Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (28 page)

“Let’s hope it’s fresher than that.”

She took my money and handed me the pie. “Come swimming with me!” she said loudly. I couldn’t help but feel pleased and a little proud at the front of that long line. She had declared me to everyone: the chosen one, her swimming partner, recipient of the last strawberry rhubarb pie.

“I’d love to.”

“Tomorrow morning earlyish?”

“Sure.”

“Meet me here and we’ll drive over.”

“Okay!” I found myself in constant agreement.

* * *

And so it was Violet who introduced me to Ice House, the pond deep in the woods where she had taught her son how to swim. They were not the woods of my transgression but another woods very near P.I.P. We strolled the broad, shaded trail like Hatfielders on holiday, I could see a watery glint in the distance where the sun shone on the pond. There was no beach, only a wooden staircase that led out of the woods and then an iron dock that jutted out into the water. The pond was pristine, glacial in origin, now spring-fed. Two striped towels hung upon the black rails; I looked out with some dismay to see two swimmers already in the water. Violet hung her towel alongside theirs and I followed suit. We swam without stopping to the other side. I struggled to keep up. Her strength surprised me.

Once on the other side, we draped ourselves like washed clothes upon a large rock. We murmured as the sun dried us. Across the pond the two swimmers arrived at the shore and vanished into the trees with their towels. We were alone in summer’s kingdom. It was a small, oval-shaped world like the inside of a locket, one side the mirror of the pond, the other the sky.

“Our little glass lake,” Violet sighed.

“Not a grain of sand to trouble us.”

“No, not even one.”

“Are you happy?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Even though your son’s away?” I couldn’t imagine Maria off-island much less forget her son.

“Yes. I like to be alone.”

I felt buoyed by her certainty. She seemed very wise to me lying there in her white maillot like an
Amaterasu
under the sun. We were not without him, we carried his image in our locket as he journeyed west walking barefoot, eating avocados, seeing orange trees growing outside for the first time. Perhaps he too was swimming, in a river, in the sea, it didn’t matter. I felt the kind of happiness one feels in the presence of a friend when one’s child is in the next room—nearby but requiring none of one’s attention.

“He arrived in Mendocino last night.”

“I hear it’s beautiful there.”

“I think he’ll like it.”

I opened my eyes and turned to see her smiling through closed eyes, drops of pond water dotting her face like dew. I studied it for signs of danger but she looked completely at peace.

“I’m proud of him. He’s more adventurous than I was.”

“But you’re very brave. What about Europe?”

“It’s not the same. I went with a girlfriend and we always had creature comforts.”

“Oh,” I said dumbly, nearly blurting out, “He never told me that,” but I caught myself, pretending our many conversations had never occurred. In a way it was easy, for I had begun to doubt that they had. My memories of our time together seemed sadly delusional if not completely insane. I half wanted to ask Violet for verification. As with a small boat in the wind I struggled with thoughts of him. In my effort to steer myself to safety, I grew tired of rowing, my arms were as weak as my will, and in the end I lay down and let the boat drift.

“Will you freckle?” I asked, thinking of his skin, the way he could take on an olive cast in a single day.

“Yes. That’s another difference. My son tans beautifully and all I get is spots.”

“I don’t see any spots.” Her skin was pale and clear.

“SPF 50,” she said.

The mention of her son’s beauty had a predictable effect. I bent my legs and wondered about the missing father. Romani? Wampanoag? Italian?

“When he comes back, I want you to meet him.”

“All right.”

“You’d like him.”

“Why’s that?”

“He reminds me of you a little.”

“Of me? How so?”

“I don’t know, he just does. Or maybe you remind me of him, I’m not sure which. You both have strong feelings about things and you’re both smart.”

“Well, if he’s anything like you, I’m sure he’s lovely.”

“It’s funny, I sometimes forget you’ve never met. It’s as if you know each other.”

“Yes, I feel that too,” I said, my heart throbbing obscenely beneath my suit, my pulse flashing like a diamond at my neck.

“When he comes back, we’ll all have lunch.”

“Okay,” I agreed. I closed my eyes less to feel the sun upon them than to cover their expression.

When the sun had dried us we rose without speaking, like nomads whose movements are ruled by the stars. We looked out across the water. Violet glanced at me in a kind yet cursory way and I gave her my best Aunt Tomoko nod. She dove in first, a a shimmering whitefish entering the dark water. I scrambled awkwardly down from the rock and waded in, my elbows flying up when the cold water touched my warm chest. Clumsily, I splashed in after her.

We swam near each other, Violet slightly ahead. Her strokes were strong; it would have been an effort for her to remain beside me. Somewhere near the middle of the pond we heard geese overhead. Within moments the birds had descended and joined us, some of them flapping and splashing the surface, others gliding like small ships alongside us. Violet turned cleanly to swim on her back and flashed me a sleeky gap smile. It was as if together we had entered a room where two people were making love. One felt simultaneously a sense of trespass and sensuality, nearness and exclusion. One heard wings brushing against the water, wings brushing against wings. Each bird carried its unknown cargo, the majestic fleet of them following its prescribed fate. I longed to touch one—I was near enough—but felt certain if I were to alter my stroke the spell would be broken and the geese would flee so I swam as smoothly as I could among them, in Violet’s green wake.

* * *

With the young man gone and summer’s onslaught under way, I did my best to remain stable: I drank cup after cup of hot chamomile tea, I reread
Lolita
, I walked for hours on the side of the road, I weltered in my sorrow before the waterfall (which now struck me as an effusion of tears), I swam doggedly with Violet, I succumbed to working the Friday shift.

People came to the library in droves. There was now a waiting list for the computers, each patron was given a different color card specifying which terminal they had been assigned to. The director switched jubilantly to iced coffee, Kitty began wearing the silver and black striped halter top that had elicited several warnings from the library trustees (we were not to expose our shoulders or midriff, though contrary to my own instincts, the showing of feet in sandals was permitted), there were crowds of children at story hour, the Saturday crafts migrated to the back garden where the forest green umbrellas were raised and the striped awning unfurled once more.

Four young shelvers were hired that summer to alleviate the increase in circulation, two of them fairly attractive university age boys in whom I could not muster a speck of interest. I had thought that the young man might open within me a hidden floodgate or inspire a new predilection, but those two boys gave the lie to all that. His absence only made more explicit my need for Violet. Like a pet, I watched the door for her, eager to be fed any morsel pertaining to her son, but she was too busy for the library. Business was brisk and the weather was fine. She had time for swimming but no time for books. In summer our priorities diverged, making mine a double abandonment.

And yet, in the days following the young man’s arrival in California, I was surprised to find that I did not feel—as I had so feared I would—abandoned. Instead, as if waking from an exhaustingly vivid dream, I struggled to verify whether my experience had been real. I went over the chain of events in my mind and couldn’t help but wonder how well, if at all, I could trust my own memory. My state of bewilderment and ecstasy and terror was not one that lent itself to fact-finding.

To muddle matters further, I had, during the past year, read an abundance of novels on the subject of older women and younger men. (Where can one expect a librarian to turn for guidance if not to books?) As I recalled some minor details (his habit of removing my shoes last for instance) and even some minor events (the alleged phone call), I began to question whether I was recounting the history of my own affair or that of a literary characters or some mad amalgamation of the two. Had I manufactured false memories or had one woman’s middle-aged modesty eradicated her belief? For if I was to believe in my own story, I was to believe in my own desire and desirability.

When the desire to hear his voice came upon me I found myself watching films featuring the aforementioned film star whose face threatened to supplant the young man’s face in my memory, a phenomenon I worked conscientiously to counteract. As the swarthy chainsaw of the actor’s voice cut through me (the memory of the young man was indeed both painful and exciting), it became my habit to close my eyes and summon the young man’s face.

Such climactic moments aside, July was dull, the days wearisome and unsettling as long London bus rides to the outskirts of the city, the nights akin to journeys I made with my mother across the moors to visit her invalid sister whom she deeply resented. Poverty, darkness, estrangement, little to see or look forward to. Not even the rumbling of a school bus in the distance to prick up my ears. And yet I confess the island was astonishingly beautiful at that time of year. Yellow lilies (their color reminiscent of the irises that grew wild at the edge of the rushy pond) had opened in the garden; tomatoes, Sun Golds and Early Girls were ready to be picked; blueberries grew plump and wild just down the road; the apples were beginning to show; the cove where I took Maria for picnics, Ice House, and of course the sea, had never been more blue. But the island of my mind was such a horror.

As the temperatures reached into the high eighties, my sense of disbelief receded and I began to anticipate his return. I tried to stop myself—it seemed pure folly to wait for a seventeen-year-old, purer still for Violet’s son—but even in the sweltering heat, I felt a chill at the back of my legs when I thought of him. The attic had become unbearable, hotter than the outdoors, especially at night, by which time it had absorbed all the heat of the day and stood emanating it. Unable to sleep, I had little else to do but perspire while I imagined our meeting. That year the apples fell early, when they were still green. I would hear them dropping in the cool dark.

As the temperatures climbed higher still into the nineties and the young man’s return date drew frighteningly near, I was filled with fear that the dream had been real after all. I thought I would explode with panic at the idea of him arriving. It seemed unlikely that he would want to see me after whatever life-altering experience he’d had on that dirty river and less likely still if he were to grant me an audience that he would still desire me. Thanks to Violet I wasn’t forced to question his very existence but the only proof of our relationship was my own desire, the phone call, the British edition of Salinger, and eventually a letter.

He wrote to me one night from inside his tent which I hardly dared to imagine, having once, as a young person myself, known the intoxicating intimacy of a tent’s interior. In a clearing, near a wood, near a body of water, the flaps of the tent open enough to allow a breeze, shut enough to ensure privacy. The night lit by stars, the only sounds those of animals and birds and insects and the crushing of grass and leaves beneath one’s prone body when one turns to face one’s companion.

He had written the letter on a page from the journal Violet had given him and I had the small hope that he might think of me each time he encountered the missing page. Though he received an A- in English he was not fond of writing. (A- was in fact his lowest grade. Despite his unusually high grade point average, he insisted his true education had been “waiting on fools” at P.I.P.) He had expressed frustration with the composition element of the class and had warned me not to expect letters. And yet, he had expended the effort to write. The page was stained by rain or water from his canteen or perhaps dew. His handwriting was, as it had been that first day, quite ordinary, but at the sight of it I felt again an unstoppable surge of pride, as if I had been the one to teach him the alphabet, printing, the writing of cursive. It was a side to him that I rarely had the privilege of seeing. Each letter was small, carelessly formed, there were loops in places where in my own there were none. To me, it was a beautiful sight to behold, a youthful accomplishment. He said he missed me but devoted the bulk of his short letter to praising the river and the land.

There was no mention of other people though I’m certain he was living among others, other volunteers and their guides. I was convinced there must have been a Sophia or a Rosamond, if not an irresistible Kamala, beside him. To my suspicious eye, what was missing from the letter, seemed to reveal as much about his new life as the brief, pastoral descriptions. What may have been a sincere effort to include me, to convey that which I could not experience firsthand, had the effect of delineating the distance between us, between the place near a river where he spent his days and the place surrounded by the sea where I existed with, to be fair, my equally unmentionable husband and child. He said he was writing by the light of a headlamp, a modern Ishmaelian image to be sure, and I was torn between my longing to imagine him and a fear of my own imagination.

At the sight of his handwriting my doubts dissolved, though I sensed they might return like headaches to plague me. Some part of me could always be persuaded that his existence, its intersection with mine, even my own existence, were impossibilities. Writing was not his strong suit, he had not lied or exaggerated there, still the content of his letter mattered less to me than the fact of it, the fact of him standing next to a river tearing a page out of the journal I had seen with my own eyes, and then the fact of him sitting down, perhaps against a tree whose leaves were a bright, summery green, to form thoughts of me and write them down.