Afloat (10 page)

When we leave the governor's mansion it is cool and raining, and we notice the gardens around the front of the home have been dug up during the night. Strange mounds of dirt and uprooted plants lie in the darkening soil.

Rain is impossible to ignore when you travel by bike, and water saturates my eyebrows and eyelashes. My face is wet and dripping, my fingers cold on the handlebars. The rain
soaks my knees as they bob up and down, and wets two patches over my breasts, until gradually I'm wet through. The neglected piles of horseshit become muddy lumps, steaming and disintegrating before they can be shoveled away. We swerve expertly around each of these, spraying gravel as we skid too fast into the lane leading to the Pine Suites. In five minutes we are home and splash into Bryce's apartment, taking our clothes off. My jeans weigh thirty pounds – I could have been swimming in them. We throw everything into the bathtub and my body is wet and shiny, beads of rainwater moist in the hollows of my collarbone and elbows.

‘Give me a wet hug!' Bryce shouts.

His arms extend towards me, his crotch red and waiting. I squeal away from him, our bodies bare and uneven in the morning light. He spins me onto the bed and wraps me in the white sheet, rubbing me dry.

‘You're like my little butterfly in a cotton cocoon,' he says.

My head pokes out from around the sheets I have been sausage-rolled into.

‘I'm telling all your friends you said that.'

He touches my nose to his, a gentle gesture, before bundling me over his shoulder, still helplessly entangled in the sheets, and spanking me thoroughly. My shrieks are muted by the sound of the rain hitting pavement, roofs, and windows, and there isn't anyone else.

We stay naked, playing with the wooden chessboard he brought from home. I lose. Both games. I strategize with my horses, the alphabet L a letter of attack. He plays with his castles and captures all my pieces, horses first. I find this particularly demoralizing.

‘I don't understand why you don't let me win.'

‘It's chess. It's a game. You're not four.'

‘You should let me win.'

He chalks up my unsportsmanlike behavior to my spoiled upbringing.

‘You'll never go places in life with that attitude,' he tells me.

I refuse to play chess with him again.

I owe my career to a pair of boots.

Russ Gerhardt was in office for forty-five years, city councillor, mayor. He liked me because he liked my father. They met on Seminary Avenue when Russ rolled down his window for directions to the hair salon and took a liking to my father's cowboy boots. Russ bought them right off his feet for seventy-five dollars after he promised to give my father a ride home. Real leather and made by Minetonka, my dad had worn those boots for years, but figured Russ's offer was a sign from the Virgin that it was time he got himself a new pair. The boots didn't fit Russ, but they had a drink together and my mother served steak and potato salad for dinner, thick mayonnaise-and dill-covered potatoes lit by the flames of her best red tapered candles. Alan and I stopped by for the celebration, her check-up that morning marking five years since her diagnosis, and at that time we were still renting out in Bloomington; Alan's route was not the best and I was tutoring for hardly any money and trying to find it rewarding.

‘International politics,' Russ said over the potatoes. ‘Hell! I don't know anything about that, but whenever you feel like answering some phone calls come down to city hall anytime.' I started that Monday. He already had a secretary, but he gave me a desk and eventually paid for some trendy business cards printed on Deluxe Victorian Gray Linen that stated I was his assistant, which meant nothing except I was on the payroll and safe, far away from children who didn't understand conjunctions or where India was on a map.

When the press called, I always knew my lines. I was never fooled like Patty often was, getting her name in print beside a damaging quotation.

‘Mayor Gerhardt likes having a good time, you know? And hel
lo
? All the charges were
dropped
.'

Russ always looked to me for damage control.

‘You know people, Bell,' Russ would say with a hand on my shoulder after giving Patty the afternoon off. ‘You know what they need, and make them think you've given it to them. In another life, you could have been a politician.'

Russ was a man whose gray hair had been dyed black, his scalp stretched in the operation that spreads the hair you've still got across a larger portion of your skull. From far away he looked young, as he had when I first met him as he tried to walk in my father's too small boots. From up close, his skin was unnaturally tight, tanned. His nails were always manicured, his teeth whitened. His only visible fault was a lazy eye that confounded the doctors; numerous surgeries had been unsuccessful and Russ accepted it finally as his cross to bear. A very lightweight cross.

He was a man in public office, and he needed me – although initially only to fetch his grande double-shot lattes with whipped cream. In the twenty-five years I worked for him, the price of these luxury lattes tripled. When he'd eaten the whipped cream with the plastic spoon, he'd top up his latte with whisky. I'm not sure how many people in the office knew this. I went home and told Alan, of course. Alan hadn't voted for him, but neither had I. My first election was the most exhilarating, after that they became routine.

Bell
, Russ would call the night before the municipal vote,
go make some signs disappear, but don't tell me about it
.

When she was old enough I took Anna with me, asking if she wanted to see democracy in action. It was always late at
night; she slid sleepily into the passenger seat beside me, waking up as soon as we spotted the first sign.

‘
There's one!
'

A different name every election. Bob Anliss. Gerry Carmichael. Sanyika Hassan. Each one went in the trunk. There were hundreds of us all over the city, playing politics. The blue signs were good, everything else the enemy. These silent nights were when I liked Anna best. She and I, headlights off, cruising up to dark-green lawns, the trunk open slightly, engine idling as I waited for her to uproot the metal frame with the plastic sign attached, then leap back into the car so we could slide off towards our next conquest. On a good night we'd get up to a hundred lawn signs, some from public spaces as well. Ours disappeared too, of course – some of the night was spent putting back signs that had disappeared.

‘Russ is the team we want to win, right, Mom?'

‘Always. That way I keep my job.'

At two or three a.m. we cruised back into the driveway, and I carried the warm body of my daughter back into the house, her palms black from the dirt. When she was in bed I made one last trip to the dump at the east end of the city. I waited until the entrance was empty of other late-night visitors, reversing into the stench through the chainlink gates.

The sky black overhead, that moment was my own small part in history. Surrounded by garbage and plastic bags that would never disappear, I was the center of it all. I loved the surprising cold of the metal frame, the slice of the sign's plastic edge on my fingers – dozens of cuts carved into my skin, thin white marks just deep enough to hint at the blood beneath.

Propping the trunk open I flung the signs by the handful. Victorious, elated, I spun like a discus thrower, letting go and saying,

‘Fuck you, Carmichael!'

Or:

‘See you later, Sanyika!'

As the trunk emptied, as the sky hinted at gray, I imagined myself: picked up by the ankles, spun and flung into another world where the night was always like this. Always exciting, and better than the day. No labels left but one. Alone.

I returned to my car, loving this secret life.

The next morning I answered the phones, telling Barry from the
Pioneer Press
how Russ was appalled that opponents' signs had gone missing.
Vandals, it happens every year
, I recited carefully, pointing out that many of our own signs were stolen as well.

‘Off the record,' Barry said, ‘how many'd you get?'

‘About a hundred,' I told him. ‘It was a good night.'

But these experiences are on a sliding scale, and this will always be the middle of my life. It always
felt
like the middle, even then, when I stopped to think about it. I knew the beginning had ended. The middle was something to fill in the gap before the end.
RE-ELECT GOVERNOR GRANHOLM
, the bumper sticker from my envelope says.

There are many things I have accomplished since that summer evening, many labels I can tape to my chest, though most have been stripped away again, altered and reaffixed. Mother. Retired. Widow. Beautiful, once.

The last the hardest to wear.

Retired, the easiest to understand.

I return the still-shiny bumper sticker to the envelope.

RE-ELECT GOVERNOR GRANHOLM.

Everyone depending upon everyone else.

RE-ELECT RUSS FOR CONGRESS.

I pick up the small library book instead and open it.

That Mackinac summer there was so much more ahead of me. Sickness. Endings. Death. And everything that comes after these things.

The doorbell is silent still, though the sound of the siren echoes over and over. Thirty seconds on, then silence. Soon it wails again, a warning.

The island streets are busier than I've ever seen them, the first yachts from the Port Huron to Mackinac race expected sometime today. Wives, girlfriends, fiancées, and mistresses drink white wine and lime daiquiris while waiting for their sailors to arrive. Camera crews and journalists from all over Michigan settle themselves on patios with a view of the lake. Velvet is losing her mind, giving me instructions like,
avocados
, before hurrying off again. She told Trainer to come in early today to weed the patio, which earned her at least an hour of imaginative expletives at the Cock last night. I hear St. Mary's church has been noticeably well attended over the past few days, and I wonder if the prayers were for good weather or victory or both.

Bryce and I have the afternoon off, and he refuses to indulge my fascination with his religion beyond our initial conversation last month; he rolls his eyes when I tell him I'm on my way downtown to research the Mormon religion and the history of Salt Lake City.

‘Mine's just as bad as the rest of them,' he insists.

‘You have pedophile priests?'

‘We have everything you have, only we keep quiet about it. No crusades or anything.'

‘You don't believe in anything anyway,' I tell him.

He shrugs. ‘I believe in doing the right thing.'

‘How fantastic for you.'

With a sigh he sits next to me on the bed, lacing up the
worn boots he uses for hunting. ‘So. Does this mean you won't ask me any more questions?'

‘Does
what
mean I won't ask you any more questions?'

‘I
love
that you're so hilarious,' he says.

Standing, he kisses the top of my head and his white T-shirt billows out from his body to touch my face. It smells of long-ago laundry detergent and more recent sweat.

‘I'm going to meet some sailors' wives,' he says.

‘Not without a platinum credit card you're not,' I tell him.

I bite the fabric with my teeth as he tries to pull away.

‘There's popcorn in the cupboard if you're hungry,' he says, trying to extricate himself. ‘Have fun with your books.'

I let go of his shirt. He smiles and gives me a wave, and leaves the front door wide open. After a moment, the warm draft from the open window slams it shut again.

There are people who believe they are lonely because it suits them and Bryce lives alone in Grayling in a rented room, far away from the Sunday services and organ music and the G-Rated, LDS-produced movies of his childhood. He hasn't spoken to his parents or his sister Odette since he arrived on the island. But I believe everyone is allowed to escape, and to choose what they wish to escape from.

We watched a movie last week where one of the characters had said something about a white horse.

‘Do you know what that's from?' Bryce asked.

‘Where what's from?'

‘The white horse thing.'

‘I guess not.'

‘It's from Revelations. “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True.”'

I had to lift my head up from his chest to look at him. ‘Holy fuck. Did you just quote from the bible?'

‘Everyone knows that JC rides a white horse,' he said.

Bryce looked pleased with himself and told me he was full of surprises.

I am not used to being outshone like this, but I don't intend to read the bible. I've tried before and made it through maybe three pages of Genesis, despite my best intentions. It really is tedious. The history of the Mormon religion however seems a little more manageable. It's newer, more political, and Trainer says he's heard the CIA recruits a lot of Mormons because they're really good at keeping secrets.

‘They don't drink,' Trainer explained.

The ride into town is warm and quick, and I park in the dark-green bike rack in front of the library. I consider not locking it, but have no desire to lose another bike this summer, and common sense outweighs my laziness. I take the time to loop the coil through the spokes and around the frame.

The Mackinac public library is one room painted turquoise. It opens at strange hours and never on Mondays or Sundays. I have never been to a library with a fireplace before, but it is huge and calming. Each surrounding tile is a bright and perfect purple. The two doors flanking the fireplace stand open on this warm afternoon, and they lead to a porch with rocking chairs. The cottage-red chairs face the lake, and there is a woman rocking slowly when I arrive; she is still there when I leave.