Afloat (18 page)

It is four a.m., and my shift begins at seven. The island gives everyone the gift of irresponsibility, and the game moves outside.

‘Bell, what the fuck are you doing?' Trainer yells as he comes out to the front porch. ‘You on a nature hike?'

The next morning the cement pathway is a sea of ping-pong ball carcasses, stepped on and broken, the half orbs scattered like moons. Only one paddle, the red one, can be found again, despite searches throughout the brush and flower gardens.

‘Serves all of you right,' I tell Bryce.

‘Speaking of serves,' he says. ‘Dickweed is bringing over his volleyball net tonight.'

We sent Anna to private school.

The Tate Academy had white columns out front, a security guard, cameras, and well-groomed teachers with masters' degrees. Miss Fedora Hall had impossibly long dark hair which she pinned and curled in complicated twists, and she wore long skirts that made me want to take a vacation.

One June afternoon, the sky hazy with pollution, she motioned gracefully to the granite bench positioned just inside the school gates, and invited me to sit.
In Memoriam
the bench said. It was placed in memory of the young Dakota boy, Hinto, who drowned in the school's ornamental pond three years earlier. They found him floating, Anna told us solemnly, arms and legs spread like a star, drifting. From the Prairie Island reservation, Hinto had been one of the thirty-two children on a government scholarship to the Tate after Minnesota's first RWP and the subsequent flooding of the Mississippi river eight years previous. His reservation had been just south of St. Paul, located on a floodplain, and the rising waters had destroyed the island's two nuclear reactors and damaged the seventeen dry cask containers used for storing spent fuel rods. Hinto's elders had been warning the federal and state governments of this possibility for years. Now twelve people were dead, the land contaminated along with the Mississippi river, all the way down to Louisiana. The compensation from the Minnesota government involved new homes, new schools, and new land.

Hinto had developed a fascination with tree climbing,
teaching Anna how to distribute her weight near the crook of each branch so as to reach the highest possible point before retreat.

His granite memorial bench carries an engraving of a sailboat.

‘Please will you sit?' Fedora asked me again.

Smiling at her, I sat. The cherry blossoms smelled musky and thick and I tried not to breathe deeply. A local judge strode past on his way up to the school, nodding as he spoke into his headset. In casual but expensive denims, he had an American eagle on his belt buckle.

The Tate Academy was a favorite dumping ground for St. Paul's political offspring – Benjamin Gerhardt confided in me solemnly one day after Russ had locked him out of the inner office, that he had
eight
friends in his Tate kindergarten class, and they all had swimming pools. Four-year-old Benjamin was enrolled at the academy until Russ's not-yet-ex wife transferred him to a different school because his teacher kept referring to him as Ben.

‘If I'd
wanted
to call him Ben, I would have
named
him Ben,' she explained to me the night of my dinner party.

Sitting awkwardly with Fedora, I wished Alan had come in my place, though this personal attention was what we paid for. We wanted Anna to be safe, not stabbed or shot or kidnapped – all the things you worry about happening to your child. Who knew this extension of yourself could be so painful? The pain of delivery can't possibly compare to the torture of having something from inside you suddenly outside, walking about, alone.

‘Your Alan is always walking,' Fedora commented, as she arranged her skirt. ‘That is how he has legs so big and strong.'

‘He does a lot of walking,' I agreed.

Her skirt was orange, the colour of popsicles. I was wearing all black, but my purse was beige.

‘He even walks in the rain,' I added.

She nodded and her long earrings were made of warm gold, almost touching her shoulders. Her neck was much longer than mine.

‘Now your Anna,' she began.

I waited. Other women always seemed better informed about my daughter than I was.

‘She knows very well what she wants from her life.'

Anna was eight.

‘Yes.'

I looked for Anna, walking down the paved path with her pink backpack in the shape of a ladybug, but she wasn't there. I became slightly more nervous.

‘Just today she has made a wall hanging of the sea turtle. From hemp. Do you know this material?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘She wants to be a marine biologist.'

Fedora looked to the sky for a moment, and then back at me. I was suspicious of being prayed for, and of not having all the information. Checking the time on the Tate's clock tower just visible above the gray-green pine trees, I remembered the clock was broken – the time was always noon. I waited for her to continue.

‘I am from an island,' she said. ‘Majorca, you have heard of this, yes?'

I nodded. Russ and his new wife had gone to Magaluf for a week's holiday last year.

‘The sea, it is very important to us there. I would like to encourage your daughter in this interest.'

‘I lived on an island once,' I said, surprising myself.

‘You know what I say then,' she said enthusiastically.
‘To be alone surrounded by water, dependent on boats. It does an important thing to a person.'

‘What made you come to America?' I wondered.

‘I have left a man there,' she said, waving a hand. ‘Is this not why every woman travels?'

We laughed together. A brown petal landed on my knee, and though she said nothing else about Anna she still seemed to want to talk. Giving a quiet sigh, she looked upwards again.

‘We are all islands,' she said thoughtfully.

I decided not to comment. The cherry blossom scent was now overwhelming, the sky burning yellow with the suspended particles of car fumes and cigarettes and skin.

‘It must be hard for you here,' I said finally.

I wanted suddenly to smoke – to be alone with the God of Peace and his onyx pipe, surrounded only by the dead.

‘It is very cold,' she admitted.

Anna finally arrived, and I stood abruptly, my black kitten heels sinking into the lawn. Reaching the paved pathway, I turned with relief to say goodbye.

‘Say to your father I said hello,' she called after us.

That evening I ordered in from the Friendly Thai and changed into a dark-green sweater for dinner. Our house seemed huge, white, and empty, and I remembered wondering what it would look like with the walls blackened, paint cracked and bubbled, everything destroyed by fire.

Alan insisted over our bowls of soup that Miss Hall was too young for him, wore too much make-up, investing in juicy lip gloss that made her mouth look wet. I pointed out at least she had good taste in men.

When Anna brought Michael home for the first time they had already been dating for a year. It was July and too hot to be
sitting outside, but we were trying to make the most of our expensive new patio furniture. The shapes of the metal and oak chairs were inspired by the praying mantis, an endangered insect which a local artist had immortalized in an admittedly abstract way with his new line of
outside installation
pieces. Alan and I were drinking a new Slovenian beer, and the spindly-legged table was wet with condensation.

We didn't hear the doorbell, and suddenly there they were. He had a Florida tan, a native of the Sunshine State. Wearing long shorts that came past his knees, a gray T-shirt and black hoops that stretched his earlobes from the inside out, I was impressed that he hadn't made an effort before meeting us, and I thought I might like him. Anna had met him on an alligator hunt in the Everglades.

‘This is Michael. These are my parents.'

She said it quickly.

I sat, rolling my shoulders forward, feeling, like I still do, that he must look at my chest first. He didn't look, smiled, and shook our hands while Alan offered, ‘Beer or wine?'

‘Just a lemonade or juice is fine,' he said.

‘Michael doesn't drink either,' she explained, looking at me.

He talked about going to the gym, I remember. His diet included canned tuna every two hours, something about bodybuilding and protein. Judging him solely by his wardrobe I'd thought at first he might be lazy enough to dampen her ambitions, keep her from her environmental crusading and everything she enjoyed in life. But it seems he had his own holy war to be fought – against loss of muscle mass and carbohydrates. I wasn't sure what to say.

‘We're only staying in St. Paul a week or two,' Anna said.

‘We're looking at houses out in the bay area.'

We. She spoke with such an assurance of their future. Such confidence in things to come. A feeling I had forgotten longago.
But seeing them together, with his legs wide so that his knee touched hers, drinking his orange juice, I remembered how it felt to have all the possibilities ahead of me. And even though I couldn't help but wonder if he was boring, even though he swallowed noisily and only drank juice, I envied Anna for being at the beginning of something.

‘Michael competed in the X-games,' Anna told us.

Alan and I smiled.

‘That's fantastic,' Alan said, and I knew he thought it was.

As evening descended I lit a citronella candle and Michael said the scent reminded him of his days scrubbing toilets at a resort in Banff. One winter he'd worked in exchange for the privilege of as much snowboarding as he could handle. ‘Work five days, board for two,' he said, grinning, drinking his juice. I leaned forward.

‘I used to do resort work when I was younger. In Michigan.'

He nodded. ‘Not too much boarding in Michigan,' he said. ‘Too flat.'

I sat back in my chair.

‘Those toilets though,' Michael said, waving a hand in front of his nose. ‘Whew.'

We weren't invited to the wedding. Spur of the moment they said. It was in California, some kind of Buddhist ceremony. I wondered what her journals contained at the time, what colour ink she chose, if she was carefully recording her ‘union' or if everything happening at each new moment was more important than the anticipation of a need for remembering.

After three years of them both teaching in the public school system on the West coast, it was a surprise to all of us when they moved back to St. Paul.

‘Where is Michael?' I asked Anna this morning.

She shook her head. ‘It doesn't matter anymore does it?'

I wondered when I'd last seen him. ‘Is he coming over?'

Anna looked at me and took my hand. Her gesture gave me an awful feeling, panic, because it meant I didn't remember.

‘He's gone, Mother. He's in California.'

I took my hand away from hers. ‘Of course,' I said. ‘And you're getting a divorce. Good.'

Confused, I wanted her to leave so that I wouldn't make such mistakes anymore. She looked sad and I felt somehow it was my fault; she reached for a picture on my dresser. In it, Michael was wearing an infuriating woolen hat that said
Board 4 Life
on it, even though he must have been at least thirty, while Anna had on some kind of hand-woven sweater that was probably made from yak fur. Michael was giving the peace sign. It was their wedding day at the Odiyan Temple, the one they helped build in Sonoma County.

I waited, and finally she put the picture in the garbage bag on her left, the one for things we weren't keeping or giving away. Anna didn't ask if she could throw it out, but I didn't object. It was a present from years ago, and it was dusty. For years I'd managed to keep it obscured behind a square glass vase filled with bamboo. Alan kept the same picture in his wallet.

She tied the plastic in a quick knot and hefted the bag, testing its weight. I followed her down into the front hall where she placed it with the others, waiting for the Amity pick-up tomorrow morning. Whole rooms have been cleared out. I was worried at first there would be nothing left. Then I began to welcome the thought.

‘Mother, stop following me.'

‘I'm tidying,' I insisted.

I took the small framed picture of a red stiletto heel
off the wall and awkwardly leaned it against the garbage bags. What did it mean, this bright red shoe? I couldn't remember anything about it, couldn't even speculate as to where it came from.

‘See?'

‘You love that picture.'

‘I don't. I'm getting rid of it.'

She sighed. ‘Fine. What are you going to do with all dad's CDs?'

Alan's music, endless disks of digital voices conjured into the air by technology. The singers were mostly dead now.

‘I don't listen to music anymore,' I said.

She went into the family room to pick out the ones she wanted. I sat in my reclining chair to watch her, her efficient fingers pink and nourished from my own wet insides. Opening a book of song lyrics, she flipped its pages. I closed my eyes and when she spoke she was talking to herself, as if I wasn't there, or couldn't listen.