The Dark Lake
A Novel
By
Anthea Jane Carson
© 2012
Book I of The Oshkosh Trilogy
“Now that's called a ghastly moon,” she said, “not ghostly”
1
The ghastly moon hung over the lake, reflecting through the trees in fractured, smoky ripples like it had that night when the air was warm and thick. No, of course that couldn't be. The lake was frozen that night, and it was the dead of winter. Of course it was, of course it was. How could I think it was midsummer? Midsummer, when the air is warm in the evening and you can walk about the lake sleeveless. Summer is what I remember. Not the bleak winter—when I dream about it.
I've been trying to call her for the past couple of weeks now, ever since I saw the hand rolling up the window, trying to keep the water from coming in. I've called and left messages but Krishna has not returned them. Maybe she's out of town. Paris or Rome, or wherever it is she goes—India? But I've tried, I've definitely tried and I'll keep trying because that's the right thing to do and I always do the right thing.
She would want to know.
I walked along the edge of the lake. I might have walked all the way around it by now, I wasn't sure. I should get back home; they would be worried, although I was certainly old enough by now. The thought made me laugh out loud. How many times had they told me I was old enough, old enough to be on my own, old enough to wander by the lake all night if I wanted to?
I felt bad about it. Who wouldn't? Who wants to still be living at home, as if time were frozen? Who wants that? But as I'd explained to them time and again, there were reasons I couldn't quite get on my feet. There were the drugs for a long time, but even more than that there were reasons. I guess you'd have to go back a long ways to figure out what they were.
Not just back to the night of the party. Back a lot further than that is what I kept telling them: and my therapist too. Back to that first night, when I first met those Transistor boys. It must have been at that first party, that fraternity party in some unknown basement.
It wasn't the first night I'd ever been drunk, it just seemed like it. What I remember most is the color red. I’m not sure though, if the room was really red. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what color the room was because the colors began to swirl and the music, wow, the music, it was like the first music I'd ever heard. They were very loud. That’s what I remember most, the loud, insistent driving rhythm of those Transistor boys up there on some stage that first night, the night the laughter echoed down the halls. It echoed into the corridors and bounced off the brick walls. It pinged on hollow, tin pipes. It mixed with the scent of beer and smoke and smiling faces and drunken singing till you smelled songs and heard cigarette butts on the floor. So it all started with them, with … what do I call them?
What do I call them, the ones whose voices still call me from the bottom of the dark lake?
It looked so dark. Was there a color as dark a black as that water looked in midsummer? Maybe obsidian—maybe that was the color—like black, volcanic glass. I finally did find my way back home without hearing any of those voices, not a single one. Not from the lake, anyway.
They were sound asleep, my parents, when I walked in: both of them. But the next day, when I had slept such a long time, my mother finally came in and woke me up, observing how long I'd been out the night before.
What difference does it make? I don't have a job to go to anymore, I told her.
Why did I still argue with her—being well past that age?
“You better take those sheets off the bed and give them to me to wash; I'll need to wash them if you aren't ever going to,” she said.
I asked her what difference it made.
"When was the last time you spoke with your therapist?" she asked.
"I have an appointment with her for later this afternoon. Thanks for helping me with the sheets; I don’t know why I don’t remember things like this," I said. "I need to make a phone call."
"Don't make any more long distance, they are killing us financially."
If only I had a job—see, then I wouldn’t have to have conversations like these.
I didn't want to talk to her anymore; I just thought it best to take a long shower and go down early for my appointment—maybe read a book or something in my therapist’s waiting room. Hanging around this house was starting to depress me.
My therapist was the only black woman in the whole town, and she was very black too. She had taken to warning people on the phone about her dark color before they showed up for first appointments. I laughed when I heard her do this on the phone during one of our sessions, remembering the shock that must have played on my own face the first time I met her.
She wanted to know if I'd followed up on trying to contact anyone to discuss the dreams I'd been having about them.
"Yeah, I'll call. I haven't had time this week. I've been trying to find work. I've been calling want ads."
"Have you contacted Krishna?"
"Tried but no answer. I don't even know for sure if I have an updated phone number."
"We can check right now." She picked up the phone. “What’s her number?”
"No, that's okay. I know it's her phone. I got her answering machine."
"Then why did you tell me you didn't know?"
"Because I can't get hold of her."
Miriam leaned back in her swivel chair, steadied her gaze, and fixed it on me like a bright flashlight.
"Have you left a message?"
I shifted around in my seat, knowing I was giving her clues about my feelings, and unable to stop doing so.
"I don't want to face it when she doesn't call me back."
"Facing reality is what I'm here to help you do." She leaned forward.
"Good point."
"And it's important for you to come to terms with some of these memories." Miriam took off her glasses, like she always did when she wanted to talk about reality. Why did she always want to talk about reality?
“Hey, what’s so great about reality?”
“It’s time to wake up, Jane. It’s time to look at reality…”
"Just give me a minute; I think I can hear their voices now. I can be there if I close my eyes. I can be back with them.”
“Jane, stay here in the present.”
***
"How do I look?" Swinging my hips around, admiring myself in the mirror. I knew though. I had always known how damn hot I looked. But still, I had to hear it from all of them.
"You look like an alley cat, and I know you are going to pounce on some poor, unsuspecting mouse." Giggling, Krishna flashes her eyes. In her reflection, if we were animals, she would see a lynx. She would see jet-black hair and eyes. If she were smiling, she would see only one dimple, and it would be on her left side.
The music pounds on the stereo; the smell of incense and pot and cigarettes and coffee is thick in the air. Krishna lights another cigarette and changes the record. I pose and swing my hips some more, watching my reflection.
"Think you've seen enough of that ass yet?" Gay, dressed like a boy as usual and lying on Krishna’s bed, mocks me from the dark corner of Krishna's room—the corner that recedes into the wall and tucks itself away from the light of Krishna’s red, jewel-covered lamps.
"Who could?" I ask.
"Yeah, I can't see quite enough of it; you think you could yank those cut-offs a little higher up your crotch?" Gay snaps back at me, her eyes giving me a smart-mouthed once-over.
"You should've been in the car today with us!" Krishna starts laughing and tells her, "She took her bra off and threw it out the window
while we were driving down Bowen Street."
"I know. She does that every time we drive anywhere."
"It's just so uncomfortable," I complain.
"Yeah, I know what you mean," Gay says. "My ass was uncomfortable the other day so I pulled down my pants and stuck my naked butt out the car window."
***
"But what you said was true; you were uncomfortable? Not a hussy, like she implies." Miriam's eyes were intense, like she'd caught me with something I wasn't supposed to have.
"What do you mean?" I asked, pulled sharply back from the deep past, startled.
"You weren't really a wild girl. It was a persona, wasn't it?"
"What do you mean persona? I don't even know what that word means."
"A mask you wore. Not your true self."
"No, that's not true. It was my true self. Why do you say that?"
"You just said that yourself?"
"How so?" I squirmed around in my seat, suddenly uncomfortable. "Can you dim the blinds? The sun is hurting my eyes."
I had a headache now. I would have it for the rest of the day. It always happened like that. Whenever she pestered me like that I would get a headache and have it for the rest of the day. On the drive home I stopped by the Open Pantry (Open Panties, we all called it back then) and overspent for a one-time ibuprofen, unable to wait the five blocks for home.
Every time I spent money now I got nervous–all these little purchases added up–a dollar here for a coffee, a dollar there for a candy bar. I never felt like I was overspending and then I would max out my dad's credit card again. He even threatened to take it away one time in a fit of rage, but then his face softened and he said, "No, I can't leave you without money to spend. I won't do that," and he hasn't mentioned it since. Still, it left me with an uneasy feeling every time I spent money now, especially since I wasn't working.
But that was bound to change. I'd been looking for a few weeks now. No interviews yet. The problem, as I always said, was that I never finished high school. I kept trying to go back, but still couldn't put up with the teachers telling me what to do in that bossy way they had. They thought they knew everything. I was so much smarter than they were and they knew it. That was probably why they harassed me so much. Jealous. Every time I mentioned going back to high school, my mom said it was just too late now. When you’re in your 30s it’s a bit late to go back to high school, she would always say.
But try finding a job without a high-school diploma.
"They expected me to put my head over a hot frying bucket of grease when I felt sick to my stomach. Do you want me to throw up on the fries?” I asked them. But that bitch didn't seem to care. “I can't believe you expect me to stay there and put up with that kind of abuse," I told my mom.
She shrugged and looked disgusted.
"Fat lot you'd understand! What have you ever done in your life besides be married to my dad?”
But I didn't argue like that with her lately. Things had gotten a whole lot better since I'd gotten off drugs and had been going to meetings. I didn't yell at her like that, and I even tried to control my spending.
I pulled into the driveway. The lawn had been freshly mowed. The midday summer humidity and bird songs thickened the air.
"When are you going to get air conditioning around here?" I asked, slamming the door behind me.
"We can get along fine without it. I've lived without it for sixty years now," Mom answered, her soapy arms up to her elbows in dishwater because a dishwasher was another thing she refused to buy.
"You could suffer bad for that now. You could get heatstroke, and now that you're sixty you might not survive something like that,” I tossed my purse on the rippled, glass table and the car keys made a clinking sound as they skidded across the it.
"How did your therapy session go?"
"Fine.”
"I talked to a woman today who said she might be willing to hire you to work at her husband's store. You just need to go down there and fill out an application."
"Tell me about it later. I have a heat headache now. I think I actually might have heatstroke. I feel sick to my stomach and that's one of the symptoms of it. I need to go lie down.”
I went into the living room and flipped on the TV. I was too hot and too dizzy to do anything else today but vegetate in front of old 1950s sitcoms. They made me feel like nothing had changed a bit. I lay there smoking cigarettes until six o'clock when my mom came in and told me dinner was ready. I didn't feel like getting up and going in there to eat. Why did she always insist on telling me that? She knew I hated to sit in there with her. And Dad never ever came home for dinner, so it was just her sitting there alone, not some family fantasy like she had about it. It depressed me to think about eating at the dinner table with my mom and dad even if he were there. It made it seem as if time were standing still.
2
"Just bring it in here," I yelled.
"Get it yourself," from the kitchen.
"I'll miss the show!"
Silence.
"Mom!"
Nothing.
I wasn't that hungry anyway.
I felt those burning fields of rage began to rise up in me again. She didn't even respond!
But I didn't act on it.
I really was getting better.
I viscerally detested it when she talked to me in that indifferent "get it yourself" voice. I hated it. She had done this to me before, many times, said something in that indifferent tone. One time I lit the house on fire, calm as you please. Just walked over to the stove and set the hot pad on it, the orange and blue one that one of my great-aunts had crocheted. I'd been seeing that hot pad since before I could even reach the stove. Then I lit it on fire and never saw it again. It burnt up in the immediate flame that shot thick and high to the air vent above it.
“Why did you light the house on fire, Jane?” Was that Miriam asking me that, or was it the police? I kept my eyes closed. If I looked up, I would know it was Miriam and not the two tall officers in blue that had stood over me that night.
“Why are policemen always so big? Oh, don't answer that; ha, ha, how dumb can a question be?”
“Don’t evade my question.”
It was the night before the first day of school—my junior year.
"That's when she really stopped caring."
"People do give up, Jane." Miriam's voice had a tone of exasperation.
"She never cared. There was something I needed, a notebook or some books, something for school the next day, something for the first day of school. You know," my voice started to quiver, "mothers are supposed to care about the first day of school. But she just said 'I don't care what you do'.”
"But you threatened her, remember?"
"Yeah. I threatened her with not going to school."
"She must have been so tired of your manipulations. She really should have gone to a tough-love program a long time before. But she didn't have the heart to throw you out."
"Why should she have thrown her own daughter out? Wait a minute. Don't answer that. I already know. I remember how I was. I remember.”
“What were you like, Jane?”
***
"I don't know why I lit the fire, officer. It seemed like a good idea at the time."
"Your parents said you were laughing and laughing about it."
"That's right." I look up into his ice-cold, blue eyes and uniform.
He stands there a moment. We stare at each other in silence.
"But you're not laughing now."
"That's right."
"Why not?"
"It's not funny anymore.”
He leaves my room, and I overhear him tell my parents—in the gold living room—that I am perfectly sane. My mom is so relieved to hear this, even proud, she seems.
I go to sleep on my little cot that I'd requested in what used to be the guest room. No, I don't want a bed, I had told them years ago. I wanted a cot, so it could be just like on TV, like on M.A.S.H. You k
now, the show?
I sleep that night, and get up and go to school.
***
"I don't remember if I did go to school the next day, but whenever it was I did go back to school, that's where all the fun was, Miriam. I'll probably never have so much fun again in my life," I told her.
"What was so fun, Jane?"
"Well, I'll tell you. I think it all culminated in perhaps the funnest night of my life at the party in Dave Mason's basement. In fact, I think all of us would agree that was the funnest night of our lives."
Of anyone's life really. For how could anyone have had more fun than we did that night in Dave Mason's basement?
How many of us were there? I don't remember. Of course, as with any super-fun night, you should not be able to remember the whole thing. That's part of the point isn't it? So drunk I can't remember?
Wild howling, mad laughter, and the pounding of Dave’s gigantic speakers. You can see them pounding. And even over the loudness, even if you cup your hands over your ears to protect them, you can still hear Gay shouting out obscene alternatives to the lyrics from the kitchen. And the pot pipe passes round and around. And the room begins to spin. And Siegfried, whom we all called Ziggy, leans back in the big black recliner and grins, watching Dave, who has passed out facedown in the cat litter. Dave crawls away a few minutes later to vomit in the corner.
I stumble through the bodies back upstairs to the kitchen, where Krishna laughs her echoing, drunken laugh and sways back and forth, knocking first into me, and then knocking over the bottles of booze by the sink. Gay, and Krishna's brother, and a few nameless faces are making a strange movie in front of the refrigerator.
Someone with dark hair stood with his back to me holding the camera, and Gay is bent over the floor laughing her hideous, drunken, hyena laugh. I stand there a moment with my head cocked at a sharp angle, trying to make sense of it. She has a fork in her right hand, one hand on the counter; three onlookers and Krishna's brother stand there behind her. She keeps putting the fork behind her and pulling it back up again in rhythmic motion, in sync with the sheer, evil sound of her hyena giggle.
The Oshkosh Trilogy 01 - The Dark Lake Page 1