30

“I’m hot,” Liz says.

The back porch reeks. One floorboard rots.

 “Did you ever consider wearing lighter clothes? Black absorbs the heat.” Damon Ray speaks in the humble tone of Mr. Rogers. One of his heroes, no doubt. He seemed from the start to think of her as a sibling, someone he may correct and question, someone whose thoughts he may probe.

Liz is dressed in black denim shorts and black court shoes and socks. The shorts wide-legged, stiff as stovepipes. She feels fat. Doughy. Neil and Sophie are about to descend: adversity must be right around the corner.

“I don’t own any lighter clothes.” She tests her strength with an 18-inch pile of Soviet Life, kicks open the screen door, and deposits the disintegrating magazines into the maw of her trunk.

DR says, “You are one strong mama.” And, “Are you sure everything has to go?” He appears fuzzy behind the screen, obscured.

“Every little thing.”

“That freezer’s going to be a bear.” “The four of us can manage.”

“What about these canning jars?”

A self-styled anarchist/socialist, perky to a fault, a hard worker, DR is also a packrat. Liz says, “Thou shalt not can.”

 “No?”

 “That’s what grocery stores are for. Jolly Green Giant. Etcetera.”

 “Okey-dokey. You’re the boss. The boss’s daughter.”

The farm is alive with growth. Shoulder-high weeds and wildflowers. New spinach every day. Crookneck squash unblemished as baby skin. “Zucchini up the yin-yang,” DR declares.

At night he gets out his concertina. Tommy might throw a stick for Mother Jones. In between tunes, her father might broach the topic of Castro and Che Guevara playing baseball in Cuba after the Cuban Revolution, just to see if DR is up on that, or some other esoteric trot through history. If DR brings up the WTO or his arrest in Seattle during a demonstration, tension like a leak in the roof might taint the night. Liz would never take to the streets, as DR calls it. It’s not orderly. And what good does it do? The way she sees it, demonstrators are self-centered, pig-headed. Talking about it seems rude. And Joe is silent on this issue, except to say, “Now’s not the time for that.” Evenings are best when there is no mention of anarchy and corporate thievery. On the glider, she’ll read. Damon Ray sings a song that moves her. And she is not a sentimental person. It’s a ballad about a young couple separated because he’s been sent to prison – “The Fields of Athenry” – and two lines get to her. Our love was on the wing. We had dreams and songs to sing. She feels a rough scraping in her chest. And she feels shamefaced. What she feels is not about him. DR has to be all of twenty and gets under her skin. It can’t be about Neil, either. She contends with the unfinished business of Neil. Neil, who will drive up any minute. She dreads the emergency of Neil: Enter the water! Swim away!

Benny and Sophie arrive first, in a hybrid, Benny tooting the horn. Mother Jones ducks out from under the pickup. Too late, Liz wonders why she didn’t prepare for Sophie’s visit with, at minimum, a shower. But no, she’s drenched in sweat, going ugly early, as those college T-shirts used to say. Sophie alights from the passenger seat into the shade of the sycamore, and Liz’s radar picks up DR’s response. He stands there dumbly, a crate of canning jars in his arms. He doesn’t put the crate down and he doesn’t go on to the trunk with it. He just stands there. Not for long: a half-minute. Under his breath, confidentially to Liz, he says, “Whistle while you work, kiddo.” As if to say, “Wild horses couldn’t keep me from this job.”

Sophie is perfume-y, clean as a Shasta daisy, glowing. Her toenails painted stop-sign red. Benny holds a DVD player under one arm. Lamely, Liz says, “Sophie. Benny. Hi.”

And before they can recover, get back to work, suddenly in the sweet brindled sunlight and the solid ka-chunk of car doors and Mother Jones leaping, everyone is there: Neil toeing the pine duff; Joe and Tommy. Everyone summery and town-fresh. Everyone talking heartily. Tommy kneels into the dog-embrace of Mother Jones. Joe plucks bags of groceries from the Skylark’s backseat. Dutifully, Tommy glances up from Mother Jones and says, “Hi, Dad.” 

Neil is a foreigner, a place she visited once. He hugs her like a sister. His presence brings to mind snooping in his desk when he was at work, the samosas she devoured at the Indian place near her therapist’s office, the sessions with the therapist and those godawful-smelling markers with which she mapped out her reduced personas on poster board (Mean Minnie, Fraidy Cat, Feminist Fanny, Eyore), and her belongings left at Neil’s townhouse, in the dresser and in the closet. In three weeks she has become someone else and Neil does not know it and it is her responsibility to say so. That’s the trouble with breaking up. You have to say so. 

They retreat to the veranda, sweat evaporating. Joe brings out a pitcher of ice water and a pitcher of lemonade. He makes another trip for beer and nested aluminum tumblers. Radiant Sophie has her tan going; she might have gained a little weight. Benny is in the living room, hooking up the television and DVD player. Peggy Lee has languidly draped herself over Sophie’s leg: traitor.

Shyly, Sophie says, “I have some news. I’ve saved it.”

Benny comes out of the house and posts himself at the door. He and Sophie make eye contact, as if he wants to lend support. The palm trees on his Hawaiian shirt mesmerize; he’s from another world: the city, good grooming, no dirt under his fingernails. His haircut’s fresh; his face clean-shaven.

Joe says, “Good news?”

“I hope you’ll think so. I’m going to have a baby.”

For a moment there is no sound save the wasps in their paper nest far enough away, non-threatening. Wasps and a few birds. Joe breaks the silence: “It’s what you wanted.”

“Congratulations,” DR says, grinning.

Joe rises from the glider and pulls Sophie up into a hug. “Did you tell Ems?” 

“No” Sophie says.

“Arturo and Magda?”

“Dad. This’s my warm-up.”

No one states the obvious, Liz’s thought: How sad. And then: I have not participated in her mourning. I lost the chance to be a big sister. Is it Sophie’s grief that provokes her when Damon sings?

Neil downs his lemonade in two long gulps. He says, “Show me around the property, Tommy?” And they go, Tommy mimicking Neil’s stance, his gait.

Tommy says to Neil, “Joe and I might start an e-business.”

Neil says, “Is that so?”

“Is that so,” Liz stage-whispers.

Benny says, “It’s about time.”

“We’re discussing the possibilities,” Joe says. “This old dog can learn new tricks. Lizard.” 

 

 

Later that night, after efforts at festivity – Uncle Mort’s salvaged homebrew, DR’s special antipasto platter, Benny’s pasta, blueberries by the handful – and after DR’s bittersweet music at dusk, and after Liz has avoided Sophie and nearly avoided Neil, Neil finally says to her, privately, “Where do you sleep?”

Their sleeping arrangements have been slap-dash, summer-camp worthy. Sometimes Tommy sleeps on the glider and sometimes he sleeps with Damon Ray in his tent, where they stargaze through a mesh ceiling. Liz prefers the barn on a clear night. But for rainy nights she has a hideaway in an upstairs bedroom – a brass bed still surrounded by boxes of Uncle Mort’s things. Every day she carries one box down to the kitchen, cursorily sorts through it, keeps anything useful (a box of rubber bands, hand lotion samples, a book on raising chickens), and the rest goes out on the dump run. Her car knows the way to the county dump. Tonight Sophie will have the brass bed; Benny the living room sofa. They’ll head back to the city tomorrow.

“The barn,” she whispers to Neil. 

The sky is true black, unpolluted by artificial light. Stars swim. It might have been romantic, under other circumstances. Neil takes her hand; she lets him. The sliding barn door – newly repaired – grinds open satisfyingly with a tug. Inside it smells of Bag Balm and curing quarter-logs and hay. She switches on a light. She had pictured them climbing the ladder to the loft and settling things there, lying in their clothes on a zipped-open sleeping bag, surrounded by hay bales. She thought they might be kind. She thought she might be able to say what she’s been thinking: What she feels is cosmic mourning; cosmic mourning is definitely an improvement over dread.

Once inside the barn, Neil grabs her arm tightly above the elbow. “It’s that kid. It’s Damon, isn’t it?”

“Let go of me --”

Neil jerks away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Liz.”

She says, “I-don’t-love-you.” Ouch. Enter the water! Swim away!

A grimace pinches his face. He clenches his fists and for a moment Liz is scared. She’s scared of what her life has become. Once she was alone, lonely, and that was hard, but not as hard as this. When she lived in Saugatuck, working for the landscaper, and then at a woolen mill outlet, she felt self-contained, with a seamless life, completely in charge. No one could hurt her. She is ashamed of what drew her to Neil in the first place, that raw sensuality he is capable of once they take their clothes off. His belt buckle – turquoise bear he bought at the Denver airport – draws her attention; it always has.

Neil kicks a hay bale. The hay doesn’t give, but moldy dust spurts from it. “Look at you and your family. Your mother’s doing her own thing. You’ve moved in with your Dad. Out here. What’s that kid doing here?”

“Un-fucking-believable,” she says. “Look. Neil. Dad needs me. Needs us. Tommy’s been good for him.” This sounds tremendously sensible, mature.

“You used to put Sophie down for living at home.”

“This is different.” Now that she’s been upfront, she wants to make sure he heard.  “I’m not coming back.”

“I knew it before you did.”

With a sigh, rolling her eyes, Liz thinks, Whatever. She reins in Mean Minnie.

He tucks his hands in his jeans’ pockets, arms stiff. “Tommy doesn’t want to come home with me.”

“Tommy’s having a good time. He loves that stupid dog.” She doesn’t know why she said stupid. To appease Neil, yes, because he’s not dog people.

“So?”

It dawns on her: he doesn’t want to take Tommy back, doesn’t want to have to deal with the single-parent arrangements of summer. Nothing he has said seems genuine; she suspects that he has come knowing that Tommy would want to stay.

Liz offers, “He can stay here.”

“He can’t stay here.”

“Why not? He’s getting along fine. He likes being here.”

“He bugs you.”

“He hasn’t bugged me for a long time. If you’d paid attention, you’d know that. I like Tommy. And so does Dad.”

At the Dutch barn door on the dark side of the barn, Neil faces the orchard.  He leans on the half-open door, star-gazing, pretending to.  All the fight has fizzled out. All the anger has percolated underground. Mother Jones steps quizzically into the barn and tucks her head into Liz’s palm, and Liz says, “Bunny-honey, Baby cakes,” to the dog. Baby cakes used to be one of Neil’s endearments.

Neil says, “Are you sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure.”

His back to her, Neil says, “I have a meeting early tomorrow.”

Meetings sure can order time, keep things tidy; they spare you what Joe calls the chaos of family life. Meetings suck. Stuck inside four walls when you could be in the great outdoors among the fireweed, the black squirrels. She never wants to be required to keep an electronic date book of upcoming meetings. Never. What Neil holds dear doesn’t matter now. Snotty things Mean Minnie might have said ring in her ears, but she keeps quiet. Mean Minnie only speaks when Liz feels trapped; and now she’s not. She’s free and plans to stay that way.

 

 

Liz and Tommy and Damon and Sophie play Hearts at the kitchen table, while Joe and Benny watch a movie.  In the companionable kitchen, with Mother Jones thumping her tail, popcorn in a crock, with the force of summer, chirps and howls, the lake air damp just outside the open window above the sink, the curtains blowing back – all gathered give off good-enough vibes. Tommy is delirious with the news that he will be allowed to stay until school starts. He will pee in the field and go barefooted and let his hair grow long and be a wild child. Liz manages to stay aloof from Sophie, even when she offers her the brass bed, even when Sophie says, “What have you heard from Ems?” And: “You’ll be an aunt next winter! How does that feel?” Liz can’t bring herself to tell the truth yet: new birth, a baby, somehow, perplexedly, make her want to hug Sophie. She hasn’t hugged Sophie in years. She’s not sure she remembers how.

 

 

 

31

 

Sophie: pregnant, Liz thinks at the depleted strawberry patch. Sophie is pregnant, Liz thinks at the kitchen counter. So Sophie is pregnant, Liz thinks at the public library. Sophie, preggers. “Gramps,” Joe has taken to murmuring. Liz can’t get over it. In the dinky shower. At the picnic table, while Joe and DR travel whatever avenues of history. With Tommy, as they bicycle over to Vi’s for blueberries. At the lake, on a day when the sand burns her feet. Day and night. Sunrise to sunset. Sleeping and waking. Working and resting. She can’t get over the shock if it.

 “What’s got under your skin?” Joe says.

They’re in the apple orchard; he’s snipping suckers from a tree trunk and she’s up on a wobbly ladder, thinning hard tiny apples. In her black denim shorts, Liz sweats. She stews in the swelter and heat. With nimble fingers, she approaches cluster after cluster of apples and flicks two or three off. The ones remaining will ripen into beauties. That’s what Joe calls them.

“I’m hot.”

“That’s not all.”

Joe shows up at the bottom of her ladder, pruning tool in hand like a staff. He’s dressed in cool clothes and somehow manages to stay cool: baggy khaki cut-offs and a linen shirt she recognizes as a former dress shirt, now stained as if it has been tie-dyed. He needs a haircut and she approves of his gone-to-seed evolution. He guzzles water from a plastic bottle.

 “If you want to know the truth,” she says, “I’m thinking about the day-to-day hazards of growing up female.” Liar, liar.

“All right, Lizzie.” He backs off.

She knows that tone: “Let’s not get too intellectual here.”

Now’s the time to tell him you’re not going back to work. Sometimes when she’s told a lie, the pressure to tell the truth feels like suffocation. It’s as if she is contained in a wall made of glass bricks – her well-constructed lie. She can see out, people can see her, but they cannot touch each other.  It’s why she doesn’t want to talk to Ems right now. She’s building that wall of glass bricks.

Propellers paddle from somewhere unseen and then a crop duster – yellow toy airplane, but dangerous – rises from a field and teeters toward its destination, somewhere, she hopes, far from their certified organic fields. Almost under her breath, she says, “How did I end up with so many men in my life?”

 “You know what your Ems always says.”

“What’s that?”

“You go where you have the most to learn.”

“What about you and Ems?”

“She’s hiking and rosy-cheeked. With Zubin, old Zubin. He makes her laugh.”

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, she can’t keep it to herself. We talk.”

“Did you tell her about Soph?”

“It’s hard not to.” He peers over his glasses.  “But I don’t think Sophie wants me to. She’s saving that.” Joe whistles for a minute: tuxedo junction. “Now don’t you go and spoil it.”

“Is that what you think I do?” She leaps – hastily, clumsily – down from the ladder; it totters in the deep grass, bounces on the ground. She gets a mean kick out of the ladder falling. Like slamming a door. Her anger buzzes like bees, like a hive incensed.

“Watch it,“ Joe says.

“Look. I’m out of here.” There is no sound but the fading crop duster’s engine and the snip-snip of the pruning blades and a small breeze and the squeak of the ladder as Liz re-sets it.  “I’m going to the lake.” She could slap herself for the tone in her voice.

“That’ll be good for you.”

A concession, she says, “I’ll pick up Tommy. And what’s-her-name.”

“Lola Marie.”

DR appears, as if he has been stealthily listening. “Mind if I tag along?” he says.

She does mind. But what can she say? “Get suited up. I’ll drive.” She clings to that, driving. She’ll be in charge. The two of them – Liz and DR – head back to the house side by side, as if a pair. Evasively silent. Liz twirling a lock of hair. She imagines Joe watching them, feels his gaze at her back.

She had been, on some level, thinking about the hazards of growing up female. Those songs her mother used to sing along to in the morning as she got ready for school. Ella Fitzgerald – the man I love. Someday he’ll come along. And he’ll be big and strong. Brainwashed, Liz decides, we were brainwashed. Being away from the man who gives her orgasms – gives her, she hates that – allows her to think clearly. Remember those anti-drug ads: This is your brain on drugs? Liz thinks of those scrambled eggs: this is your brain in love. Akin to madness. Once a professor said to her, “The only constant thread of women’s history is that it is lost and discovered, lost and discovered.” Like her own history, her own sense of herself. It gets lost and discovered over and over. Where does Sophie fit into a feminist line of thinking? And Liz’s response to her pregnancy? Hard-wired, we must be hard-wired.

Mother Jones gambols over, huffing. DR squats down and adores her, lets her lick his face. “She’ll come along?” he says.

Inside, Liz’s still snarling. But she can’t resist the dog, for Tommy’s sake. Her sleek car is being trashed day by day. Her next big project will be selling her car. Vi has a clunker of a pickup she wants to sell.

Damon has piled grocery sacks of recycling outside the back porch. Coke cans and milk jugs and flattened cereal boxes. “Later, you’ll help me with the recycling, okay,” he says, almost a statement, as if he expects her to say yes on automatic pilot.

“If you’ll help me with the porch.” Sophie’s visit, the thinning of the apples, other chores – all got in the way of cleaning the still squalid porch. 

“Deal.” Then he says, “Why’s that porch so important to you?”

“When I walk out there, I want to feel serene.”

This is nearly the extent of their relationship: labor exchange. Liz is more experienced, and able to hide behind scorn, a hint of scorn. For what? His eagerness. His untried optimism. The peace buttons on his jean jacket.

 

 

Lola Marie sits in the front; dudes in the back, along with Mother Jones. Lola Marie is blond, long-legged, with an oval face and pink glitter on her eyelids. She wears rings on her fingers and rings on her toes. Vi waves from the blueberry shed where she spends the day washing pails, weighing blueberries, and keeping up a patter that apparently has intrigued Joe. He’s gone over there for coffee three mornings in a row. Gone over and come back whistling. Plump Vi, with bandanas that match her clothes. Her husband died three years ago of Lou Gherig’s disease. 

“Tommy,” Lola Marie insists, “tell them what we found out about Shakira.”

Tommy squirms. Liz can see it in the rear view mirror. “What?”

“Tell them.”

“So,” DR says, with a conspiratorial wink, “Give us the inside dope.”

He makes it permissible for Tommy to chatter on: guy to guy. Shakira wrote her first song at the age of eight. She reads Walt Whitman for inspiration. At mention of Whitman, DR catches Liz’s glance in the rear view mirror. When she’s mad, she’s not sure what matters. Not much has the chance to please her. She twirls a lock of hair and rolls her eyes. She gives DR that much.

Ever closer to the lake, past a golf course and the sailboats moored on the Kalamazoo River, they drive with the windows down, Shakira’s tango-inspired “Laundry Service” loud. Liz can’t seem to get tango out of her life. The road narrows and they’re up a hill and past the gatekeeper to the big lake.

The big lake never fails her.

Her heart leaps. Worries broadcast to the wind.

It’s a little choppy, with whitecaps like pennants against the navy blue. They park near the concession stand where cardboard banners of Sponge Bob Square Pants advertise ice cream. Teenage girls in Day-Glo bikinis sit on a picnic table, polishing their toenails. Carting bags and drinks and a ball, bed sheets and towels, they make their way down the sandy slope to the flat crescent of beach where there is an empty spot amid the hundreds of other umbrellas and blankets, a place for them, and Liz thinks, I never want to leave here. Never. 

She swims horizontal to the beach, about thirty feet out. Her tank suit is black, snug, and her body does not feel like a burden when she swims. It does not feel deprived. Her long swimmer’s arms, breasts, thighs, in clover. DR is farther out, tapping a ball back and forth with Tommy and Lola Marie.

Back on the sheet, slathering on sunscreen, she looks up and DR stands right before her, lake water bright on his skin. He says, “You love the water, don’t you?”

“I do.”

He sits down and puts his face up to the sun. They slip on sunglasses. “I’ll do your back,” he says. And Liz lets him, even though it’s one of the oldest come-on lines. She can’t imagine that he would come on to her. He squirts sunscreen in a spiral on her back and shoulders and with his fingers sending some signal she can’t quite read, doesn’t want to read just yet, he smoothes the sunscreen into her freckled flesh.

People, you might be thinking, How can he fall for her, as crabby as she’s been? But there is no accounting for chemistry. All those on-line matchmaker services and their quasi-scientific assessments and promises of harmony: don’t kid yourself. Chemistry can seethe when you least expect it. When you’re afraid.  When you think you’re not ready.

He says, “You know that tub?”

“What about it?”

“We could turn that into a soaking tub. For you.”

They gaze lake-ward behind dark glasses. Lola-Marie waves, her skinny arms aloft, and Liz waves back. A ferry steams beyond the swimmers, and a thread of music unfurls from the ferry, something big band, sparkling.

He says, “We’d put in a skylight. You could see the stars. I could re-plumb that hook-up at the utility sink. It could be a haven. Your haven.”

Stingy still, Liz says: “It’s an idea.”

The tub is filled with Uncle Mort’s old-fogy-junk, mouse-traps and coffee tins of nails and screws, an orange life preserver and a broken canoe paddle. A brick substitutes for the missing claw foot. What she envisions is a paint job and glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Or DR’s skylight. She wants it. She wants what hadn’t occurred to her: she could look forward to it. Eagerly. “It sounds as if you’re here to stay,” Joe will comment curiously, when she tells him. Maybe so. She wants water therapy. Lit by candlelight. Whatever music she desires. A private place where she can dream the dreams that leap like long-lived muscular fish out of the lake. Her mother has dreams with longevity, why shouldn’t she?