“I wish I could play basketball,” she told me when we were halfway around the block.
“Women’s basketball isn’t that interesting,” I argued. “They can’t dunk.” I ran ahead, pretending I was making my way down a basketball court toward the net, then jumped for my layup. The leaves on the sidewalk scattered when I landed.
“Then I wish I could be on the men’s team,” my mother said. She had always been stubborn, but depression made her more so.
“You’d be awfully short.”
“Not all of them are as tall as they look.” She was wearing a kelly-green stocking cap that one of us had knitted for her in seventh-grade home economics class. The stitches were long and loose, the tiny ball hung halfway down her back.
“Some of them are seven feet tall.” I said, but I should have known better than to get into this kind of thing with her. She was much better than my father had predicted before he died.
“Spud Webb’s only 5′ 6″.”
“Spud Webb sounds like a potato,” I told her. The street lamps flickered on. We were back home, but evening was still a half hour off, and we started around the block again.
“He plays for Atlanta,” she said. “Went to school at North Carolina State. But the shortest player in the NBA is only 5’3".”
“That’s impossible,” I said. It was raining, but the day was warm—almost humid—and we had not bothered with umbrellas. “He’d be a midget out there with all those other guys.”
“Tyrone Muggsy Bogues,” she said and stopped walking while she collected her thoughts. “He’s with the Hornets. Came from Wake Forest. Check it out if you don’t believe me.”
She knew I wouldn’t know where to begin to look up that kind of information.
“Well, those guys might be short, but they’re young,” I reminded her, not because I didn’t think she knew this, but because I wasn’t sure how serious she was.
“I didn’t say I could play pro basketball. I’m saying I wish I could play it.”
“I wish you could play it, too,” I told her. “Megan, Nina, and I could be the presidents of your fan club. We’d be there at all the home games holding up signs with Bible quotations no one would understand, screaming out your nickname when you stepped up to the foul line.” I sneezed and she handed me a tissue. It was a sign that I should either wipe my face or blow my nose. I did both and then, just as I had when I was a kid, handed her the soiled tissue, which she stuffed back in the deep front pocket of her raincoat.
Later that week, when I called to invite her out to dinner, she told me she couldn’t go. She was busy.
“Doing what?” I asked.
“I’m going to learn to kayak,” she said, and I asked her to repeat what she had just said.
“Kayak,” she said and then spelled it out for me. “Like the Indians did. That’s how they saw the world. They got in their kayaks and paddled to different places when they got bored.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going to have my adventure.”
“I see,” I said, when at the time I clearly didn’t see anything at all.
With nothing to do at the hospital, I took a taxi to the Petosky airport.
The front door was locked, but when I knocked a woman in a ski parka opened the door.
“You caught me napping,” she said. Her checks were red, her eyes puffy. I apologized.
“The Blue Goose arrives in an hour.” She pointed to the door leading out to the tarmac. The Petosky County Airport has so few flights that instead of numbers they use nicknames. One airline, one gate—the Blue Goose arrives from Detroit at 4:00 P.M. every day, the Canadian Fowl in from Sault Ste. Marie at noon, and the Chicago Eagle at 8:30 every other evening.
Megan and Nina, the only women on a flight with seven businessmen, were last off the plane.
“Welcome to Petosky,” I said.
Megan was surprised to see me. “You left Mom alone?”
“She’s sleeping,” I said. “This trip exhausted her.”
“I bet,” Megan said.
Nina stood a few feet away from Megan and me. Nina has always been closer to Megan. I used to think it had to do with size—they are exactly the same size and have shared clothes since they graduated from Catholic grade-school uniforms. Even now they borrow each other’s dresses, good shoes, winter dress coats. Their lives continue to be similar, just as they were when we were growing up. They both work for General Motors, Megan out in the Lake Orion plant, Nina in an accounting division at the headquarters downtown. They both live in suburban Detroit, and both their husbands are from Indiana, a detail that sealed, at least for me, their similarities. Nina is still debating whether or not to have kids, but when she does, I’m sure she’ll have two. Just like Megan.
Nina hugged me stiffly. Her oversized carry-on bag swung off her shoulder and hit me on the top of my right thigh. I could tell she was trying not to be angry with me.
“Why’d you have to do something so stupid?” she asked after Megan was out of hearing range. “Really, Caroline. Doesn’t the family have enough to worry about without you doing something stupid like this?” Nina wears the same perfume as my mother, and the musky odor startled me until I got used to it. Then it seemed to underline why we were talking like this.
“Megan’s furious,” Nina whispered. “She wants to know what happened.”
“She already knows everything,” I told her. “We talked on the phone for half an hour.”
Nina shook her head. “The police told Megan you were standing on the side of the river. They said you let her get in the boat. You stood right there and let her do it.”
“Close,” I said. I moved my hands apart as if to measure the distance. “I got pretty close. The river is right beside a beech forest, so it’s hard to get right up to the river. The state park is a maple and beech tree haven. You’ll find more of those trees there than anywhere else in the world.”
“Don’t,” Nina warned and started walking toward Megan and the car-rental woman.
“Don’t what?” I followed alongside her.
“Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?”
“You treat this like some kind of joke, and Megan’s going to explode,” she said. “You have no idea how angry she is.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you mad, too?” The other passengers arriving on the Blue Goose had gone, and the large room was again quiet except for the clicking of the baggage carousel, which had circled with only a few pieces of luggage.
“I just don’t know what you and Mom have been up to,” Nina sighed, and I knew she and Megan had argued this over and over on the flight north.
“We haven’t been up to anything,” I said. “No one’s been up to anything.”
“Sometimes when I’m over at the house I feel like I’m walking into some kind of secret club. All sorts of whispering and planning.”
“There isn’t any club,” I said, but Nina walked away and joined Megan by the door. The woman told me she had enjoyed talking with me, and I thanked her.
The wind was coming off Lake Michigan, cold and sharp, nothing at all to do with spring, when we stepped outside.
“I can drive,” I volunteered.
“No.” Megan shook her head. “Absolutely not.”
“I know my way around,” I argued. “It’ll be easier than me yelling out directions every two minutes.”
“You don’t have a license,” Megan said. “Remember?”
“Would one of you open the door?” Nina said. She had her hands deep inside her coat pockets, and she looked tired. “I don’t care who drives the car. Just open it.”
“It’s not illegal for me to drive,” I said. “I just lost my license. I can still drive.” But I handed the keys over and got into the backseat so Nina could sit closer to the heat vents.
Megan drove straight into downtown Petosky without asking for any help. She didn’t even hesitate, and I said something a
bout what a good memory she had. As a family we used to vacation in that part of northern Michigan when we were kids. My father rented a two-room cottage on Walloon Lake, and we spent a month there every summer.
I waited in the downstairs lobby while Megan and Nina went up to the room. I was tired but knew I would not sleep.
Megan and Nina don’t like the way I live my life. Their disapproval isn’t something that makes me want to prove that they’re wrong, because I don’t think they are. I know my singleness makes them uncomfortable, and they’re constantly asking me why I don’t date more. This is odd, because I don’t date at all. Somehow I imagined my life would be somewhat different from how it actually turned out. I thought by the time I was thirty-three I would have been more settled with my choices. I don’t think I counted on a prince on a white horse, but I saw myself with someone. However vaguely I imagined him, I at least imagined he’d be someone.
My mother and I had spent most of our time in the U.P. looking for Indian artifacts. We didn’t have any digging tools, but we walked near the shores of Lake Superior, checking near the bases of the tall evergreen trees for things that stood out against the dark-green, dark-brown earth. We were looking for surprises but found mostly rocks and a few pieces of off-white water glass. The man in the pancake restaurant we ate at two mornings in a row told us about shipwrecks in the area, and my mother and I looked for pieces of cargo that might have washed ashore.
“I don’t believe other people can keep us from loneliness,” my mother said to me one afternoon while we were treasure hunting.
“Well, of course we do,” I told her. “That’s why we have friends. That’s why we spend time with people.”
“I don’t believe that’s true.”
“Look at you and Dad. You two were happy together. You weren’t lonely when he was alive.”
The tall pines moved in the strong wind coming off the lake. We couldn’t see it from the path, but the chill of the spring water was in the air all around us, and it burned our faces bright red. My mother stopped walking and handed me something she had hidden in her raincoat. I thought it was a tissue. I shook my head and told her I didn’t need one.
“Which one do you like best?” she asked, and handed me two photographs of herself.
“What for?” I asked. “Which one do I like best for what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she sighed. “It’s always nice to have a photograph of yourself close by.”
She had selected old photographs. Photographs when she was younger. One showed her walking down an aisle in a dark wood church, dressed in a strapless gown with a full skirt. Her partner was wearing a morning suit, gray pants with long dark tails. He was not my father, and when I asked her who it was, she asked me if I liked her hair. I touched the nape of her neck and said it looked fine.
“No. I mean here,” she said and gestured to the photograph with her red-mittened hand. “We wore such cute dresses back then. Not like those awful floor-length things you wear today.”
“When was the last time you saw me in something floor-length?” I asked.
“Who are you walking with in this picture?” Her dress was nice. Her hair was styled around her face. It was dated, but she looked happy, as if anticipating that something exciting was about to happen.
“I think this one will do.” She took the one of her as a bridesmaid out of the plastic bag and gave it to me. “This is really the best one.”
“Is that Uncle Bill?” I asked, though I knew it wasn’t.
“I wish I had a clearer head shot, but this one will have to do.”
“Who’s going to need a photograph of you?” My mother was not whimsical. She had a reason for everything she did.
“Keep it in a safe place,” she said. “Someplace where it will stay dry.” That’s all she said, and a few minutes later we went back to our treasure searching. The dead autumn leaves crumbled when we picked through them. The ground at certain spots had thawed, and the earth was cold and wet in our hands. Later that afternoon, we washed the dirt trapped under our nails in the water of the Tahquamenon River, and I began to understand what she was doing.
Nina stepped out of the elevator alone. They hadn’t been upstairs long, fifteen minutes at the most. The receptionist was on the phone, her back turned to us. She spoke in hushed tones, but the echoes in the room were such that I could have heard every word if I had wanted to. I stood up and stretched. My lower back ached, and I rubbed it through my raincoat.
“Mom wants to know where her kayak is,” Nina said.
“Is she awake?” I asked.
“Awake and worried about the kayak,” Nina said. “She’s not talking about anything else.”
“Does she want to see me?”
“I’ve been up since five-thirty,” Nina complained. “Can you just do what Megan says so we can get some dinner, maybe some sleep tonight?”
Prone to exaggeration, sometimes outright lying, Nina is the kind of person who goes around telling people that her whole life changed when John Lennon died. People are impressed with this kind of statement. It’s strong, powerful, almost spiritual, until you add it up. Nina, who was born in 1964, would have been all of fifteen the day Lennon was shot. I once asked her what kind of changes she went through and she said something about cutting out the excessive things in her life. I guess maybe she switched from Coke to Diet Pepsi, or started limiting herself to one hour of television a night. I like her exaggerations and feel sorry when they get her into trouble, as eventually they always do.
“How is she feeling?” I asked.
“She’s okay,” Nina said. “Obsessed with her kayak.”
Up to that point I hadn’t been thinking about the kayak. All morning long it had just been my mother and me alone in the park. And then when the DNR guys came out in their boat, it seemed that we were surrounded by people. In all the confusion, I lost track of what happened to her kayak.
“Tell her it’s on its way,” I instructed Nina. “What does that mean?”
“Just tell her that,” I said. I was sure that the kayak must be in the falls, maybe out in Whitefish Bay by now.
“It’s on its way?” Nina asked.
“She’ll understand.”
“Secret clubs,” Nina said and headed back to the elevator. “A two-person sorority. That’s what this is.”
“Don’t worry, Nina,” I advised. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll be happy to hear this.”
I found the book buried between the sheets on her bed. She had all but quit housecleaning, and the place was a disaster. I went over one night to dust, do a few loads of laundry. An oversized children’s book—the front cover was a painting of an Indian doll in a canoe caught on a wave in the middle of a storm. Paddle to the Sea. The waters are white-capped and it looks like the little boat is moving upstream, against the waves. I opened it and skipped through the text, looking mostly at the pictures. It was a story I remembered from school. It is the story of an Indian boy from Canada who longs to have an adventure but can’t leave his village. He carves a wooden doll sitting inside a canoe. In the early spring he sets the doll on top of a mountain and waits for the sun to melt the snow. The carved toy takes off for a long journey through and around the Great Lakes, up into Quebec, until finally he makes it out to the sea.
“Is this what this is all about?” I carried the book downstairs to confront my mother.
By this time she was a member of three or four kayak groups. That night she was sitting on the couch; her legs tucked under her, flipping through a new catalog. She rarely drank now. She was convinced that alcohol muddled her concentration. She took a mind-control class at the YWCA in Royal Oak and was convinced that she was smarter. She paid a lot more attention to what she ate, cutting out red meat and fatty foods from her diet. She’d click her tongue at me when I ordered hamburgers or cheese steak sandwiches.
“Excuse me?” she said. She worked out on free weights, and I could see the difference in her shoulders and che
st. She was fit. Strong and healthy, she looked much younger than fifty-five.
“This,” I said and held up the book. “Is this why you’re doing all this kayaking?”
“That’s a children’s book,” she said, and took it from me. “I used to read it to you girls when you were younger.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “I never heard this story before.”
She bent her head forward and began rubbing the back of her neck. I could hear her joints cracking—her workouts kept her constantly sore. We had installed a shower massage to relax her muscles before bed. She slept less, but it didn’t seem to affect her. She was full of energy.
“Mom,” I said.
She looked up, her hair covering her face. She no longer had it done every week in the beauty parlor, and now it was an outgrown perm that she cut herself every two or three weeks in the upstairs bathroom. I had just cleaned the sink of hair.
“Okay,” she said. “I never read it to you as a kid.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said, and sat on the armchair across from her. She motioned for me to move. I was sitting on a stack of magazines, but I told her they’d be fine. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“It’s a book,” she said. “That’s all.”
“It’s a book about an Indian who canoes out to the ocean.”
“The doll makes it out to the ocean,” she explained and opened the book to show me one of the illustrations. “The Indian boy has to stay in his village. Up in Canada.”
“And where are you going?” I asked.
“It’s almost nine-thirty,” she said and pointed to her watch. “I don’t think I’ll go anywhere tonight.”
No one could avoid things better than my mother did. I knew she was planning something and I knew she was soliciting my help, but no matter how many times I asked her to explain, she hesitated and talked about the rapids, the sharp rocks whitewater rafters love but kickers fear. And somewhere in all that avoidance, I became her partner.
It was on our fourth night of camping, just after we had closed the tent and lain down ready and waiting for sleep, when my mother told me she wasn’t going to worry about me. It was only eight o’clock, but nightfall comes early in northern Michigan, and it had already been dark for a few hours. We had forgotten candles and used our flashlights only for bathroom visits. Spooked by the quiet woods, we always went together. There was nothing to do but go to bed and wait for morning.
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