The Summer List

by Amy Mason Doan

“Accidental loss of strength,” I whispered.

  She looked up. “What?”

  “You said that last night.”

  “Did I? That’s not bad. I should have Elle call it that. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is hard for her to pronounce.”

  A man in my mother’s building had ALS. Walkers, wheelchairs, the gradual loss of every muscle, even though the mind was fine. It was the cruelest disease.

  “Laur, don’t cry. Not yet. Later, we’ll cry.”

  All I could see was Casey swimming like a mermaid, skating like a little kid. I’d just gotten her back.

  “When did you...” I could barely mutter the words.

  “Four months ago.”

  “And what’s your...”

  “You can say it. How long do you have?”

  “There’s research now, money. That ice-bucket thing. And Stephen Hawking, he’s had it for ages, right? Maybe...”

  She laughed. Actually laughed. “Everyone says that about the ice buckets and Stephen Hawking. But there’s no cure yet. And Hawking’s an outlier. Nobody understands how he keeps going.”

  “Still, that means there’s hope, there must be—”

  “It’s moving slowly for me. I might have five or six years. Depends on what I’m willing to live with. I might have ’til Elle’s twenty-one, if I’m lucky.”

  “How is she? You said she knows.”

  “She knows the basics. It’s the worst part. She’ll have my mom. But...”

  “I’ll help. I’ll...” But who was I? Someone who’d walked out on her friendship nearly two decades before. Who’d never even met her little girl.

  “You being back is pretty nice,” she said softly. “Sitting here. I’ll take that for now.”

  When I trusted myself to look at her I found her eyes swimming and had to look down. I concentrated on her small sunburnt hand in mine.

  35

  November

  Three months after camp

  She had another name now. Just like Alexandra became Sandy, clutching her gold bible like a shield so they couldn’t take all of her, Katherine became Kate. That’s what she wrote on her name tags.

  Her mother had made new friends at her church retreat. Lolly was out. Lolly wasn’t really saved, her mother had said. She thought she was but she wasn’t, like most people, even most people at the church.

  The two of them joined a new church, one formed by her mother’s retreat friends. True believers. Her mother said she’d never seen so clearly before.

  For months Katherine reasoned, pleaded, cried, shook her mother’s shoulders in a useless attempt to rattle the blankness from her eyes.

  Then Katherine retreated to some small fortress within herself.

  Now it was Kate who prayed for eight hours on Saturday and ten hours on Sunday, who didn’t complain as she shivered in the industrial building in Daly City that Reverend Brockwood had leased to hold his swelling congregation.

  The warehouse had once been used to pack chowder and still held a lingering cologne of dead fish. Katherine would have giggled and poked her mother, crinkled her nose when Reverend Brockwood preached about Fishers of Men. And Katherine’s mother, wherever she had gone, would have giggled, too, whispered, Let’s get the hell out of here. But this meek, obedient woman was not Katherine’s mother.

  It was Kate who surrendered her old clothes, even her favorite embroidered cutoffs and the sheer, vanilla-colored blouse they’d bought at the mall only last March, the blouse her mom once said made her look like a medieval princess. Kate who accepted her new costume of long skirt and high-necked shirt.

  March seemed like so long ago now. Their lives before seemed made-up, a dream. Had her mother been unhappy with their old life, but hidden it all along? She must have been, to want to replace it with this life just because she was fried.

  Her word. Her excuse for going to Three Pines, spending summer apart. She was fried from her job, her life, and had needed a change. A rest. That’s how they’d been trapped in this new life.

  Fried. A silly-sounding expression until you thought about it.

  Now, it scared her. Her mother’s old personality had been burned up. Like it wasn’t beautiful.

  Her wild, somewhat whooping laughter, and her ideas about how to parent, like the time they’d both called in sick and gone to the Redwoods instead of school and work. Mental health days, her mother called these outings.

  The way her mother had always tickled her. Even the way she’d sobbed quietly under her covers after her last boyfriend had split, served Campbell’s tomato soup for five dinners in a row, her red-rimmed eyes caked with too much orangey-pink Erase concealer, but still not concealed. She would have preferred even the sad days, like the tea day, to this blankness. The terrifying evenness of her voice.

  Her mother hadn’t been fried before like she’d said: They had fried her over the summer, while Katherine was just down the road. They had cooked her circuits. Rewired her.

  But Katherine wouldn’t let herself be fried like her mother; she had Kate to protect her.

  Kate let them dunk her in a plastic wading pool while they sang and cried and raised their palms to the metal roof. And Kate stopped herself from running, screaming, through the phalanx of worshippers in their metal folding chairs after she emerged, dripping and sputtering, and saw her mother’s blue eyes streaming with joy, her face as wet as her own.

  Kate kept Katherine alive.

  And Alexandra kept her sane.

  Alexandra rolled her eyes from across the room whenever fat Reverend Brockwood beat his podium. If they managed to sit together, Alexandra found secret ways to entertain her. She passed her notes, rolled like tiny cigarettes, that said Scavenger Hunt! She listed things to find in the vast room: polka-dot scarf, man with three-plus folds in his neck, bird’s nest in rafters.

  Once she tilted her bible so Katherine could see the faint pencil sketch drawn in a corner of the glossary page. Two girls in braids, half-hidden under an umbrella. The meaning was clear; Reverend Brockwood was a spitter, and the more fired-up he got, the more vigorously he railed about lust and wickedness, the hypocrisy of other faiths, the more the saliva flew from his tiny mouth, anointing the lucky worshippers sitting front-row center.

  These small gestures made her new life bearable.

  So one Sunday morning, when Alexandra and Katherine met in the far-right ladies’ room stall for a few stolen moments before they had to become Sandy and Kate again, Katherine asked only one question when Alexandra pulled a piece of foil from her turtleneck.

  It was smaller than a stamp, with two fuchsia disks affixed to it like candy buttons.

  “What are they?”

  “They make everything wonderful. They make everything...soft.”

  Alexandra peeled them off and touched her tongue to one, swallowed. She held her palm under Katherine’s chin.

  Katherine mimicked her friend, accepting the tiny pill with her tongue. Their own secret communion.

  And just as Alexandra had promised, twenty minutes into afternoon service, the warehouse’s right angles blurred and melted, her metal folding chair became velvet, and even the bloated, waxy face of Reverend Brockwood changed to warm liquid color. He spoke of lambs, and she saw lambs trotting down the aisles, reached out, and petted their billowy wool. He recited from the book of Hosea: “And the old king will float away like driftwood on the surface of water.” And she floated.

  Wonderful.

  Winter

  The candy buttons got her through January.

  In February Alexandra said she was running away. Her parents had told her—had told the Sandy version of her, the only one they knew, who could be trusted with such news—that the elders of the church had voted to sell off the Three Pines property.

  The church was officially splitting. No more arguing between the older
members and the new ones. Alexandra’s parents and some other families were following Reverend Brockwood to a piece of land he owned in Idaho. Seventy acres. Privacy. No other faiths nosing around, questioning their rules.

  The church in Idaho would have its own school, just for them. There was a boy they had their eye on for her; they would have their own house.

  It would be wonderful.

  Alexandra had fifty-eight dollars, ones and fives she’d pilfered from her mother’s purse.

  And she had a plan: a ride, a place to crash. Just until she saved more money, waitressing, maybe. Then she was going to move on to Los Angeles or New York. She was going to act, or paint, or sing. She was going to do everything.

  “You’re staying with him, aren’t you?”

  “Come with me. He likes you.”

  Katherine shook her head. “She wouldn’t make us go. She wouldn’t quit her job.”

  “She’s changed. They change.”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  Alexandra has to run away, she thought, but if the church splits up and the craziest of them move, my life will go back to normal.

  Later that night, after she found the packed bags in her mother’s closet, after she saw the check for unused vacation days endorsed to Reverend Brockwood, after she confronted her and she said, “Yes. Yes, of course we’re going with them,” and Katherine pleaded, begged for things to go back to how they were, and her mother smiled that empty, empty smile and said of course she didn’t want things to go back to the way they were, Katherine called Alexandra.

  “When do we leave?”

  36

  Sacred Institutions

  Late June 1999

  Summer before college

  “You gave me too much, dear.” Mrs. Sheehan pressed a nickel into my palm.

  Before I could apologize for making wrong change she was out the propped-open front doors, nibbling her square of blueberry-lemon cake. Blue Moon Cake, my mother’s neat penmanship spelled out on the sign taped to the table edge. Everyone said how clever she was, inventing this cake, how the shiny crescent moons of blueberry pie filling in each piece of lemon sponge were so perfect, how she should open a bakery. The way people raved, you’d have thought she’d cured malaria.

  I’d sold four cakes and a dozen slices, plus assorted brownies, blondies, and muffins, during the usual sugar frenzy after Reverend Talbert’s send-off from Ephesians: “Know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God!”

  Filled with the fullness of God. And baked goods.

  Now it was only me, a few stragglers, and Mrs. Pettit, manning her own card table—for choir sign-ups, I assumed—across the room. Any minute the deacon would unprop the front doors and I’d be free.

  J.B. was home from LA for the weekend so he and Casey and I were driving to a beach we liked in Pinecrest. They were picking me up at 11:30 in his truck.

  J.B. Now officially, gloriously, my boyfriend.

  We’d exchanged emails all fall and spent Thanksgiving break talking and kissing in his truck cab, listening to the radio, fogging up the windows.

  At Christmas I agonized over his gift and decided to sketch him instead of buying something. A small black pen-and-ink, only three by four inches, as if trying to capture his soul would seem less intimate in miniature. As if its size would make it a casual present.

  Though I spent more time on those twelve square inches of Bristol board than I had on anything I’d ever drawn. I mimicked the intense gothic style of the woodcut illustrations in my 1943 edition of Jane Eyre. J.B. staring across the lake, remembering the cruel boy who’d taunted him. His hair wet, his eyes soft, lost in another world.

  We sat outside my house in his truck for our gift exchange. The Pogues belting out “Fairytale of New York” on KALT-FM. He handed me a heavy rectangular package wrapped in flocked red-and-green paper and I gave him his almost weightless little present swathed in gold tissue.

  His gift for me was a gorgeous color hardcover about the painter Lee Krasner.

  “It’s perfect,” I said, carefully turning the pages. “I love her.”

  He held my line drawing up to the truck’s overhead light for a long time before speaking, then nodded. “It’s me,” he said simply.

  After that we emailed daily and talked on the phone three times a week.

  I made him tell me about the four other girls he’d been with. Names, ages, the where, the how often. I told him about my unremarkable dates in town, my explorations before the good-nights.

  I confessed what I hadn’t told anyone except Alex—that I wanted to draw. I told everyone else I wanted to be a graphic designer. Practical. Safe. He told me about his favorite buildings in LA, that he’d wanted to major in architecture but had switched to straight engineering for the sure money. For his mom.

  The messages zipping up and down California between JulianB@netzero.com and kayakgirl96@aol.com got longer, warmer, until he sent one sweetly official, brief missive in January:

  Subject: technical?

  are you my girlfriend? used word today, describing you to nosy fellow TA

  terminology accurate?

  ps hope it is

  During the academic year he had to work on campus most weekends, tutoring and in the engineering lab. But he stole away one Saturday in February. Driving six hours to meet my bus in Sacramento, where we found a quiet café. Hitting the road again three hours later in the opposite direction, a quad espresso in the cupholder.

  By spring I was so jelly-kneed in love I could barely concentrate on my classes, but I’d gotten into CalArts. Casey’d been accepted at UCLA, where J.B. had one year left of grad school.

  We’d all be in LA soon. Me, J.B., Casey.

  * * *

  I was happy, anticipating my freedom, so close now, and the afternoon ahead in Pinecrest, the swimming and sunbathing and lazy kissing on damp towels, fingers laced together. Casey would call, “Get a room, you two,” and throw a towel over us or splash us in her good-natured way, pretending to be shocked. I was in such a good mood I accidentally smiled at Mrs. Pettit.

  She pinched her face up. “Wonderful sermon.”

  “Wonderful.”

  As if I knew. I’d been too busy reliving scenes from the night before, entangled with J.B. on Casey’s bed while the sounds of the postgame party drifted upstairs. We hadn’t slept together yet, though I wanted to.

  Fragments of Reverend Talbert’s message had intruded into my daydreams, creating an unholy but undeniably sexy hodgepodge: J.B.’s hand exploring the curve of my waist (...and he spoke to the Apostle Paul...), the way I’d tunneled my hands under his shirt, turning his voice ragged (...fishers of men, he said, and it was so...). That’s how I entertained myself in church these days, crossing my legs tight in the sunny pew. Then feeling guilty.

  “Where’s your mother, dear?” Mrs. Pettit asked.

  “She has her committee meeting in the library.”

  “And which committee is that, now? It’s so hard to keep up.”

  “The one remodeling the bride’s dressing room?”

  “Now, won’t that be charming. When our Emily was married it was in a pitiful state. Torn carpet, rusty faucet. I don’t know what we’d do without your mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you give her one of these for me, dear?” Mrs. Pettit walked over with a slim red pamphlet. The tightness of her smile made it clear she hadn’t forgiven me for dropping out of choir sophomore year. Neither had my mother.

  I’d assumed Mrs. Pettit was drumming up support for youth choir, or adult choir, or canticle singers or bell ringers. She was in charge of pretty much any group making noise in special robes.

  But when I glanced at the pamphlet I realized this was something else. Something new.

  I left the unsold goo
dies, the money box, the powder blue napkins with the trotting lambs on them, strewn across the table. I left without saying goodbye.

  * * *

  When Casey was swimming and J.B. was curled on my towel, his head in my lap, I showed him the pamphlet.

  “Oh, man.” He sat up.

  The pamphlet quoted a senator from Mississippi who compared homosexuality to a condition like alcohol abuse or kleptomania. A pathology in need of treatment, it said.

  Mrs. Pettit’s pinchy smile took on a sinister meaning; I wondered if she knew about Casey. Dina Pettit, her daughter, went to the parties on the sly, so even though she knew Casey was gay she probably wouldn’t have said anything. But Coeur-de-Lune was small.

  “You going to show her?” J.B. said.

  “No.”

  “Is your mother part of it?”

  “I don’t think so.” I folded the pamphlet and rolled it inside my dress, wrapping the fabric tight, tucking it into my beach bag. “But either way I’m done. I should have stopped going to church years ago. You should’ve seen the way they treated Alex one Christmas.”

  “Alex never struck me as the religious type.”

  “She surprised me at a carol service I was playing piano in. Sophomore year. She was all dressed up, but...” I shook my head, remembering the long, sliding glances, the insincerity in the greetings that cold December night. So good to see you here finally!

  “They said stuff?”

  “It was the way they looked at her.”

  “Why? The scavenger hunts?”

  “All of it. The parties. The cutoffs, the boyfriends, her age. That’s all they see. And if they know about Casey? They’re probably thrilled. Proof they were right all along, not to be friendly to Alex. Also...never mind.”

  “Also what?”

  I’d never told him about Alex kissing Stewart Copley the summer before.

  “What?” J.B. repeated.

  “Nothing. You need lotion. You’re burning.” His skin wasn’t burning at all; he didn’t burn. I touched my favorite part of his shoulder, where various muscles joined under smooth skin.

  He kissed the shoulder where my bathing suit strap was supposed to be, and for a few disloyal seconds I wished we were alone, or that Casey had brought a date.