Afloat (6 page)

An unnumbered journal, from my thirties:

The hailstones are here, big as babies. In the basement. Anna won't stop crying
.

I sorted through the books earlier today after boxing up the old bed linens. My purple sheets from college had been in that closet for almost fifty years along with my mother's handmade quilts, some old board games, and an instruction booklet for playing gin rummy. The entire top shelf had been stuffed with sad and oily plush toys Anna had insisted I keep, claiming there was no room in her own house for such things. I called her over and she emerged from my bedroom stopping to perform what she called ‘the forward bend'
asana
.

‘You're just touching your toes,' I pointed out.

She ignored me for a moment, exhaling loudly with her face between her knees before straightening.

‘Yoga would really help your quality of life, Mother. We could do it together.'

At times, watching Anna makes me wish for my reclining chair, a place to sit, surrounded by my empty house with nothing around me to confuse or contradict my own understanding of the world.

I shook my head and pointed to the top shelf of the closet.

‘Your animals,' I said.

‘Oh my God!' Reaching up, she brought down a green rabbit. ‘Holy shit, it's Bugsby!'

I told her that if she didn't pick one they were all going in the garbage. She rummaged through them, smelling their fur, finally putting them all in a garbage bag to take back to her house. She knew each one by name. Anna had created nametags for all her toys, printing the letters with black marker and affixing the
hello my name is
sticker to the plush and plastic breasts.

When the shelf was empty, Anna wrote her name in capital letters on a strip of masking tape and stuck it to the plastic bag, so that it wasn't confused with the others. She looked at me defiantly and said, ‘Well, I won't keep
all
of them. I'll sort them out later.'

To which I replied, ‘Yeah, right.'

She eyed my journals as she bagged up the animals, but did not say anything.

They sit alone in the closet now, except for a change of pillowcases and some extra blankets for the guest bedroom. An entire closet filled with my own words. I suppose the cupboard is haunted, in a way.

But I'm ready for them now.

The first is as blue as water, the other red and bound in cloth, both absent of any clever quotations. So much of my past in these pages, ready to be discovered, and I will read each page to remember the summer as it was, to help my guest and I to reminisce when he arrives after his long drive.

It is not yet two, the weather is steady in my backyard.

Reading back in time is tedious, tiring, deciphering the horrible handwriting, drunken handwriting, drunken thoughts. Nothing is dated, all the days run together. Beneath the words,
eight
shots don't know how I got home fucking bike
, I have written, more coherently:

I am in love not because it is Saturday

or spring

not because I am drunk

or alone

not because he is what I was waiting for

but because I am here
.

These words have not lost their importance to me, even written so long ago. And what better reason to love?

I run my fingers over the page, but I can't feel the depression of the letters anymore.

The sun reflects off the water and the roads, and brightens the white buildings. It bakes the island dry and dusty, so by the end of the day the streets are covered in a thin layer of dried horseshit that the men with their wheelbarrows are unable to collect. The dust creeps up pant legs and covers toes and sandals and I
know
that it's shit, but it looks like dust so it's okay.

When I sit to examine my dirty feet closely, I see the brown bits of undigested hay, like tiny slivers of sawdust. Unlike Main Street, scooped, shoveled, and washed clean at night with the town fire hose to emerge pristine and slightly damp the next morning, the shit builds up around our apartments, the flies loud and buzzing. Our road only qualifies for a once a week cleaning.

Inside, away from the breeze off the lake, the Pine Suites heat up with stagnant air, laundry begins to smell, leftover food brings ants (as Velvet's laminated warning signs had predicted) and the walls seem to be sweating. Our room smells of bodies.

Bryce makes us a pitcher of purple juice and we finish it quickly. When he swallows I can hear the liquid in his throat, and he makes an
ahhh
sound after every sip. I wonder if after a while this would get annoying, but he's too new, too good for me to wonder for very long. We lie on his bed, the one sheet shoved to the floor. He licks me with his tongue to see if it will leave a purple mark.

I reach under the bed for my journal. The cover is clean
and blue, the new paper white and stiff; I am trying not to fill its pages with things like,
laundry detergent
, or
remember my red shirt
. The sweat from my palm sticks to the fresh pages. Bryce wants to know what I'm writing.

‘Secrets.'

‘Tell me.'

I turn the pages as if looking for a specific passage.

June fourth
, I read,
I think Bryce is just dreamy
.

‘Fuck off. What are you writing, really?'

June fifth
, I continue,
sometimes Bryce swears at me and it makes me sad
.

I am worried he might snatch the book from me. Instead he reaches absently across the bed to poke me in the back.

‘You're very soft,' he says.

‘Tell me about being Mormon,' I ask.

He stops poking. ‘I don't think so.'

‘I want to know. Do you have churches?'

‘We have churches.'

‘So what's the deal? Why Utah?'

‘Wouldn't you rather have sex?' he asks.

I roll my eyes at him, and he sighs and then recites as if from a brochure:

Joseph Smith is the founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. The angel Moroni visited him in upstate New York, and the angel showed him a set of tablets, which laid the foundation for the Mormon religion
.

‘Where are they?'

‘Where are what?'

‘The tablets?'

‘In heaven.'

‘And this happened in upstate New
York
?'

‘That's the story.'

‘And Salt Lake City?'

‘Good skiing,' he says.

‘What was on the tablets?'

‘Shit, it's one o'clock. The game's on.'

Bryce rolls off the bed, his chest tanned and wet with sweat, and punches the television on. His loose jeans reveal the tops of his boxers: a red and white heart pattern. He notices me noticing.

‘They're functional, not sentimental,' he says, anticipating my question.

I decide to see his point. In the kitchen, he pulls a beer from the fridge and then returns, tossing something towards me.

‘What's this?'

The magnet is plastic, and shows a man in eighteenth-century dress leading a wagon train and pointing. The magnet says, ‘This is the place.'

‘It's Brigham Young leading the Mormons to Salt Lake. I got it when I was there. You can have it, if you want.'

‘It's fucking hideous. I don't want it.'

When I look up he winks at me, and I throw it at him.

‘Who's Brigham Young?' I ask.

‘I'm watching the game,' he says, climbing back into bed.

He takes my hand absently, and kisses my knuckles as the red team beats the blue team in a game that goes into overtime.

Tonight the chef special is
duck confit
. Chef Walter refuses to tell me what
confit
means and I have to look it up in his special dictionary, its pages smeared with food and oil.
Confit
means, ‘roasted in its own juices.'

‘Isn't that what
picatta
means too?'

Chef Walter stares at me, then says, ‘Look it up.'

I do, and
piccatta
means ‘
seared
in its own juices.' I tell Rummy and Trainer as they arrive what
confit
means.

The Tippecanoe is almost empty and it's raining gray drizzle outside. The heat from the early afternoon has evaporated taking the tourists with it, and I remember we left the bedroom windows open. Everyone stands around polishing silverware, drinking coffee, and helping each other with the
USA Today
crossword. We are stuck on twenty-three across, for which the clue reads: the abbreviation for a western state. We can't decide which states constitute western states, or if the clue includes places which are southwest, like New Mexico. We agree on UT, WA, MT, and NV, but we won't know which is right until the puzzle is almost done.

‘The woman at table twelve has fake tits,' Brenna announces, as she enters the kitchen.

Rummy immediately goes out to check and reports back with the authority of an expert that they are most likely fake. A few of the girls go out to look as well, while Trainer says, ‘It's got to be Utah, because thirteen down is Ukulele.'

He uses his black pen to fill in the spaces.

‘Did I tell you I got a new bike?'

‘Spare me,' Trainer says.

When I go out to check on my two tables, the couple that was sitting at table number five is now outside on the patio, the gray slate black and slick from the earlier afternoon rain. In fact the entire restaurant is outside, looking up. The air is wet with mist and there is a rainbow. A full arc seems to be projecting from the top of the lighthouse and curving over the entire expanse of the sky to fall somewhere by the last ferry dock at the other end of the island. Everyone is speaking softly, standing in groups. Table number five gives me their disposable camera, posing by the railing overlooking the water with the end of the rainbow falling behind them. As the mechanism makes a tiny clicking noise, I have a strange feeling in my throat.

Trainer appears beside me, licking black crossword ink from his fingers.

‘God. A rainbow,' he says. ‘What a fucking cliché.'

Velvet comes to get me, making careful high-heeled steps across the slate. Her black blouse is unbuttoned in such a way the pale beginnings of her breasts are visible, and she tells me the water glasses on table nineteen are empty. Table nineteen has already paid and refused my last offer to refill their glasses. There is no point in telling Velvet this. I take one more look at the sky before I follow her in.

As I approach the table, Velvet watching to ensure I do as she instructed, the couple are discussing the lighthouse. They turn to look at me.

‘Which one is the famous one?' the woman wants to know.

‘Sorry?'

‘Well, there's the big white one, right there in the lake, and the little red one out there on the island across from us.'

I squint out the window, disbelieving. ‘There's two?'

The couple look at me, and then out the window. The woman points: ‘That one, and then that one.'

She points out the bright-red building and the lighthouse tower beside it. From a distance it looks like a house.

‘Oh,' I say. ‘I only ever noticed the big white one.'

I could never figure out why the white one was called Round Island Lighthouse when it wasn't on an island.

Realizing I have pointed out the Round Island Lighthouse incorrectly now to over a dozen guests, I instinctively look over my shoulder to make sure Velvet can't hear our conversation from where she is standing. Still holding the water pitcher, I awkwardly fill up their glasses without asking them, and retreat to the back of the restaurant where I decide I like the modern white lighthouse better than the famous one. Alone in the lake, the massive structure reflects the weather
perfectly, glowing gold and pink with the sun, and turning gray with the storms. To me this is more valuable.

Trainer stands next to me for a while, his only table having a relaxed dinner with Mango Carpaccio appetizers and Glazed Walnut and Arugula salads before the main course. There are three couples, all the men gray-haired, the women lipsticked. The sort of table where it's awkward to drop the check, three hands reaching at once, everyone winking at you.

‘Guess how much their bill is?' he asks.

‘I don't know. Did you know there were two lighthouses?'

He looks at me. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?'

I shake my head. ‘Four hundred?' I guess.

‘Six fifty,' he says.

As he starts to calculate his tip I look out the window, but the rainbow is gone.

Bryce tells me later on when I get out of work that he had seen the rainbow too, and had thought of me.

Then he says:

‘I fucking nailed Brenna with a water balloon today.'

‘That's the third rainbow I've ever seen in my life,' I say.

He puts an arm around me. ‘You'll see tons more this summer, I promise.'

I like that he feels he can promise me this.

Then he adds grinning, ‘She was soaked.'

Brenna is reading a book in which the narrator talks about waiters being a ‘bad emotional risk.' These male waiters travel from restaurant to resort to hotel, learning, loving, hating, then moving on. This transient lifestyle has trained them to be incapable of longevity. They'll be pleasant to your face and then spit on your relationship behind your back. And they like to sample lots of different dishes.

‘It's so true,' says Brenna. ‘It's
so
my ex-boyfriend, Matt. He's such a cheating piece of shit.'

The other girls nod sympathetically and she turns to me.

‘You're really lucky,' she says. ‘Bryce is, like, husband material.'

Blue says she can't wait until she gets married. Her boyfriend's name is Jeremy.

Does the job make the man, or does the man take the job? I am optimistic. Bryce is a waiter, but he is very picky about what he eats. And I have it on good authority that he never spits in anyone's food.