by Jean Andrews
It was barely light outside, and I’d put in a long day, but I was inexplicably energized. It would be interesting to take in the nightlife only a mile down the lake. I put on a pair of jeans and my sneakers and a sweatshirt that said, RBG THE WOMAN FOR ME, and I headed out the door. As I drove there in only minutes, I realized it would make a nice walk along the road in the daytime.
* * *
Muskie Lake was on the backside of Jensen’s. I pulled onto the gravel, alongside two worn-out cars, got out feeling a bit nervous, and grabbed the aluminum door handle on the screened-in porch. Why had they bothered with a porch? The screens were floppy, and the door made a loud metallic groan as I pulled on it. Everyone in the place looked up, looked me over, and then stopped looking.
A jukebox sat directly to my left, along with three booths surrounding a pool table and floor space for dancing. Straight ahead was the bar with a door behind it that led to supplies, including tanks full of minnows and a large metal tub filled with worms. Behind the bar were beer brands known to Northerners—Bent Paddle, Snow, and Dangerous Men. Forewarned, I thought. Over the back door, a weathered board read WE PACK AND SHIP FISH.
To the right of the bar against the third wall were cabin groceries—light bulbs, ice cream, Tampax, coffee, Popsicles, cookies, marshmallows, and matches. Things you could run out of, or forget, and didn’t want to drive to town to retrieve.
Three handsome, baby-stubble boys leered at me. They were blond and muscular, and I imagined earned their cut physiques the old-fashioned way, by chopping wood, rowing boats, and working in the lumber mills. The tallest one lined up a pool shot and slammed the balls with extra force, then glanced up at me and grinned. You wish, I thought.
His much shorter and cuter cohort dropped a quarter in the booth jukebox and made a few dance moves to the staticky sound system. Neon signs hung everywhere, mostly for products no longer available, like HAMM’S BEER, FROM THE LAND OF SKY-BLUE WATERS.
Jensen, a broad-chested fellow wearing suspenders, over a short-sleeved gray T-shirt, to hold up his baggy gray pants, appeared from the back of the bar, where he’d been sorting the tiny fish by size into large aerated buckets. He dried his fingers on a bar towel, gave me a big friendly grin, and asked if he could get me something. I looked at his hardworking hands, permanently dark under the nails. Worms and wieners all from the same guy, I thought, and said I was just looking.
“Take yer time,” he said, and went back to sorting minnows.
I moved over to the east wall near the groceries, and that’s the first time I saw her—a stunning blonde in white shorts and a white polo shirt standing at the counter carefully examining the candles for sale. The shirt was a bit plunging for a traditional polo, and it showcased her beautiful breasts.
She wasn’t very tall, maybe five foot four, but she appeared tall, with her long legs and small, tight butt. My God, her legs go to heaven. I quickly critiqued my thoughts. That’s a male way to assess her. Wow, every guy on the lake must be after her. However, when I glanced at the boys, none of the them were paying any attention to her.
Her profile was right out of a fashion magazine where all the faces have been air-brushed to perfection. She had the most flawless complexion. How did she maintain that out here in the woods? Not even one Muskie mosquito bite on that beautiful forehead. Her blue eyes were almost translucent and seemed otherworldly and distant, as if still focused on some faraway place she inhabited and had just momentarily left. She wore a snug ankle bracelet made of gold horses running in a circle around her beautiful leg, and the single gold band that wrapped tightly around her wrist featured two horses’ heads. I wondered if she was just here on vacation, and I pretended to be looking at items near the candles as an excuse to move a little closer. Her perfume was a mixture of southern magnolias and northern pine, a diverse forest blown in off the lake. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, I checked to see, then wondered why.
Like an exotic animal who’d been approached too quickly, she turned and disappeared through the back door. Moving casually, I left as well, trying to get a glimpse of her from the gravel drive. Maybe she was renting one of Jensen’s cabins. I lost sight of her in the dark.
The blond woman had thrilled me. I could find no other word for my response. She was serendipitous. “The Lake Goddess,” I dubbed her, giving me hope that interesting, sophisticated people lived nearby.
* * *
Back at the cabin, I parked the car and walked the stretch to the back door, flanked by the pitch-black shadows of the pine trees, almost forgetting to be afraid of the dark.
Inside, I locked the cabin door, jumped into the big, soft bed, pulled the covers up, and was asleep almost immediately, lulled into unconsciousness by the strange sound of loons warbling to one another on the lake.
In my dream, a tall, dark-haired woman rose out of the lake and told me the wait was almost over. “It’s over,” she kept repeating. “It’s over.” I awakened in a sweat and began to fret over the parts of the dream I could remember.
How is it over? Maybe I should stay out of the lake. Maybe she’s warning me I’ll drown.
Chapter Three
The next morning, I awoke to the sound of a lawn mower. Someone was taking care of the grass in front of the cabins. The mower’s incessant buzzing in the distance was actually pleasant. I didn’t hear yard maintenance in the city because there were no yards, just heat off the concrete and horns honking. By contrast, the distant hum of a mower was hypnotic, and the fresh air through my bedroom window screen was intoxicating. I felt luxuriously lazy and oddly happy.
I made a cup of coffee and then grabbed the bag of peanuts off the old Formica breakfast table, stepped outside in my nightshirt, and sat down on the wide cement steps facing the lake, enjoying the morning light.
A long dock stretched from the shore out into the sandy part of the lake, skipping the soggy clay near the bank. Shoreline clay was like glue. It sucked you down six inches into its gray muck that clung to your feet and wedged in between your toes like wet cement. You had to scrape it off before you could walk without tripping. A few feet farther out, the lake bottom became firm and then turned to amber sand that was beautiful and hard.
The view from the porch was breathtaking, and for the first time I experienced the feeling of never wanting to leave a place.
Taking a peanut from the bag, I scraped the shell on the cement and made a clicking sound with my tongue, then called chippeechippeechippee. It had been my favorite childhood activity at the cabin.
After about ten minutes, I assumed the chipmunks of my childhood were deceased, and prior to ascending to that great nuthouse in the sky, they had failed to teach their grandchildren how to panhandle for peanuts. Furthermore, sounds carried on the lake, so I was worried that Marney was listening to my ridiculous impersonation of a hungry rodent. Might as well double down on that, I thought, loudly cracking a few nuts and stuffing them into my mouth.
Suddenly peeking around the tree, a chipmunk stared at me with bright, beady eyes. I tossed a few peanuts in his direction, and he lowered his chubby little body to the ground. Soon, three chipmunks were crawling up my back and onto my shoulders, stashing the nuts in their expandable jowls and making brief runs to their winter storage areas, where they deposited them and came back for more.
It was the best time I could remember in years and made me long for a pet. I’d given up the idea of having a cat because Ben said he was allergic to them. Of course, dogs in the city meant scooping poop off the sidewalk in quart-sized baggies before breakfast, which, when added to Ben’s early morning diatribe, was more shit than I could take.
I shook off those thoughts, went inside, and showered in the tiny tin box with low water pressure. So much lake water and so little shower water. Must be three-inch pipes trying to pull the lake water up the hill.
After my drip-shower, I dressed and headed for town to scope out the locals and perhaps run into the Lake Goddess, the only other creature in the woods
that interested me.
* * *
The Muskie Café sported a huge wooden board over its entrance with a painted fish on it. In fact, all the buildings seemed to have a fish fetish. I decided to go inside for coffee and a homemade sweet roll. When I opened the door, all heads turned, the row of mostly bearded men at the counter stared at me, and then they all turned back to their food. Every wall had at least four huge mounted fish on it, and I envisioned their heads turning too. I’ve seen too many Geico commercials.
A young waitress in a pink-and-white shirtwaist dress and a starched white apron, looking as crisp and retro as a WWII poster, came over to the booth to get my order. After she left, an older, heavy-set woman who walked with a limp joined me to ask if I was Alice Armand’s niece. I told her I was and asked how she knew her. She said they had worked the church dinners every August.
“Your aunt was a fine woman, and she could make a raspberry preserve to die for, and of course all the kids loved her because she was always up to something crazy.” The woman laughed. “She didn’t have too much luck in the men department, but I don’t think that bothered her, far as I could tell. Anyway, I’m glad I ran into you. Hadn’t thought of Alice in a while.”
And she was off, leaving me with secondhand images of salt-of-the-earth, jelly-making, child-hugging, man-hating Aunt Alice.
Through the window, I caught sight of the blond woman. The Lake Goddess going into the drugstore. What mundane items could a lake goddess possibly need from the drugstore? A refill on her magic potion to ensnare men’s hearts?
I paid up and dashed out of the café. She was finishing up at the counter, talking to a young female clerk. She didn’t seem to be buying anything and was already exiting the drugstore when I hit the street. I followed her to the post office. Why was I following her? I wasn’t really following her. I needed to go to the post office too.
She entered the tiny building, and I hung back as if pretending to get my bearings, checking out the water company next door and the boat-motor repair shop. Having given it the appropriate amount of time to make my arrival seem coincidental, I entered.
“Warming up out your way?” the postmaster asked the woman.
“It is. And more loons seem to be on the lake this year. I always love their cry.” The mystery woman’s voice was deep and sensual, but no-nonsense. I could have listened to her for hours. Her golden hair was short and curly and worn close to her head, like a woman who participates in athletic events and has to keep her hair out of her eyes. She was forty, maybe, wearing khaki slacks, a V-neck, three-quarter-sleeved shirt, neatly tucked in, and a cognac leather belt that matched her shoes. She has to be from out of town. I was aware my thought was biased but then took up for myself. Have I seen anyone else remotely that coordinated since I’ve been here? There you have it! I told my politically correct self.
“Wife loves the loons too.” The postmaster brightened when he talked to her. “Here you go. Take care.”
“You too.” The woman took her change, turned, and walked past me.
“Hi!” I said, immediately realizing that I sounded like a starstruck teenager.
She paused for a split second, looked into my eyes, smiled, and said, “Well, hello.” And she left.
She might as well have said I’d won the lotto, because I was inexplicably happy.
The postmaster jolted me back to earth. “How can I help you?”
“Stamps. A dozen. Who’s the lady who just said hello? I feel like I know her.” I was lying, hoping for a name.
“That’s the woman out on White Horse Point,” he said, as if everyone knew that, and quickly gave me change.
“Oh, so she’s a permanent resident.” I was delighted for no apparent reason.
“’Bout as permanent as the rest of us.” He laughed, and I hurried back outside and watched her retrace her steps. I casually followed her until I reached the center of town and the Muskie Café, where an elderly Swedish man intercepted me, causing me to lose sight of her.
“Hey, there, Alice Armand’s niece! Are ya lookin’ for company over a cup? Helen at the market told me you was here.” He held the cafe door for me, and it was my second trip inside in only half an hour. But no one seemed to think that odd, because this time no one raised his head to look at me. My elderly escort introduced himself as Maynard Swensen.
“Me and my wife Wilma knew yer aunt and uncle real good,” he said with that attractive Norwegian lilt.
He was a big-boned fellow with thin, sandy hair and soft, blue eyes that must have attracted the ladies back before the cataracts gave him an otherworldly stare. Despite his elderly appearance, his gnarled hands looked powerful. He was what people up North called “hard as wood.”
When I asked about his wife, he laughed. “She was yust too sportin’ for an ole horse like me, so we got unhitched.”
“I guess that happens,” I said, not wanting to dig deeper.
“Ya. Happened to your auntie too…cuz ole Yake, he done sneaked around with my wife.”
“Oh, my gosh. I didn’t know.”
“Well, now ya do!” He gave a big, hearty laugh. “Now ya do,” he repeated quietly and stared off into space, apparently lost in a different time. I didn’t know what to say about his festering thorn of cuckolded love, other than to hope it would work itself out.
I told him I was glad he stopped to talk and that I was sure I’d see him again before the summer was over, and I paid for both our coffees, as familial penance on behalf of Uncle Jake, Rake-of-the-Lake.
“Lake brings that out in people,” Maynard said, trailing behind me out the door. “Hot sun, cold beer, cool water lappin’ up against ya, pine trees whisperin’ to ya. Gets a lotta folks in trouble. Fact is, most people think the whole Point is haunted by love gone wrong.”
Like a kid who’d just seen her parents having sex, I wanted to run away and think privately about what had happened. Uncle Jake running around on Aunt Alice—and with some lake woman in a town of 989 people, probably 789 back then—where everyone knew everyone. How embarrassing for Aunt Alice, but of course, in those days, women pretended everything was just fine.
* * *
I’d no sooner pulled in at the cabin than a woman I assumed was Marney came sailing out of the white cabin’s back door, the screen banging loudly behind her as she crossed the yard, arms outstretched. She was small in stature and decked out in peach tennies, peach bows, and peach fabric that blew in the wind and swooped around me like an out-of-control kite. When she hugged me, her heavily made-up face landed in the vicinity of my cleavage, and I immediately deemed her the lake elf. She apologized for not being here when I arrived, but, she paused to catch her breath, “I’m part of the committee getting ready for the church dinners.”
Marney had a round, friendly face, lots of black curls, dark eyes, pink polish on her fingers and toes, and a happy demeanor that I envied, while at the same time found annoying. It was like bubbles. A few are fun, but a bottle full of them nearly chokes you.
She held me at arm’s length, tilted her head up to look into my eyes, and quizzed me like a mother: Was I settled in? Did I have food? Was the bed comfortable? Did I know how to adjust the heat in case it got cold at night? Finally, something that will loosen her grip on me.
“I don’t know how to work the heat,” I said. She let go of me and barreled inside the cabin, with me behind her, where she searched for heating instructions in the silverware drawer with the intensity of a dog digging a hole, then waved them in the air with all the enthusiasm of someone who’d just discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. “Fouuund them!”
She scanned the instructions quickly, then tinkered with the levers and valves on the pot-bellied stove, all while giving me a verbal tour of the lake.
“So we’re in Ramona’s cabin here, and then Ralph and I live next door in the white cabin. The red cabin is next, and it’s ours too. We rent it out to different people all summer—rarely the same ones. You’ll love the Robertsons, a mother a
nd daughter who’ll be coming up in a few weeks. They’ve always stayed at Jensen’s but were so happy our red cabin came available. Then there’s the old two-story cabin we rent out to local hunters and fishermen in the fall. That’s a hoot! We practically have to take a hose to the place after they leave. Past that cabin is lots of woods, until you reach the far end of the horseshoe, where at night, you can see a light way out on the Point. Back in the woods is a cabin with thirty acres.”
The stove belched and shook, and flames roared behind the glass door, threatening to leap out and ignite Marney’s “peachedness.” I tugged at her sleeve to pull her back from the flames, but she waved me off. “Ignore that!” she said, like the Great and Powerful Oz, and jumped back without a break in her monologue. “The former owner was a gorgeous, tall creature who used to own the entire cove but gradually sold it off, including the land that wraps around the Point farther east, into another cove where Jensen’s sits, along with cabins they rent out.” She took a deep breath. “Okay. This is the only knob you need to bother about. It’s off now, but turn it up for warmer, down for cooler. Ramona says you just need to relax and unwind, and that ole writer’s block will drown in the lake.”
I started to refute the writer’s block but decided it wasn’t worth it. I made a mental note to kill Ramona instead. Marney scrounged two tickets to the church dinner from somewhere under her diaphanous get-up and slapped them into my palm. “Third week in August, so plan to come.”
I thanked her for settling me in, and she beamed. “I’m just glad to have company. My husband Ralph is such a sphinx.” She hugged me, and I had empathy for Ralph.
Chapter Four
The sun glittered through my bedroom window as I stretched and yawned, feeling I was in a place more luxurious than New York’s Peninsula Hotel. I got my coffee and came back to bed, cuddled up in the quilt, and watched fish jump in the lake. It wasn’t long before I heard a tap at the door and realized it was Marney, who wanted to know how I was doing and if I’d slept well. After a couple of exchanges, she launched into a monologue about life on the lake and how she and Ralph ended up here.