“Kids!” I said too loudly. He didn’t comment. I let myself go quiet. The place was hazy inside, except for the floody, glowy light melting through the window seams. I saw that the front room was wide, with a wood plank floor, a pullout sofa and chair at one end, a utility sink and counter on the other. By the front windows was a big cream linoleum table that could dine eight, except it was pushed up against a corner and only had four chairs. I thought then that I’d rotate between the chairs for each meal, so that none felt wasted; meanwhile Earl John spoke of the well he had dug, its idiosyncrasies. He told me there was a stash of junk drawer stuff—TP and tools, some backup kitchen items, things other renters had left—under the bunk. “Oh, and burn the trash you can. The other stuff you can save to bring back.”
“I’ll bring it back,” I said emptily, looking at the little ripple of the floor planks. All I wanted to do was lay my body across it. My stomach hurt from the plane ride and my chest hurt from what I was doing there. Then I became taut and bloated and cold, changeable as the weather, just like a woman. I was ready to be alone and not lonely.
“You know how to use this stove?” he asked. I made a noncommittal noise and so he gave me a provisional tour. Squat as an old TV, it was lacquered black with a hinged door in its front. A thick shaft came out its back, then chimneyed through the roof. “This is the flue, gotta make sure this is open. And here’s where you put in your logs and kindling and tinder. Make sure you lock this so the house doesn’t get all full of ash, mind. And up here is where you can cook what you like.”
What did I look like, what did my face look like, when he asked could I build a fire. “I’ve built some fires,” I said.
“You are going to get good at it, little miss.” I sneered to myself; the idea of learning anything seemed at this juncture ludicrous. But seeing my face he only chuckled—a dab of chiding pity perhaps—then showed me the rest of the house. There were bunk beds in back, adult sized. The bottom bunk had a full-size mattress jutting. There was a bathroom sink and a vinyl cubicle with a hose you could set up on a hook for a shower.
Out the back door and down three steps, a little way into where the woods crept up, was an outhouse with a crescent moon cut out of the purple-painted door. “Wife was good with a jigsaw,” he explained. Beyond there was an old fence that must’ve once divided carefully the cabin’s territory from the surrounding wild, though now it was falling down.
Earl John led me back to the lakeshore so we could finish hauling my supplies. I murmured and followed him back through the meadow, with little interest in returning to anywhere I’d been previously.
THE SUN WAS down by the time we were done unpacking the seaplane. A lantern was on. Candles were lit. I located a small flashlight and put it in my pocket. All of a sudden it was romantic. Was it the light or the place or us. Nope: I was demented, pried open. I looked to Earl John and he said thanks and I said thanks and he seemed almost sorry to be leaving me there. He had, I noticed, an involuntary eye twitch. I felt a little bit sorry for myself too. With the darkness I was understanding things—my new hang—a hair more.
Earl John began to say goodbye, that he’d meet me back up here the following summer as agreed. I did not have any plan to live that long. I did not really have any plan. He looked at my face. I wondered was I grimacing or melting. I was making myself obvious, certainly. For after looking in my face, my obviously unplanned face, Earl John turned to give me a half hug.
“Do you have headlights on that thing?” I asked. He laughed and said yes, that he’d get off and back fine, long as he didn’t have to land in the water, which he didn’t. What if I undid his overalls, I thought, though I didn’t move. We exist with sets of stories or lists: the ways we must feel during loss or solitude, the ways we must present the self to others, the ways we must act. But there are other and scarier ways to be.
Earl John seemed heavier than he looked, not lighter. His overall fasteners were not the usual slide-to-button but something more complicated. In him there were weighty things, or so I assumed. Wistfulness. The wild. Big game opponents. Those overalls! I was staring.
“Noticing these?” he said. He gestured to his bib.
“They look serious.”
“They are. You got anything like them?”
I looked at my pile of stuff in the wan light. It was ignorance made material. I shook my head. Then he began to disrobe.
“I’ll confess,” he said, as he sat down on the couch, undoing his bootlaces. “I only have sons, but I still feel like some kind of bad dad leaving you up here alone.”
“I’ll be okay,” I said, slowly. It was like watching a soap bubble in air, watching this happen to me. This feeling of unhappening, of about-to-be, nested itself inside me, has never left.
“No, I’m serious,” Earl John said. “You seem responsible enough, like you can take care of yourself, what do you say, street-smart. My son the computer programmer could use some of that.”
“Thank you,” I said quietly as Earl John wrested his boot from his foot. I watched as he rose, sock footed, and began to unfasten his overall straps, those which had seemed to me previously un-unfastenable. Beneath he was wearing a button-down denim shirt. He let the straps fall and started a strange shimmy, his jowls jiggling a bit, so little I wouldn’t have noticed if I weren’t me, there in that remote cabin, living it. The bib fell down like a broad tongue. He unfastened more fasteners at the waist, on either side.
In respect or in embarrassment I looked away, to the corners of the room, their small pockets of dust and webs. A thoop-plunk noise came from the direction of the man. It was his overalls, now sitting at his ankles. I saw then that he was wearing thin jeans beneath, the color of cataracts. “Oh!” I breathed, involuntarily, then realized he had been talking the whole time.
“—it’s not that he doesn’t have friends, but I think they’re all over the internet, and that’s all fine, but I do wonder what it’s doing to him, not having anyone to, I don’t know, cat around with, go to things with. He doesn’t get along with Janey’s son either. I hoped he would. Can’t blame them.”
“But you just said he had friends?” I managed.
“Yeah, but not real ones,” he said, sitting on the couch, folding the overalls. I watched him put his boots back on, the laces pulling tight.
“But if they’re real to him?” Well of course I was thinking of Gene, 100 percent less real, 100 percent more annoying. I wanted verification that he was gone or not gone. Would he loiter and sting me here with no end but my own demise.
“You sound just like him,” he said and laughed thinly. “I guess it’s a different world now. My stepson on the other hand, he isn’t a type who needs—” He stopped.
I looked around, watching finally as he folded the overalls and held them out to me. “I couldn’t.”
“I think you have to,” he said. “Just wait until winter. I know they’ll be big on you but that’s all the more room to layer. You’ll be happy to have them.”
I took them, thanked him. I felt like I was letting go of plumb weights, as I laid them carefully on the sofa’s arm.
“Now tell me if you really know how to build a fire?”
I did, in theory. But theory didn’t manage much out there, so I shook my head. In the stove he crossed a few large logs. Then he added some sticks and paper and lit a match. Right off the paper blazed, smoking. After some damp resistance, the logs caught too. Slowly the house warmed.
“You’ll be okay,” he said. For me, “okay” was a familiar expectation. This was folly on everyone’s part. Earl John side-hugged me goodbye once more. It was not a notable departure, except that he was the last live person I planned or expected to see. It seemed impossible I’d survive the week.
As I was waving from the front porch, watching his flashlight beam swipe out of view, through the stand of trees and somewhere down into the blonde meadow, I was thinking: oh, you old goat, just leave already!
But I didn’t mean it. Back
inside I rolled out my sleeping bag across that plank floor, got a glass of water, thought of the purple-doored latrine and then thought better of it, locked the door bolt, and got down into the bag. The ceiling in the cabin was low but some eye-brain trick made it look as if it was receding. I was hungry but my heavy head won.
Much later, I think, I woke to see the fire in smolder. My heart was bellows fast. If it’s now I die, I thought, well, then—all the better. But instead it was the fire that died. The warm smoke kicked out of the stove in thin curls. My heart slowed. I shimmied deeper into the bag and fell asleep again like I didn’t even hear the crickets loud as ravens.
THAT FIRST MORNING I woke to feel mummified. It was hot in the cabin and close; by the front window, in the sunbeams, little jerk flies kibitzed. They moved not like doves, but like chickens in air.
I sensed it was late in the day. Snot corked my nostrils. I wondered again about Gene. When had I seen him last? Not since our exotic real estate encounter in the empty apartment. Had he forgotten himself? It seemed possible or probable he wouldn’t return. So I moved him from my worries: a single block lifted from an avalanching pile.
With no responsibility to be a person, I found I was bored. The day was undetermined and indeterminate. I was being a brat. I decided to eat something. The drawback of solitude is boredom, is an excess of agency, is yourself.
To loosen neck muscles I swung my head. I shook myself out like a blanket. I let out a bellow and thought: it’s a berry-blast kind of morning! The meal-replacement bars were in one of the tubs. I knew which one. This made me feel clever.
Nakedly I took chomps of the bar, then swallowed. The trick, I thought, is to make a schedule. Or the trick is to have small goals. Or maybe the trick is to do whatever I want. But it didn’t matter if I was bored. Surely I would succumb to an infection or fall or animal attack; I wouldn’t have to be bored forever. In the meantime I vamped about it.
I held the bar out and away from me. The wrapper, with its zoomy design and print, was too heavy with hands, with personages. In magenta silhouette, a miniature woman leapt from an inch-high cliff with a paragliding rig. I dropped the bar on my beloved floor. The sound was sapless.
Meanwhile my armpits were spouting sweat rivulets. When I touched them, experimentally, I felt sick of myself. It was time to go swimming. This was one small goal.
Outside I heard a faint falling noise. I went to the window to see what I could see. There was no living thing in evidence beyond the front curtains, in the daylight. I thought how the indoors were a smaller fraction of my life now. Pursuantly the outdoors made promises.
I finished the bar and dressed carefully in my khakis and a T-shirt, rubbed my skin all over with DEET-based spray, bent beneath the kitchen spigot and got some water across the roses in my cheeks. The water was shuddery and silty but no matter. I put on my untied boots and strode. Outside the air was gently warm, tea left to cool.
The land looked different than it had when I’d been yoked with my possessions. Now it stretched and bounded. On the horizon line, just closer than the mountain peaks was some kind of tower with a trussed base and flat-roofed volume atop. I had seen it from the air. I could not determine how far it was, or whether it was being used currently. I looked across the broad blonde meadow, seeing how the path ahead knit itself into the trees. The woods were both deciduous and evergreen, needles and dry leaves and fallen branch arms covering the ground, accompanied by low green brambles and whispery ferns of at least nine varieties. Their leaves were different from one another at least. I saw a squirrel, and several birds overhead. I felt a bit like a squirrel, found in a scrubby backyard or on a mountain just as easily. Context did not change our watchfulness, our imprecision; our insignificant, rattley chitter.
I went on walking and surveying. Soon the woods broke open again. I came upon the lake and its plank dock. The night prior it’d seemed so far from the cabin. Or what I mean is: It wasn’t very far to the lake from the cabin. A heavy load makes a longer road, or something like that.
By the lake the air was flat. Before this I would never have described air as flat. There was a bitten-feeling on my ankle’s dry skin. I was nervous about the lake and going in it, though I loved to swim. I preferred pools: water with no secrets. But, goodbye, pools! I thought. I was not in pool-land anymore. This lake was a stranger. I wondered about leeches.
I took off my boots, my shirt and pants, folded them beside me. I tried not to think of snakes. Lying down on the dock I felt spreading and heavy. Like a piece of dough waiting to rise. Without Gene I found myself more aware of my performances, my roles, the way I played to a nonexistent camera.
Above me the sky was wide. Here I have all the world, I thought, when once I had so little. A studio apartment, the shut-in life of automobile transportation, various rooms in other people’s homes, the balance-beam corridors at work, the little closets where I fed my flies. The freed flies who were by now surely dead. Here in the wild I had every option of movement and space, a self-serving roamer’s delight.
Once the sun was high and I could see it like an opponent, I rose from the dock and slipped into the water. There it was: the untrustworthy lacey, mossy life of the lake’s bottom. I made circular laps around the water’s edge, staying away from the deepening center. I felt permitted to expend energy, at last. All that time in the suburbs I had been holding on to it: just in case, just waiting, just ready. My strokes started sloppy and then smoothed as I tensed. I extended my limbs and rode my own current. With my eyes closed I cut forward, then flipped onto my back and floated, at last opening my eyes to a dense stand of squat trees. There was a large water bird resting itself on the far end of lake, some kind of heron. Its neck kinked and straightened, and then the bird set off, over me and the trees. I waved goodbye.
There seemed to be an especial peace in any water. I used to swim with Pop in pools, after the first cancer and before the second. At the time of us swimming together I was first a freshman living in the dorms at the university, then a sophomore who lived at home, and so on. Usually Mondays, always Tuesdays, definitely Wednesdays, sometimes Thursdays, I’d set my alarm for too early, wake to roll on my Speedo and cover it with a T-shirt or sweatshirt, along with soccer shorts, then report for duty at the door. Pop wore sweatpants, a shirt, a windbreaker if it was chilly. Our suburban air was apple-crisp. The streets were empty, except for a sighing bus making its way down the main drag.
Pop drove us to the municipal, where at the front desk we said hi to the gal, grabbed towels, descended to the locker rooms to be gender-sorted, and then reunited on the green-tile pool deck, where it smelled like chlorine with a secret of mildew. The tall windows along the length of the water showed wet grass, or melting snow, or blotting sun. If we were too early, a lifeguard would be in the water unspooling the lane lines, and if they were, we’d get in and help. If not I’d sit on the edge while Pop used the ladder to lower himself in. He’d stretch in the shallow end. I’d ignore his body—so lately sick—in favor of the lane line clicks and flip-flop slaps echoing. I never stretched, got started right away.
Pop had a foot on me in height, but he was messy. I had a handsome crawl, and often clocked him speed-wise. When you’re swimming you have to keep your head down; you have to stretch your arms like a ballerina; you have to rotate into your stroke; you can’t forget about your legs. Everyone forgets about their legs. Does a dolphin forget their tail? My flip-turns were shoddy however—I always ended up with water up my nose, a chemical soda. I did them anyway. They cut down on time. Speed had been important to me.
We’d do thirty laps, 1,500 meters, because we said we would. In the water I would think about the number of each lap as I stroked, repeated it to myself over and over. Twenty-three, twenty-three, twenty-three, twenty-three; until it was time for twenty-four, twenty-four, twenty-four, twenty-four. Twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five. Up to thirty and I’d hit the wall huffing and shining. When I was done usually Pop had a lap or two to go.
Later in the locker room I’d stand under the shower’s faint warm trickle, feel it saturating my suit. I’d wash my hair with hand soap from the dispenser. Then I’d dry off again and put my hair up and dress and buy a can of pineapple-orange juice from the Minute Maid machine for Pop and me to split. We’d alternate sips on the way home; sometimes I’d drive if Pop felt tired; the juice was sun + metal = hello, day! Often I wondered were we being stubborn, trying to unmark orange juice’s sinister associations, trying to evict “It’s not the bad kind” from our psychic rooms. The new context worked, mostly. Only briefly, if ever, did I recall during those car rides pulp congregating brightly at the tops of glasses. When I did I found I could look out the car window, scumble it away. Ma would be up by the time we returned. She would kiss our cheeks and ask airily if we had a good swim.
Later, in my first morning class, I’d let my hair down. It dried faster that way. It would release the smells of the pool, the chlorine and mildew and hotel-smelling hand soap. Once a tall fellow student—having smelled me, I suppose—asked if I was serious about swimming. Did I want to join the intramural team. Bet it’s obvious what I said, never once looking at his face.
Between my graduation and the mountain, our swimming outings ceased. First I stopped, saying I was too busy, though I was not. Then Pop stopped, sick; started again, then stopped, sick again. In this ignorant, organic way we began to abandon one another.
When was the first last time I saw Pop. He was judging the cream in his tea. He was hitting the back of the spoon on the countertop. He was vertical, which, by that time, was uncommon. “Do you want a cookie maybe?” I had asked him. He had looked good for fifty-five; his thinning body passed for cosmopolitan. The cookies were lemon wafers: a kind he liked. I can’t remember what his answer was. I can no longer remember. Then I did what we all do: I left through a door. I got in a car. I drove.
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