The Flambouie is a ritual that newcomers to the island are initiated with, he explains. It is a shot of Drambuie liqueur heated in a glass with a lighter, and then a second glass is placed atop the first to capture the alcohol fumes before they escape. Typically a crowd of well-wishers will gather to shout encouragement. I have two, whipping the top glass off of each shot, breathing the fumes quickly as if it’s a drug, and then downing the hot liqueur in a swallow. My stomach burns and it feels like living.
John pours me another, for free.
We sit on the leather couches and this time I belong. The large television near the bar shows a gold-colored football team playing a blue one with the sound turned down. Someone that Bryce knows falls off her barstool, but she’s okay and orders another beer. An elderly couple walk in and then out again, looking for a different, perhaps more sophisticated Mackinac experience, and I imagine the woman is looking for ‘a glass of your house chardonnay’, and the man will try a local beer because he’s on holiday and feeling adventurous. Beside the couch Rummy is talking to Blue who is drinking orange juice, her dark hair layered attractively around her face, the silver of her cross resting between the delicate points of her collarbone.
‘I hear people from Canada say “hoser” a lot?’ she asks him.
Rummy smiles, and I can tell he’s making allowances for her.
‘Lots of rumors about us Canadians,’ he says. ‘Whatever you’ve heard it’s all true.’
He leers at her, and she laughs nervously, poking her orange-juice straw around her glass. When she is done he gets her another one.
The jukebox is loud and continuous, the sound of the Pac-Man video game bleeps in the background and Bryce wants to know where my adorable mole went, the one by my eyebrow. I laugh and rub away the concealer. Sober I might have been mortified, but instead feel only mild embarrassment. Bryce leans over and licks it.
When I stumble up to the bar for another drink I notice Trainer, sitting by himself.
‘You lucky bitch,’ he says, and I smile.
At the end of the night Bryce pays our tab and helps me out the door, telling me to follow him. There is a trail he says, a not so short cut that he wants to show me. He makes sure I am steady on my bike before retrieving his.
‘It’s too hard to stay straight,’ I say, feeling that I could probably stay straight just fine.
‘Once you start pedaling,’ he says, ‘you’ll be perfect. You see this?’
He points to a thin sliver of line on the left side of his chin.
‘The tequila did me in last summer, went right off the street and into a lamppost.’
‘That’s not comforting me.’
‘But it’s because I forgot to pedal. So just remember to keep pedaling and you’ll be fine. I promise.’
‘I really like my new bike,’ I say.
We leave the town behind. Instead of continuing up the paved road to the Pine Suites, he veers to the right across some gravel and behind the massive barn owned by the carriage company. The noise of the horses echoes off the high wooden rafters, the sound mournful and loud. Then we are past the barn and the silence encompasses us again as we pedal up an incline towards the trees. I cannot see the path anymore as we enter the forest. If I look up I can see where the trees meet the sky, though just barely, and in the darkness the oak and pine are all one massive wall. There are no streetlights, no sounds, and my entire world is this. We are hurtling too fast through the darkness together and I am afraid of not being fast enough to keep up. I pedal furiously to stay right behind his back tire. As our bikes glide around the curves of the trail he looks back to see if I am keeping up. He keeps looking back and I want to yell:
I can do it!
I’m here!
I won’t be left behind!
I want to laugh and say, ‘I’m not a girl that you need to take care of, Bryce.’
But I don’t say it because I wouldn’t mean it. I don’t say it because he is looking after me and I never asked him to. He gives a shit whether or not I am behind him and he is checking to make sure. I trust him because I have to and he is not fucking off and riding too fast and I am almost crying because it is such a relief to have this.
Pedaling into infinity, this island feels more real than any other place I have lived. I work every day and drink every night and excess is expected and encouraged and there is not enough time, but that’s exactly the point. My friendships here are lively and spontaneous compared to the girls at St. Kat’s now far away and boring with too much education, and there is a man in front of me, a quick ghostly form turned solid and safe in the darkness, and I am beginning to think of him as mine.
St. Paul, 1:35 p.m.
With my chocolate-covered nightgown in the garbage, Anna helped choose my outfit this morning. The decision of what to wear was difficult. If the storm arrived as predicted I would need to be warm, which meant unflattering woolen socks, full cotton underwear and a long-sleeved shirt, which in turn meant unearthing the large Tupperware container marked WINTER CLOTHING from the basement. If the storm veered or dissipated, as they often did, the temperature would stay relatively the same. Rapid Weather Patterns, the government calls them. Appearing fully formed on radar and disappearing as quickly, they are exact, perfect storms with a disciplined set of precipitation rings that destroy everything underneath. I’ve experienced only one, though there have been many warnings.
The first three appeared in rapid succession over a period of two days in California, and the images were fantastic. Buildings covered in ice, flooded with three feet of water, everything glistening in the quiet aftermath, holes punched through cars and roofs by hailstones. The property values for the homes left standing dropped so quickly, those who weren’t displaced simply left. Santa Fe and Salt Lake took most of the influx – the first city by choice, the second by charity.
I was in Monterey for the opening of the Sun Palms, the first of the big resorts the government built to bring in revenue for the rebuilding effort. Meredith and I went in expensive bikinis, drank too much, and met a military man. He’d been from the bay area, which was still underwater, and when the cannonballs of hail hit he’d been walking his dog Mobius – a real pretty beagle, the man told us. When the hail stopped there was nothing left on the end of his leash but pulp, and he was barely conscious anyway, floating down his own neighborhood street in thirteen hours’ worth of rain, hail, and snow. I wanted to know what happened next, and he said a family in Bountiful had taken him in, their ward helping him through his journey. A Mormon family, and I nodded. We all looked out over the water together. What I wouldn’t give for a boiled egg, he told us. But all the chickens had died years ago from the flu.
When I left California, its border rendered as arbitrary as I guess it ever was, I brought a T-shirt for Alan that said, I survived California’s RWPs and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. But he wouldn’t wear it, and I suppose he was right. He usually kept my poor taste in check.
My optimism about the likelihood of the storm veering off course, and also because I was too tired to retrieve my winter clothes from the basement, led me to choose a short-sleeve knitted pullover in a solid wine color, dark and flattering against my pale skin.
‘This color really takes the years off,’ said Anna, plucking approvingly at the material.
I decided to wear jeans because they made me feel younger.
What’s missing is a flat abdomen and suntanned arms, though I never tanned very well, and now there’s no sweat on the backs of my legs or low-slung pants to barely conceal my pubic hair. What’s gone is the feeling of everything years and years ahead, and here I am counting down the hours to an evening.
I’ll take what I can get.
My tea’s gone cold.
I have all of my old journals, two from that Mackinac summer, although I don’t know how I ever found the time to write. The seventy-five books are on a shelf in the hall closet, and will remain there until I die. I wonder what will happen to them wh
en I am gone. If Anna will find them and throw them away, or if she will sit and read, taking an afternoon, then an evening, a weekend, to know me better.
One Saturday, years ago, while Anna and her father were at the Tomahawk Ropes Course in Mankato, I did a meticulous search of her bedroom and found her journal, feeling embarrassed I was so curious and disappointed there seemed to be nothing else to find. My daughter was a mysterious woman, and what I did not know about her seemed suddenly astounding that afternoon; it was irresponsible to be so ignorant. In the drawer of her bedside table, where I found one green apple-flavored condom, was a clean white book with a quotation on the cover – The Past and Future are Illusions. They Exist in the Present. Which is What there is and All there is. The beginning of her interest in Zen; she was just fourteen. Sitting on her bed and locking the door, I decided to start at the end. I still remember the words exactly, written in anger and outlining her opinion of me. I snapped the book shut, humiliated. In the bathroom I ran a hot shower and cried, while afterwards, standing naked in front of the steamed-up mirror I turned and strained to see the soft blue mark of the tattoo from so long ago. I rubbed moisturizer into my face with an upward motion, careful not to tug the skin. I was snippy with Alan for a week.
Would I have been upset if it weren’t true?
I imagine with a delicious horror the skeletons that might jump out from the pages of my own past, an army waving words like knives and stabbing everyone that’s left – although recently too many of these skeletons have been aired, their bones brittle but hard in the sunlight.
Journal number 18, the year after the island:
Test negative. This entry was followed by a drawing of a bare-breasted woman with angry pubic hair.
Journal number 36, right after we slept together:
Alan’s penis is marginally better than Dan’s. A bit longer. Great Lakes birthmark, nice hands.
Journal number 46, right after I started at the office:
Russ took me to 22 Musgrave. Drink Drink. Roast Chicken. Government Amex.* Remember to ask Patty about his lazy eye*
An unnumbered journal, from my thirties:
The hailstones are here, big as babies. In the basement. Anna won’t stop crying.
I sorted through the books earlier today after boxing up the old bed linens. My purple sheets from college had been in that closet for almost fifty years along with my mother’s handmade quilts, some old board games, and an instruction booklet for playing gin rummy. The entire top shelf had been stuffed with sad and oily plush toys Anna had insisted I keep, claiming there was no room in her own house for such things. I called her over and she emerged from my bedroom stopping to perform what she called ‘the forward bend’ asana.
‘You’re just touching your toes,’ I pointed out.
She ignored me for a moment, exhaling loudly with her face between her knees before straightening.
‘Yoga would really help your quality of life, Mother. We could do it together.’
At times, watching Anna makes me wish for my reclining chair, a place to sit, surrounded by my empty house with nothing around me to confuse or contradict my own understanding of the world.
I shook my head and pointed to the top shelf of the closet.
‘Your animals,’ I said.
‘Oh my God!’ Reaching up, she brought down a green rabbit. ‘Holy shit, it’s Bugsby!’
I told her that if she didn’t pick one they were all going in the garbage. She rummaged through them, smelling their fur, finally putting them all in a garbage bag to take back to her house. She knew each one by name. Anna had created nametags for all her toys, printing the letters with black marker and affixing the hello my name is sticker to the plush and plastic breasts.
When the shelf was empty, Anna wrote her name in capital letters on a strip of masking tape and stuck it to the plastic bag, so that it wasn’t confused with the others. She looked at me defiantly and said, ‘Well, I won’t keep all of them. I’ll sort them out later.’
To which I replied, ‘Yeah, right.’
She eyed my journals as she bagged up the animals, but did not say anything.
They sit alone in the closet now, except for a change of pillowcases and some extra blankets for the guest bedroom. An entire closet filled with my own words. I suppose the cupboard is haunted, in a way.
But I’m ready for them now.
The first is as blue as water, the other red and bound in cloth, both absent of any clever quotations. So much of my past in these pages, ready to be discovered, and I will read each page to remember the summer as it was, to help my guest and I to reminisce when he arrives after his long drive.
It is not yet two, the weather is steady in my backyard.
Reading back in time is tedious, tiring, deciphering the horrible handwriting, drunken handwriting, drunken thoughts. Nothing is dated, all the days run together. Beneath the words, eight shots don’t know how I got home fucking bike, I have written, more coherently:
I am in love not because it is Saturday
or spring
not because I am drunk
or alone
not because he is what I was waiting for
but because I am here.
These words have not lost their importance to me, even written so long ago. And what better reason to love?
I run my fingers over the page, but I can’t feel the depression of the letters anymore.
Mackinac
The sun reflects off the water and the roads, and brightens the white buildings. It bakes the island dry and dusty, so by the end of the day the streets are covered in a thin layer of dried horseshit that the men with their wheelbarrows are unable to collect. The dust creeps up pant legs and covers toes and sandals and I know that it’s shit, but it looks like dust so it’s okay.
When I sit to examine my dirty feet closely, I see the brown bits of undigested hay, like tiny slivers of sawdust. Unlike Main Street, scooped, shoveled, and washed clean at night with the town fire hose to emerge pristine and slightly damp the next morning, the shit builds up around our apartments, the flies loud and buzzing. Our road only qualifies for a once a week cleaning.
Inside, away from the breeze off the lake, the Pine Suites heat up with stagnant air, laundry begins to smell, leftover food brings ants (as Velvet’s laminated warning signs had predicted) and the walls seem to be sweating. Our room smells of bodies.
Bryce makes us a pitcher of purple juice and we finish it quickly. When he swallows I can hear the liquid in his throat, and he makes an ahhh sound after every sip. I wonder if after a while this would get annoying, but he’s too new, too good for me to wonder for very long. We lie on his bed, the one sheet shoved to the floor. He licks me with his tongue to see if it will leave a purple mark.
I reach under the bed for my journal. The cover is clean and blue, the new paper white and stiff; I am trying not to fill its pages with things like, laundry detergent, or remember my red shirt. The sweat from my palm sticks to the fresh pages. Bryce wants to know what I’m writing.
‘Secrets.’
‘Tell me.’
I turn the pages as if looking for a specific passage.
June fourth, I read, I think Bryce is just dreamy.
‘Fuck off. What are you writing, really?’
June fifth, I continue, sometimes Bryce swears at me and it makes me sad.
I am worried he might snatch the book from me. Instead he reaches absently across the bed to poke me in the back.
‘You’re very soft,’ he says.
‘Tell me about being Mormon,’ I ask.
He stops poking. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I want to know. Do you have churches?’
‘We have churches.’
‘So what’s the deal? Why Utah?’
‘Wouldn’t you rather have sex?’ he asks.
I roll my eyes at him, and he sighs and then recites as if from a brochure:
Joseph Smith is the founder of the Church of the Latt
er Day Saints. The angel Moroni visited him in upstate New York, and the angel showed him a set of tablets, which laid the foundation for the Mormon religion.
‘Where are they?’
‘Where are what?’
‘The tablets?’
‘In heaven.’
‘And this happened in upstate New York?’
‘That’s the story.’
‘And Salt Lake City?’
‘Good skiing,’ he says.
‘What was on the tablets?’
‘Shit, it’s one o’clock. The game’s on.’
Bryce rolls off the bed, his chest tanned and wet with sweat, and punches the television on. His loose jeans reveal the tops of his boxers: a red and white heart pattern. He notices me noticing.
‘They’re functional, not sentimental,’ he says, anticipating my question.
I decide to see his point. In the kitchen, he pulls a beer from the fridge and then returns, tossing something towards me.
‘What’s this?’
The magnet is plastic, and shows a man in eighteenth-century dress leading a wagon train and pointing. The magnet says, ‘This is the place.’
‘It’s Brigham Young leading the Mormons to Salt Lake. I got it when I was there. You can have it, if you want.’
‘It’s fucking hideous. I don’t want it.’
When I look up he winks at me, and I throw it at him.
‘Who’s Brigham Young?’ I ask.
‘I’m watching the game,’ he says, climbing back into bed.
He takes my hand absently, and kisses my knuckles as the red team beats the blue team in a game that goes into overtime.
Tonight the chef special is duck confit. Chef Walter refuses to tell me what confit means and I have to look it up in his special dictionary, its pages smeared with food and oil. Confit means, ‘roasted in its own juices.’
‘Isn’t that what picatta means too?’
Chef Walter stares at me, then says, ‘Look it up.’
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