Lake People

by Abi Maxwell

  That night, her father did not say goodnight to Mike Shaw. He simply opened the truck door for his daughter and closed it once she’d climbed in. “Buckle up,” he told her, his voice weak and his breath a fog across the cold truck. As he drove he reached his hand in her direction, let it hover above her leg for one moment. Heat blew hard against their faces and sent the quick and sweet smell of him circling around. They never went to see Mike Shaw again.

  But they did take the long way home. Her father drove slowly, and as they passed alongside the lake he unrolled the window. Alice imagined floating out that window, landing upon the frozen water and being taken in as one of the lake people. At the pier he stopped and turned the truck off. Her coat was cinched tight and her arms hung awkwardly over her lap. She looked like a child just in from the snow.

  “There,” her father said quietly, and pointed out to the island. The lake was illuminated, a radiant white, everything crisp and immovable. “Eleonora’s lantern. Do you see it?”

  The wind picked up and howled like a loon. Alice looked out toward the tip of the island. Of course she saw nothing, but still she nodded in agreement. Yes, she was saying. Yes, I know that light is there.

  Hill Country

  1981–1982

  THE FIRST TIME she went to his place there was no staircase—and how would her life have turned out had that staircase never been built? Because funny is what he had been. So funny that she would be knocked right over.

  He lived one hundred miles north of the lake, beyond the mountains, in a vast spread of land where even the tourists didn’t go. After she’d met him, it took Alice but one week to show back up in his driveway. There, on his land, at dusk, in the distance the mountains hung like a single stair across the skyline.

  “I wanted to see the mountains,” she said, which in a way was true, but the real truth was of course that she had wanted to see him. He opened his arms and took her in and the motion was certainly one filled with mocking but still there she was in his arms. They stayed up through the night, telling each other stories and lying back on his bed, keeping the time from passing by keeping their eyes open to each other. When the sun burrowed into the room they looked at nearly all they could look at of each other. Later, he took her to the thrift store, bought her some silly, cheap clothing, said, “Look at that, now you don’t even have to go back home.”

  Later still he said to her, “See, I got room.”

  “Some man thinks you’re a good lay so you just move in with him?” her father asked her when she phoned.

  “Yes,” Alice said. She did not go home.

  He had a great plume of blond hair and he was tall and so funny. From his bedroom—from his bed, even—she could see the mountains. After they made love he would stand there in the second-story window and pee right out of it. And then one time he pointed to a ledge miles away, up the mountain, and he said, “There, let’s do it there.” The birch trees were aglow and they drove and hiked and made love in that spot he had pointed to, on the hard rock ledge, and certainly she and Josh understood each other in some ancient way.

  That first time she’d met Josh, Alice had watched him, eavesdropping. He’d been talking to a friend. That they were talking of some old girlfriend of Josh’s was clear. Their subject was not. “Bad news woman,” Josh had said, and then, “She’s had like five of them.” Miscarriages, Alice had thought suddenly. The word had dropped into her mind like an early leaf turned and fallen. Just as quickly it blew away. When, years later, she recalled that moment, she would have to remind herself that she hadn’t really heard the conversation anyway.

  “You don’t love me,” Alice said one morning at breakfast.

  “Ah, baby, no.”

  “I love you,” she said. She had said it to him before. And in her lifetime she would love again, in a deep, deep way, but never again would it be like this. Here her heart had been wide open. Do what you will, she might have said.

  Josh filled his fork with eggs and hash browns and like an airplane he pushed it toward her mouth. Zoom, zoom, open up. She did, and laughed. He paid the check and waited for her in the truck.

  They made love in that truck. On the mountain, in the truck, upside down, in the kitchen, in the bathtub.

  On that drive home she thought he was angry. She believed this would be it, she had ruined it. It had happened before. “I don’t want a girlfriend,” he would say. “Stay here, be my pal. You’re my bud. Stay, live with me.” That and, “I want to die a lonely old man. I don’t want a girlfriend.” Okay, she would say, every time. How could she say that? It only took a few days, anyway, before he wanted her in his bed again. Each time she agreed. So now, on that drive home, she thought it would be that way. She stayed quiet. She squinted into the thick woods, let her vision shift just enough for a stone wall to appear, a lake, a rising hill of maple like those of Kettleborough. In these moments when he left her she had learned to do that.

  But on this day she was wrong. They stopped at the only stoplight in town and something hit her and she turned to find him pelting her with little packets of cream. Back at the restaurant, just for this, he had filled his coat pockets. One of his jokes. For a time in the renovations of the house—it was a daily chore, and still undone—the bathtub had been in the middle of the room. It had a showerhead, and a curtain that enclosed the entire tub, and Alice had been in there when suddenly a banana flew over the top. Another. And then a potato, a loaf of bread. She had laughed and laughed and the food had not stopped and she had even laughed when the frozen chicken hit her in the head.

  Now he pulled into the courthouse and turned the truck off and came around and opened her door and lifted her out, carried her to the steps. It was deep fall, the leaves a fire raging through the valley.

  “Whoops,” he said, and dropped her on purpose. Ha, ha. He made a show of picking her back up, and at the top of the steps he dipped her and kissed her and said, “Aw, how romantic,” and they were married.

  Among the things that Paul sent his daughter when he heard the news were rubber boots, a rain jacket, and a good rain hat that tied beneath the chin. “Now that you’re a farmer,” he had written. Was it mocking? Alice liked to believe it was not, though she knew that her father was upset and would not ever come visit. In the years since Alice had gone to college, Paul had become angry and stubborn. But it was true—Alice and Josh had planned to farm—chickens, they spoke of, and gardens, and even perhaps a goat. But what did they know? Winter had come but no snow, only so much rain that the ditch along the side of the road had transformed to a dirty river. In it were carried brittle leaves and sticks and once in a while a beer can, an empty bag of chips that a driver had let float out the window.

  Josh worked most days, construction here and there, but Alice couldn’t find a job. She took to passing her time sitting close to the woodstove—for there were still great gaps between the logs that formed the walls of the house, which meant that the wind came streaking through like an army of ghosts. Alice read and cut the crosswords from the paper. They had built a staircase by now, together, during one of their good spells, and she learned to keep a packed suitcase at the base of it, for even now that they were married Josh’s periods of breaking up with her still had not ended. She believed the suitcase helped to put Josh at ease about their marriage.

  Her father might not approve, but those gifts he had sent were sensible. Each day Alice put them on, the boots and coat and hat, and went out into the cold, wet world. It was her one grace of the day. Up the road she walked. She dreamed of leaving, of going to Boston and getting a job, taking up an apartment in the city. Though in truth what propelled this dream was the vision of Josh chasing her there. Alice, he would call. How he would tell her he loved her.

  Alice liked to call to animals, like the moose she saw one day as she stood in the window. She spoke to it silently: Come here, I won’t hurt you, come inside. The beast loped across the lawn and was off. None of the animals—there were a lot, like deer, and
the coyotes she heard howling in the night—would respond to her. None but the squirrel who now came to the back door each morning and waited for her to put breakfast out. She fed it toast spread thickly with jam. But she had yet to befriend any other animal. Even Josh’s dog, Dorie. When Alice tried to bring her along for a walk she would show her teeth and faintly growl. For friendship Alice stuck to the squirrel.

  And then one day she was walking through the field across the road and speaking in her head to a deer she was sure she heard over at the edge of the thin line of woods, by the road. Josh wanted to call it off. He had moved to his own bedroom. Alice could call it off. She could, couldn’t she? She cinched her rain cap tighter and took big, heartfelt steps, though her hip was still sore.

  “Martha!” a woman called. Maatha. Not a deer at all. “Martha up the street! That’s me!” The woman moved quickly through a patch of brambles and ran across the field to Alice. Under her sweatshirt her massive chest heaved.

  “It’s Martha up the street,” the woman—sopping wet, with no hat or coat or boots—managed between breaths. “Alice! I been meaning to see you, I says to my husband, I says Ronny, that over in the Blaisdells’ old place, that is Miss Alice Thorton, nicest girl I ever knew. I says that! Course I see you gots yourself a man, so you isn’t Thorton no more, but all the same I says it was you and sure enough plain as day it is, I ain’t so stupid as Ronny says, but of course I don’t get out much, first day really, the kids, you know Christy? Fourth grade already! And Jason first and today I say, what the hell. Ronny’s sleeping the day over at the factory, your husband work there, too? Course! Why else we come to this forsaken place! My Ronny works nights and sometimes he sleeps there, just a little cot they got, but here I am gabbing on and you ain’t said one word. Gabbing Martha, that’s what my sister says. Shut your trap! Ronny says that. Just shut up. Alice.”

  Alice Thorton, it was still her name. She had not had the courage to take Josh’s, had thought it would be too much for him and would make him leave her. Now she wondered if the name would give her a bit of authority. The wind shifted and a deer took flight out of the woods. Alice watched as it cut across the field and was gone. That was it. “Martha.”

  “Martha Paquette,” Martha said.

  Martha Hill, she had been. In Kettleborough nearly all the Hills—no one knew just how many—lived up there by the dump. Hill Country, they called it. Not the Hills themselves but others about town, because the road seemed as though it was its own country. Across their spread of land were strewn houses and shacks and even teepees. A thin stand of pine trees lined the road before their property, so to see in one had to try. And people did, momentarily, slowing down and edging toward the side of the road, peering but pretending not to. There were rumors about how the Hills guarded their land with shotguns, so no one ever dared pull in. So Alice hadn’t really known Martha, not until they had been placed together for a school shop project. In spite of herself Alice had loved Martha’s unflinching ways. “Kids don’t like me, ain’t that life?” she would say. That year there had also been rumors about Martha, of her home and the kind of meat she ate, raccoons mostly, and then those terrible things, her doing it with Jay Hubbard one minute and his brother the next, on the old railroad bed with a makeshift condom of plastic wrap and a rubber band. Alice had done nothing to stop those rumors, though in shop class she and Martha had laughed together so much that whispers started to circulate about her, too, ones that said that Alice was finally with her own kind. Still, when Martha would wave in the hallway or the cafeteria, Alice would turn the other way. This was public, after all, where Hills were only friends with Hills. It wasn’t long before shop class ended and so, too, their friendship.

  “I always thought of you,” Martha said now. “I says to Ronny, I says, I know I got me a friend in Alice Thorton. And up here we need a friend, don’t you say? My family ain’t up here, course you know that. I know you always was nice. I says, Ronny Paquette, just because you can’t stand me don’t mean no one can. You leave this house, he says, and I’ll whoop your ass. And he will, too, ain’t that the truth.” Here she turned her bare face into the wind and made a whistling noise, yes-sir-ee. “But today I says what the hell, Martha Paquette, we is taking ourselves for a walk. And here I run into you! Our house first one up from the gully, you know that? You seen it? You’s the nicest friend I ever had, you know that, Alice Thorton?”

  “I’ve seen your house, Martha,” Alice said. Each day she passed by it, a small turquoise house down in the gully, with rooms built on from the center so sloppily it looked like a house of playing cards that would surely blow over in the wind.

  “Sure,” Martha said, responding to nothing. “I would love to take a walk with you tomorrow.” At the edge of the field Martha called Alice’s name once more, and it came to Alice not like the insistent voice of this strange old friend but like a welcome song, or a bell. A warm wind came up behind Alice and her hair blew forward, caught in her mouth. She turned southward, knowing that if she crossed those mountains she could just go a distance and then fall right into the lake, home.

  While Josh split firewood in the dark, Alice fished through the kindling box for another old newspaper to cut the crossword from. Already they had a pile of firewood big enough to last two winters, but still he wouldn’t quit. Over the kindling box Alice sharpened her pencil with a knife. When the phone rang she was startled, and the knife slipped, and she nearly sliced her finger open. In a daze Alice counted the phone’s rings and imagined what may have happened had that knife slipped differently, or just a little more. She may have sliced her wrist right open. She may have bled to death. Then what would Josh have thought? They had no answering machine, and at thirty the phone still rang.

  “Yes,” she said. Not the way she typically answered the phone but this is what came out.

  “Martha up the street,” the voice on the other end whispered. “Martha. You there? Alice? It’s Martha up the street!”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank the Lord for that. I gots to tell you something, Alice. You know my husband, you know Ronny. I gots to pack his dinner and sometimes his lunch, too. You ever been to the mill? Over past town? Alice? They got those machines there to buy some boxes of soup but I say Ronny! Alice? Hello?”

  “Martha.”

  “I thought you dropped right off the planet!” The whisper vanished. Martha talked full-speed now, told Alice that tomorrow she needed to make cookies for her husband’s lunch—and of course she’d slip two each into her children’s packs, too—but she was out of flour. Did Alice have a few cups of flour? A little more than that? Enough for the week? “You know Ronny. He says I leave this house my ass is grass. Dead meat. Dead as a doornail? You remember that from school? Dead As A Doornail!”

  “Yes, Martha. I’ll bring it up in the morning.”

  Alice set the phone down, fed the fire, drank a glass of water. The room was big and empty around her, and when the phone rang—Martha again—she was thankful. “My clothes all wet from our walk today, you remember?” Martha said she could not have her husband catch her with wet clothes. Could Alice come over and take them, just hang them to dry for the night at her own house?

  “Martha,” Alice said. “Isn’t your husband home now?”

  “You think I’m on the phone when Ronny’s home? He works nights, I got to tell you twice!”

  “Then can’t you dry the clothes at your own home?”

  “What if he comes in for a surprise! Alice, use your brain!”

  Alice agreed to do it. In truth she was relieved to have a task. She put that big-brimmed hat on and Josh’s thick jeans, the ones lined with flannel. She pulled her feet into her boots. There was something the matter with her car, it had not started for weeks, so she took Josh’s truck keys from his coat pocket. She would go to Martha’s first, get the wet clothes. And then to the grocery store, where she would buy the woman her flour. Before leaving, Alice went to look in the mirror. How many days had it been sin
ce she’d been in public? Her face looked different, tired, the skin pale and blotchy. She pinched her cheeks until they filled with blood and then she went out, passed by Josh without a word. He did not look up from his work.

  There was a small wooden porch that led to Martha’s front door, and Alice went up it and knocked, but there was no answer. She could hear the television, and see its flashes of light through the curtains. She knocked again, and called out, “Martha!” and that was when she heard a pounding on the window, followed by the holler of a little boy. Alice moved toward the window where he had knocked, but the curtain had been pulled shut again.

  “Get,” she heard. It was a low sound, a sort of hiss. It had come from Martha, her head stuck out the front door, darting back and forth like a bird on watch. With her foot she pushed the door open farther, and opened her arms. The pile of wet clothes dropped. “Get,” Martha said once more, and pulled the door closed.

  Alice considered leaving the clothes there on the porch, but then what else did she have to do? She took the clothes and though Martha had been cruel she went to the store for her all the same, bought a big bag of flour. At home she realized that she could have gone to the store first, then dropped off the flour when she picked up the clothes. The way she had chosen to do things was probably more difficult. But at least this way filled up more of her time. Carefully Alice hung the sweatshirt, T-shirt, and jeans on the dry rack. They were still soaked and wrinkled, and they already smelled of mildew. It seemed Martha had taken them off and stuffed them away as they were. Alice took them back off the rack and put them in the machine to wash. She unlaced the sneakers and pulled the tongues up and she set them by the woodstove.