Afloat (9 page)

‘No such thing as a happy ending, I guess.'

That the woman died of a broken heart is something I do not mention. It seems to me like that might be the easy way out.

Bryce is only marginally impressed with the tale, but this is always his reaction to finding out things he didn't know about before.

‘Would you cry a hole into a rock if I drowned?' he asks.

‘Of course.'

He puts a hand over mine and winks at me. ‘That's what they all say.'

John brings over our food, everything in plastic baskets. I've ordered the deep-fried whitefish, which ruins the taste of the fish, but I'm in the mood for something crisp and fat. My drink is an expensive Long Island Iced Tea, and Bryce has a Screwdriver, also unusual for him. We trade sips.

Some days you feel like something different. It's nice to be able to change your mind.

As we begin eating our fish, I remember to tell him that his sister called.

I have a souvenir from that day of fairytales and deep-fried fish. My mug is not the only thing I have kept from that summer, although it is the most practical. It's a silly thing to speak of now, so trivial it seems.

He bent the straw from my long island into a triangle, fitting the ends into each other so that it kept its shape. ‘For you,' he said, flicking it at me. I left it on the table when we got up, and then later, taking off my clothes before bed, I discovered it in the hood of my jacket. It stayed on the dresser there until I left. What makes one keep things like this? But I did, I brought it home with me, and it went into an envelope.

This morning Anna came and put her hand on my shoulder, startling me. I'd been wondering about my breasts and how I wanted them to appear this evening, imagining the encounter both with and without them.

I think I
will
wear them, I told Anna, turning towards her touch.

She nodded and brought me to the bedroom. The thick envelope lay at the bottom of the closet surrounded by men's shoes. Some pairs shiny and hardly worn and others creased across the toe. The mail bag beside Anna was full. She had already discovered the two lavender air fresheners stuck to the back wall and when she pried them off the paint came with them. When she apologized, I was far away, remembering how nice the lavender used to smell, masking the scent of Alan's wet leather running shoes in the morning.

Alan's favorite smell was sand. When we played my
What Would You Give Up?
game, he insisted he would trade all the fingers on his left hand for our own private beach. He would not give up any of his toes, as that would upset his balance. I told him sand was just made of rocks and rocks don't smell, and he said for someone raised Catholic I had very little faith in my own senses.
If you just sit still and concentrate long enough, you can smell anything, taste anything
. He sometimes tried moving pencils with his thoughts. Anna with all her meditation and studies about transcendence to different worlds agreed with her father. Anything was possible.

The envelope from my closet was heavy and marked with the word MACKINAC, as if all the contents, all the cards, letters, the one cassette and the triangle straw memento were geographically branded somehow. I imagined my island past as a person, with hair made of dry green grass and a lighthouse beacon for a heart.

‘It's full of old papers,' Anna said, reaching a hand into the envelope.

‘I know what it's full of,' I told her. ‘Just leave it.'

She ignored me. ‘You can't keep this, Mom. What is this?

A
cassette tape
?'

She held it out reading long-ago handwriting that wasn't mine. ‘
Sex
Machine?'

There was a brief pause – the song selected, the disk set in place, the music beginning suddenly. The lights of the jukebox turned red, then green.

‘Mom?'

The voice was sultry, sweaty.

She sighed, putting the cassette tape back in the envelope and placing it in the round curve of my papasan chair, which I cannot sit in anymore as it's impossible to get out of. The
chair was full of things I couldn't yet bring myself to throw away. I wondered if Anna were just anticipating all the subsequent cleaning she would do after I died – if her encouragement for purging was a result of her own selfishness.

This morning's efforts now fill two canvas bags marked
Property of The United States Postal Service
, bulging and lopsided by the front door – the huge bags they use in the warehouse before the mail gets sorted. Funny to think they're full of a dead mailman's shoes instead of birthday cards and bills. He had more shoes than I ever did.
Bought them on sale
, he always said proudly.
For work
.

I wonder if I should attempt to move the bags somewhere else; they look so uninviting, crowding the hallway with the type of past we won't want to remember. But where else could they go?
Welcome
, I will say.
Don't mind my dead husband's shoes
.

Open before me is the story of Arch Rock written faithfully in my red journal, the speech bubble around my old words leading to a young ink woman with feathers in her hair. I put the envelope on top of her. It is bulky at the bottom, some of the items misshapen and the envelope worn thin in places. I touch my tongue briefly to the open flap, but the adhesive has long disappeared along with my taste buds. I decide to begin by chance, and reaching in I'm reminded of the haunted houses at St. Mary's Primary where, with eyes closed, you hoped for something manageable like the peeled grape-witch's eyeball. My mind is certain, however, that this long-ago envelope was carefully filled with only pleasant things. Some memories have no need of a physical reminder.

I pull out the cassette tape that Anna had found so offensive
and rattle it beside my ear. The plastic casing is cracked, and there's nowhere to play it now except the old stereo in the basement. We haven't done the basement yet. I make a note to see if the stereo still works; it would be nice to hear again. Setting it down, I notice the brown ribbon running through the bottom of the tape is broken.

Impatient now, I turn the envelope upside down and everything slides out together as if the passing of half a century has enabled each souvenir to attach itself to the next, afraid of being alone.

In the pile, a thin paper rectangle is shiny with the politics of the summer. Though it never occurred to me at the time, I suppose giving out bumper stickers on the island had an air of the ridiculous about it. I try to peel away the waxy paper backing but my fingers won't work and this governor died a long time ago anyway. Still, I think I'll keep it.

I'm reminded of the shows on television, where a professional cleaner will come into someone's house to help them get rid of things. There will be protests, the mother saying,
But it was my grandmother's chair
. And the professional cleaner will say,
Yes, but that chair is not your grandmother
.

It's easy to laugh then. It is easy to laugh, but it is much different when it's your own hand, hovering above the trash, hesitating with memory.

The sun from each day etches itself in progressing shades of brown on my skin and Bryce begins calling me his Little Indian Princess. Trainer says he's sick of the white man appropriating minority culture this way, and Rummy points out that Trainer is white himself and the least politically correct person he knows, and Trainer calls him a lying Canuck. The resulting conversation ends with shots of Jaegermeister, and Trainer giving Rummy a piggyback ride down Main Street, both of them yelling,
The British are coming!
At four in the afternoon tourists stop to take pictures.

These strange incidents are rarely worthy of conversation, each unlikely act obtaining a sort of normalcy and blending together with the last. The schedule hanging in the back of the Tippecanoe runs from Thursday to Thursday and often there are no corresponding dates, or even the month.

Everything is green and the lilacs begin to bloom. Hundreds and hundreds of trees turn purple and white and pink. Bushes that were thin and broken and brown just days ago now reveal their purpose, exploding with breezy trumpets of flowers; the air is full of their scent. Some people come just for this, to take pictures and walk among them. They blossom quickly and stay for weeks. The shops sell sweatshirts and china plates with sprays of lilac on them.

What
else
should we see on the island?

When guests ask, I point to the large white house near the west bluff.

‘You can't go in,' I tell them, ‘but sometimes she's there. You can see her through the windows.'

The governor of Michigan uses the summerhouse for both business and pleasure. Supposedly when the state flag is raised it means she is in residence, but though the flagpole is tall and visible from atop Fort Hill, the small blue flag is difficult to see. The
Detroit Free Press
is a better indication of the governor's whereabouts. Bryce tells me the flag's crest includes both a moose and an elk, supporting a shield on which a man is waving and holding a gun. ‘We don't fuck around here in Michigan,' Bryce told me proudly. Incongruously, the white ribbon at the bottom of the flag reads in Latin:
if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around
.

The governor's mansion is described as stately, Victorian, picturesque, and also as a tax burden by some Republicans. The current governor is a Democrat, and she points out that when the Republicans were in office and made use of the home the cost of it didn't bother them. It is a nice house for parties. I know this because the groundskeeper employed by the governor lives in the house and loves drinking Shiraz-Cabernet. After a bottle or two he becomes a gracious host, inviting random people he's just met back to the mansion.

We arrive there late one sweltering night after the pubs have closed. No one knows his name, but none of us care as he leads a group of us, stumbling, into the living room which is tasteful and white and open. Trainer keeps wondering aloud where his bellboy is, and Rummy throws up on the governor's couch.

‘You guys fucking know how to party,' the groundskeeper says with approval.

Trainer takes in the vases of flowers, the gold candlesticks,
the heavy portraits on the walls, and says, ‘This place needs a lot of fucking to liven it up.'

The groundskeeper nods and says, ‘hell yeah', and then takes a mirror from his pocket.

‘You guys need a bump?'

Rummy shakes his head, no, and wanders out the front door wiping his chin, where we hear him continue his dry heaving on the front stoop. Bryce pretends he doesn't indulge, so Trainer sits down to do a line and the two of them discover they have the same dealer. After more drinking someone brings out a deck of cards, and at four in the morning all of us, minus Rummy, play Crazy Eights, a game the groundskeeper punctuates with accusations.

‘Cheating motherfuckers,' he says after every hand.

We ignore him.

‘You all think this island is some backwater shithole,' he continues, as if defending it from some unspoken insult.

‘But, seriously. You know who's stayed here? In that bedroom?' He points to a window. ‘George fucking Bush.'

‘I told you!' Bryce says to me.

Bryce has already told me the long list of historical figures that have visited the island over the years. Mark Twain is said to have rocked in a chair on the porch of the Grand Hotel, Gerald Ford came here as an Eagle Scout, and George Bush Senior, as the groundskeeper now swears on his life, was here in secret one summer. Bryce's friend Dickweed has corroborated this fact, although I didn't believe him at the time. Dickweed claimed that while he was wandering the streets late one night a few years ago he fell over in front of a carriage. It was forced to stop and two men wearing black searched him. After the men realized Dickweed was merely drunk, they led him by the arm to the roadside and were on their way.

‘So I'm by the side of the road and this old guy leans out of the carriage as it speeds up and says, “Have a good night,” and it was the
fucking
president.'

So the story may or may not be true.

The groundskeeper gets up abruptly, and he disappears saying something about turning on the sprinklers. I look out the front door to check on Rummy, but he's disappeared. His bike is gone, so maybe he made it home.

We choose the third-floor guest bedroom for the night, listening to the gentle sound of the chugging waterworks and the occasional swearing from our new friend still somewhere outside.

‘Rummy says Anna Jameson visited the island back in the day,' I say.

My face is buried in Bryce's armpit, and there is a pause while I wonder if he's asleep.

‘I refuse to give you the satisfaction of asking who that is,' he says.

The stately bedroom has thousands of flowers everywhere: the bedspread, the curtains, the wallpaper. We do not notice this until the next morning when the governor's butler asks us to please get the hell out of the house before he calls the police. The house is on a hill, however, and we know that the trek upwards on bicycles will not be one the police make eagerly. We also cannot believe that the governor has a butler.