to all the lakeside community. We all gathered at the ancient lakeside community hall, which smelled of old wood and mold. Everyone brought potluck salads, hot dogs, Jell-O, corn, watermelon, and pies. I hadn't met many of the East Side folks and none of the West Siders, if you discount Ben, who lived in the middle. It was a little hard at first, being first-time renters with no history there, but the universal leveler of children soon smoothed over awkward moments of self-introduction, and before long I was comfortable in the midst of other moms, trading stories of scheduling nightmares and soccer wounds.
Eventually a pickup baseball game evolved and we played until it got too dark to see the ball. I was reminded of church school picnics years ago, when the staid white-shirt-front and prim white-glove set pulled on madras shorts and sneakers and got loud and so out of character they were forever changed in my girlish view. Somehow, I thought, as I stood waiting for my turn at bat, somehow our children had missed that adult transformation. Their parents and friends of their parents were commonly seen running or playing tennis or roller-blading through the park. The adults in my girlhood were grown-ups. In my kids' view, maybe we were just big kids without curfews. I heard Tim refer to Ben by his first name and I didn't make a move toward correcting him. I assumed Ben had introduced himself that way.
As the long July twilight faded, the lakeside gathering formed up a caravan to the site of the Cameo fireworks, a private ski area a couple of miles away on the other side of the hill. Neglecting to bring along chairs, Sean and I spread our blanket on the rough ground and lay down, Sean's head on my lap, Tim and Lily boxing us in. The display was loud, brief, and enthusiastically received by the assembled masses.
The finale over, the throng headed for their tightly packed cars. The darkness turned everyone into anonymous shapes, a single moving unit of blankets and coolers and lawn chairs. I grew disoriented and somehow got separated from Sean and the kids. I bunched the blanket around my shoulders, glad to have it in the cooling July night, trudging along with the crowd. Flakes of conversations from earlier in the day surrounded me and I exercised my ability to put names and faces together, depending a little on instinct and the limited revelations of flashlights. “Good night, Carol. Good night, Glenda, nice to meet you . . .”
I realized that I hadn't seen Ben at the picnic. It wasn't a sudden realization and I knew that, on some level, I had been waiting for him. What surprised me was my disappointment. I told myself it was because I wanted to introduce Ben and Sean properly. Walking back to the parking lot, I couldn't exactly fathom why I thought that was a good idea. Or why I thought it was important. It wasn't as if this neighborly acquaintance would be long-lived.
By the middle of their first week at the lake, charcoal-grilled hamburgers and chicken had already begun to lose their novelty and my family was keen to go get restaurant food. The day had turned oddly fall-like for early summer, and we ended by going to an afternoon movie in the next town over, and then even farther afield to a restaurant Grace and Joanie had recommended. A converted railroad depot, this place offered something for everyone, fine dining, a pub, a dance floor, and the Red Sox on TV.
After we'd been shown to our table, in what looked like the former station manager's office, I went to the ladies' room. On my way back I saw Ben at the bar, munching peanuts, sipping a beer, intent on the baseball game on the suspended TV. He had his back to me and I debated an instant before going over to him. Just at that moment a commercial came on and he lifted his beer, bringing me into his line of sight . I was rewarded with a grin.
“Hey, Mr. Turner.”
“Hey yourself, Ms. Grayson.” He swung around on the barstool to face me.
“Ben, thanks awfully for the cereal. Now you only have yourself to blame if my kids bug you.”
“Oh, they don't, Cleo. They're great kids and it's . . . actually a nice reminder.”
“Of what?”
“That life can be fun sometimes.” He shook his head in self-derision. “Too much time alone. Sorry.” He took another sip of his beer. For the first time I thought he might have had several before this, a flatness in his usually bright eyes. “So, what brings you out this way?”
“Tired of hamburgers. I needed a night off from cooking, and the kids needed some electronic stimulation. Sean needed a restaurant meal.” I sounded like a bad hostess complaining about her guests. “How about you?”
“Yankees are playing the Red Sox and the only TV in Cameo is in Tony's Pizza and they only serve bottled beer.”
“I see.” The commercials were over and Nomar was up. Ben didn't look at the TV but at me. If he had had more than the pint in front of him it wasn't obvious in his speech. I pulled myself back, it shouldn't bother me if a guy liked a beer or two and a ball game alone. Ben's mild brown eyes were just slightly clouded, and in the poor lighting of the bar I could only just detect a shrinking away from me when I heard Sean's voice and felt his hand on my shoulder.
“You coming back, Cleo, or what?”
Ben didn't smile at Sean. He knew who he was and, having that advantage, Ben waited as Sean introduced himself and put out a hand, less in friendship than in territorial bounds.
“Sean McCarthy. Cleo's husband.”
“Benson Turner. Cleo's neighbor.”
Having, figuratively, pissed on me, they shook hands and simultaneously glanced up at the TV as Nomar fanned. I felt myself diminish as the two men postured their baseball knowledge. Finally I interrupted, “Sean, the kids are by themselves.”
“Well, you're the one who disappeared,” he got in, sotto voce, as we headed back to our table.
It was pleasant not eating my own cooking, eating something other than hamburg or chicken. I had a nice Yankee pot roast dinner and Sean an Italian dish of some sort. Lily and Tim opted for tacos, and the McCarthy family was happy.
The music from the lounge heated up, from easy-listening ballads to blues. At some point I realized the canned music had been replaced by live and I talked everyone into going into the dance floor area to listen to the girl singer. She was tiny, way too tiny and way too young to have the husky, smoky blues voice she had. The lights in the lounge were dimmed, dark enough now to just make out shapes in the room, couples mostly, slow dancing to the beat.