Summers at Blue Lake Read online

  SUMMERS AT BLUE LAKE

  Summers

  AT

  Blue Lake

  A Novel by

  Jill Althouse-Wood

  Copyright © 2007 by Jill Althouse-Wood. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from Don Congdon Associates, Inc.; the agency can be reached at [email protected].

  For Gundy and Schultz, who gifted me with “Once upon a time …”

  Acknowledgments

  THIS NOVEL HAS BEEN a long journey for me, and many have shared in my path. It is my deepest privilege to thank them. I’d like to start in the beginning by thanking my parents, Marty and Dave Althouse, who gave me the gift of faith. No writer can begin a novel or endure the process without it. I’d also like to acknowledge my extended family—including my siblings (the J-crew), their families, and my in-laws. Special merit to Tammy Wood, who had no choice but to listen to major plot points on our long training runs. As for my friends, I’ll be eternally grateful to my inner circle: the Paisleys (you know who you are), the Peterys, and the Steeds. These are the people who helped me lift my glass not only in the times of celebration, but in the murkier hours of rejection as well. Thanks to Monty Smith and Suzy Arrington for reading the earliest manuscripts and checking my college remembrances of metalsmithing against the actual practice. Angela Maloney was my connection in the Richmond area, and I thank her for her insights and help. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Sue Engleman, who nurtured my children while I worked toward my goals.

  I’d also like to pay homage to my mentors, including some exceptional teachers and female role models, without whom my education would not be complete: Joanne Shaak, Deanne Buffington, Sally Watkins, Faith Lange, Vera Kaminski, and Anne Graham. Continuing on into the gurus of the publishing process, I thank my agent Denise Marcil. She brought this book to fruition, with unwavering belief, through its many incarnations; few agents would have invested as much as she did to see a story brought to light. To my editor Chuck Adams and the staff at Algonquin, I offer gratitude for the chance they took on a new voice and for leading me through the art and science of bookmaking. Writer Sharon Naylor is both friend and mentor. She read my first short story and encouraged me in writing and in life on a daily basis.

  Finally, I want to honor the people who share my life. No novelist lives for fiction alone. My family is my real (and best) story. My husband, Mark, a self-proclaimed geek, kept me in computer heaven. But it is his love, support, and tolerance that really powered me through this process. Jonah and Maren, my children, are my pride and inspiration. They are the reason I strive. It took being their mother to start me on my path to writing. Thank you, all.

  SUMMERS AT BLUE LAKE

  PART ONE

  God of Mermaids

  ♦ 1 ♦

  MY GRANDMOTHERS WERE LESBIANS, a truth they neither exposed nor concealed. Every Sunday they took their place in the third pew, left of the aisle, at Lakeside Lutheran. Their white-gloved daughter sat between them, drawing Jesus in the margins of the bulletin while they nodded and fanned away their sins or their guilt (or whatever it was they came to church to exorcise). Their fellow parishioners embraced them in the cool shadow of the Sunday sermon, even loved them as one should love sisters in Christ, but not without question. During the steady marches that Lutherans often mistook for hymns, the board members took turns policing the third pew—if only to convince themselves that my grandmothers’ bond was solely economic. And they were momentarily convinced that it was. The daughter is an angel. Or, They are members of the social committee. But at the service’s end, my grandmas would lean into their final amens with more tilt toward each other than to the altar. Then, even their friends accepted the verdict: these women were the daughters of Eve.

  The congregants weren’t proud of their judgments. Quite the opposite. They were as uncomfortable with them as they were with the stiff collars and shoes that pinched their flesh on the Sabbath. For my mother and her mothers, Sunday was a day of grace. People folded under the influence of the Gospel and chicken dinners until they were drunk on their own goodness.

  Monday would come, and with it, a spiritual hangover. Once again, my grandmothers were acknowledged with a whisper, a nudge in the hardware store, a smile that lasted a second too long. There were other things, too—unspeakable other things that caused my mother to turn away from me when I asked her about her childhood. She described the happy times to the window or the wall or her magazine instead of to my upturned face.

  Maybe she was right to not tell me, her only daughter. She had moved away from her childhood, geographically and emotionally. She and my dad had married—a move that had taken her away from the dimpled hills of Pennsylvania to a similar topography in Virginia. They bought a house in a subdivision with driveways notching the sidewalk at regular intervals, and mailboxes (with one surname only!) flagging each notch. I completed their lives two years later. We had a perfect little family, tainted only by my mother’s inability to deliver any in a string of promised, but premature, brothers.

  “You are blessing enough,” my parents told me so often that it couldn’t be true.

  I was a child of the 1970s. My mother pulled my hair back into daisy barrettes for most of the decade, and I never lacked for anthems—mostly disco music at the roller rink. Attitudes had changed in the twenty-five years since Mom was a girl, at least on the outside. Feminism, along with civil rights, had strangled the press with its message of tolerance, but inside the bi-levels of Jefferson Heights, the slogans softened to a tap on the shoulder rather than a grip.

  In our household, my father listened to my mother with more respect than most husbands, but he voted a straight Republican ticket, prayed the Pope’s prayers, and watched sports while Mom cleaned the dinner dishes. Under this reign, the three of us watched the TV news of gay activity in San Francisco as if it, too, was an example of liberal extremism rather than a limb of our family tree.

  The word was not forbidden in our house. I had heard it often and had practiced saying the beautiful syllables in my mirror. “Lez-bee-an.” It sounded exotic like sapphire or emerald, only more purple like amethyst, jewels that were secret and dark and lovely in velvet boxes.

  “Lezzz-be-ann.” There was power in the z sound as it chiseled through my mouth. With only one child in the house, my parents seemed to forget the careful zones of adult conversation. My father squinted as he said the word in not so hushed tones to my mother. But the z’s didn’t change his expression. He could order extra cheese or ask if Mom had used his razor without even a slight crinkle on his face. Lesbian. Though the resonance hypnotized me, and the power entranced me, the meaning evaded me.

  For my fourth-grade family heritage report, I boasted that I was Scotch-Irish on my father’s side, and on my mother’s side we were Lesbian. I did not understand when Mrs. Faust sent me to the nurse’s office to wait for my mother after school. Nurse Witmer and my mother tried to explain the meaning of what I had said by using several visual aids. After pamphlets of young girls with new breasts and one long filmstrip about special kisses and touches, I said, “I already know about sex. What does that have to do with us being Scotch-Irish?”

  My mother nodded to Nurse Witmer, and together, they fumbled over blunt phrases they had hoped wouldn’t be necessary. With those judicious definitions, my education was complete. Visits to my grandmothers became charged with my new knowledge, as if I had just been given the secret ingredient in the family recipe for barbecue sauce. I never had to entertain the baggage of Mom’s childhood; I could see my grandmothers with the wonder they were due. When I was with them, I felt cemented into my heritage in a way that surpassed the fourth-
grade curriculum.

  My grandmothers also taught me lesser lessons along the way. In Nonna’s kitchen, I learned how to make baklava. The oven taxed the already steep price of the summer heat, but we willingly paid the toll. Nonna mixed stories, as well as nuts, into her gooey filling. Between tastes, I stirred the honeyed syrup and listened to her history, which was, after all, my history, too.

  “I received several wedding proposals after serving this to the sailors in Greece,” she boasted.

  Nonna’s blue eyes twinkled in their Scandinavian naughtiness. She professed a Greek ancestry as well as a kaleidoscope past. Although I had my doubts about the Greek part, I knew that her true-life story had to include a dalliance with least one man in uniform. I pulled apart pieces of phyllo with my sticky fingers. Later, as we cut the pastries into their diamond shapes, I imagined brooding men with cups of dark, sweet coffee toasting a young Nonna.

  “Anja, please have my babies.”

  “No, Anja, marry me.”

  And Nonna would turn and smile with the inky lips of a black-and-white film star. The men thought she was smiling at them, but she was looking beyond the sailors for the mermaids.

  Grandma Lena was one such mermaid. She was a champion swimmer. During the hot afternoons of the 1970s gas crisis, she would shuffle me off to the lake near their house. The orange plastic straps of my flip-flops carved white ridges into my sunburned feet. For the half mile we walked, my attention was drawn downward on my blistering toes, but as soon as the water cut through my pain, I would look up to see Grandma Lena diving into Blue Lake.

  She was a mer-goddess in her white swimmer’s cap and skirted suit. Grandma Lena was not a woman of fashion. Her bathing suit had molded bra cups that had a tendency to indent. But she was a mer-goddess all the same. Though her strokes impressed me with their strength, it was her ability to recline on the water that amazed me. Grandma Lena could read a newspaper while doing a back float. She could even nap soundly while I swam in concentric circles around her sleeping, floating form. When she awoke, she would show me how to do a back flip and the breaststroke, keeping at it until the lake glittered with the diamond possibility of a sunset.

  And so Nonna the Greek and Grandma Lena (said in all one breath—like ballerina) became the mythos of my quiet childhood. They transported me away from the horn-rimmed glasses of my father and the Redbook of my mother. When summer released me from my school desk, I turned to my grandmothers’ house on Mulberry Street for the enigma that was also their magic.

  ♦ 2 ♦

  Summer 2000

  PENNSYLVANIA HAS ARGUABLY the worst roads in the United States, and while this opinion is reinforced by surveys put out by Triple A and the Teamsters union, you won’t hear any complaints from me. My two-year-old Toyota, a car that had not previously graced the state, arrived in Nonna’s driveway after a journey of exactly ten hours (four of them in the Keystone State), delivering us by some autopilot refinement I never knew it had. Even before the engine stopped, Sam catapulted from the backseat to relieve himself on a once carefully pruned hedge. My first instinct was to scold him, but he had suppressed his urgent business for the entire last hour of the long trip. I made a cursory effort to avert my eyes to give him privacy, but I couldn’t help myself. In the midst of the overgrown vines, flowering their magenta triumph, and roses, which refused to be outdone, my son looked like the national statue of Belgium: Manneken-Pis. Little boy pissing.

  The trip itself had been long, made even longer by the needs of a young boy and a dog. How could I simultaneously accommodate bathroom breaks for both? Each needed my attention, and neither could be left alone. Luckily, some compassionate dog-loving strangers had helped me with my dilemma. They watched a tethered Jules while I shepherded Sam into the less-than-sanitary ladies’ room at the turnpike rest stop. Don’t touch anything. I had never before traveled alone with my son, much less with the dog, but this trip would not be the last. With no choice but a successful outcome, I flexed my mothering muscle in training for future strain. As with most exertion, this first foray tired me: my nerves were shot, and my insides writhed with the memory of something I had supersized (in the faulty expectation of sharing my food with Sam).

  Jules barked from his crate in the rear, and I freed him to follow Sam’s lead. The boy with the tawny hair and his golden retriever danced celebrations around their wet spots on the lawn. They circled the mailbox and conjured hopscotch on the flagstone path that led to the front porch.

  “Come on, Mom,” Sam called, but now I was the statue, frozen by the seventeen Junes that had come and gone since I had last spent the summer here. As I stood, the weeds curled around my exposed toes, and ladybugs ascended my legs. I half expected a bird to perch on the hand that I was using to shield my eyes from the sun.

  The house looked the same and yet different, which was odd. I had stopped by the place a few weeks ago on the day of the funeral, but I hadn’t gone inside. That memory was blurry now, shadowed with people and emotion. I hadn’t had the time then to really consider this house, its contents, and the possibility I might actually spend another summer here. What did I expect to see now? Great sandstone slabs, quarried from the family farm, framed too-white windowsills. The steep roof, also, was shocking in its brightness. It was metal, silvered with paint, not patina. Last summer a troop of college painters had refreshed the exterior of the house and, no doubt, refreshed their parched throats with glasses of Nonna’s rum-laced lemonades, which she served on the wide front porch. Nonna had maintained her home and Lena’s gardens until the end. In her last years, she seemed to pick up speed and do the work of two. That was the gift and the curse of good health followed by a sudden brain embolism: at eighty-three, Anja Graybill had died young.

  Here I stood, like a stone sentry, the last relative of a great woman. My mother, Nonna’s daughter, had preceded her in death. Mom’s passing in January had been a relief ten years in coming. It was the culmination of mounting grief I experienced since she found the first lump in her breast ten years ago. Hers was a singular death made up of smaller losses along the way: one breast, then the other, then the glands, the hair, the skin, the bones. Dad and I wondered that we had anything but Mom’s heart to bury. I questioned, at the time, if Nonna’s body would be able to withstand the grief for her only child. She had been strong at Mom’s funeral, but I suspect that most of that show of strength was for me. Who was left now?

  Grandma Lena had kin: one estranged sister and one semi-estranged nephew. At Lena’s funeral ten years ago, his only representation had been a wreath of roses and a condolence card signed by Travis and Liz. Though I had known Travis in childhood, his marriage or pairing (one can’t assume) had been news to me. The gesture of roses seemed so impersonal at the time of his aunt’s death that I felt it was unlikely Travis would materialize when Nonna died. When I couldn’t find a listing for him on the Internet, I shrugged away any attempts to inform him of Nonna’s passing. This legacy was mine alone.

  So accompanied by Sam and the dog, I had embarked on this journey with the intent of cleaning out the house on Mulberry Street. Dad had offered to come with me, but I told him no—he was sweet to offer. After the ten-hour drive, we had arrived at the past home of all my summer longings. And now that I was here, I had to ask myself, what was it? My escape? My duty? My birthright? My future?

  I ached to run to the porch and fling open the door. But I knew that behind the front door was a combination black hole/funhouse that might suck me into a dimension where time laughed. Behind that door, ponytail holders and wedding rings, vinyl records and CDs would all collide. I am Bobbi Ellington, was Barbara Jean Foley, am BJ and Mom, was Honey and Darling and back again.

  I had every right to be fearful; however, the haunting came not in facing who I was, but who I would become. Never again would I cull the identities that had carried me this far in life. Even in my muddled state of mind, I understood. The names of the past began to pulse in me like an earache. I wanted the comfort of
this old, ancestral house, and I wanted the ghosts to nurse me.

  I drew on my recollections and churned them into sensory expectations. This house beckoned me, and I knew what I would find. First, I would breathe in the scent of Cachet lotion and English Lavender soap. Then the lost smells of chopped olives and lemon chicken would accost me. They wouldn’t really be there—except in memory: Nonna stopped cooking elaborate meals after Grandma Lena had died, preferring instead to alternate dining out with the early-bird crowd and eating her doggie-bag leftovers. But I would swear I could smell her cooking, and my stomach would growl in anticipation of a fine meal. The house would still possess the hints of long-ago cigarette smoke. The soft gray scent would be there, holding tightly to the fabric of the heavy drapes, the memories of fabulous parties clustered deep in the folds.

  I longed to touch those drapes and the old, bottom-thick glass of the windows. I wanted to collapse into the hard springs of the davenport and eat cold SpaghettiOs with an orange plastic spoon. I wanted to glide on the porch swing while skimming a used paperback. I wanted to rediscover the oils that my great-grandfather painted during the cubist movement in Paris. (A contemporary of Braque, Sid Stevens had yet to come into vogue with anybody but me, his great-granddaughter. Even Nonna had wanted to take down those “horrid, boxy landscapes.”)

  And I hoped that fulfilling these expectations would be enough for me. I tried not to think about the things I would never again have inside that house. The evening phone calls back to my mother in Virginia. Nonna’s lamb pie. Grandma Lena’s fingers braiding my hair. A body built for a bikini top and cutoffs. And my life the way it was before Bryce said, “I’m not sure if I ever really loved you.”