Summers at Blue Lake Read online

  The past mattered so little now, or too much; I didn’t know which. With the armor of two wash baskets filled with clean bedding and towels, I followed Sam to the front porch. The floorboards creaked an eerie welcome. Putting the baskets down, I fumbled in my pocket for the key that had been digging into my thigh since the moment we left home in Michigan. I found it, and the skeleton key slid over my sweaty fingertips into the keyhole. It turned effortlessly.

  Sam looked inside and said, “It’s not so bad.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I echoed, without conviction.

  “Welcome back,” the ghosts greeted.

  And Jules, self-appointed guardian of the aggrieved, barked in defense of all of us.

  ♦ 3 ♦

  Summer 1983

  THE SPATULA CAME DOWN hard on my wrist after I took the sticky fingers out of my mouth.

  “Don’t let anyone see you,” Nonna said in something between a hiss and a whisper. “This cake is for hundreds of people, and here you are licking the icing. I’ll have the board of health after me.”

  “Right,” I said. Nonna never could maintain her anger around me. She couldn’t do it when I was little, and she couldn’t do it now that I was almost fourteen.

  “A little bit of my spit is not going to wreck Sara and Tom’s wedding, Nonna. I’ll bet you five dollars, they’ll cancel that fiasco before noon.”

  “Well, they’d better not. They haven’t paid me for this cake yet.”

  “Well, I’m not even sure Tom is finished paying for his divorce yet, not to mention the child support he owes,” I muttered.

  Nonna clicked her tongue at me in disapproval. “You have been listening to Joyce again. You must take what that woman says with a grain of salt.”

  Nonna stepped back to look at her creation. The seven layers were spread out over her kitchen bar. She squinted, and then ever so lightly smoothed an edge with her spatula. I wanted to tell her she shouldn’t use the spatula she had just used to smack me, but I became mesmerized by what we had created. The cake was beautiful. I wanted to tell her so, but I was brooding.

  My mother was finishing her master’s thesis, and Dad was busy working; consequently I had to spend the entire summer, instead of the usual two weeks, with my grandmas. Ordinarily it would not have been such a terrible sentence, but my summer absence from home meant I had to surrender my eighth-grade boyfriend, Jimmy, to the pouncing Sue Lipkowski. “Lips,” as all the kids called her, was actually better known for a physical feature somewhat south of the face. She had been the earliest bloomer in our class and had not been shy about her development. As was her modus operandi, Sue clamored after the older boys. How lucky was I that she broke her code this summer? So I did what was natural and blamed Nonna for my predicament.

  Though they tried, my grandmothers could not seem to transform my pout. They offered everything from taking me to see the movie Flashdance to heavy bribery (a new bike), and although I really didn’t care that much about Jimmy Fuhrman, I began to see sullenness as an art form.

  After their first round of enticements seemed to have failed, Grandma Lena suggested that we call Travis, the son of her much younger half sister. He was currently doing some work around the yard, but what Grandma Lena had in mind was a bit more social.

  “It’ll be nice to have your cousin around.”

  “Travis is not really my cousin,” I objected. Lena was not related by blood; Nonna was my biological grandmother.

  Lena looked taken aback. “Well, he’s family at any rate,” she said quietly.

  I tried to bargain with Nonna when we were alone with the cake. I could already picture a coerced outing. Travis would be jabbering about ham radio frequencies while we made our way to a museum show of insects native to the Susquehanna River Valley.

  “We have nothing in common, Nonna. Travis is so dense,” I argued.

  “Barbara Jean, that’s enough name-calling. Travis McKenzie isn’t dense. He’s a sensitive, quiet boy. If you took some time to get to know him, I think you would be surprised.”

  “I know enough about him already,” I said. And it was true.

  I had grown up with Travis McKenzie my whole life. If he were like most big brothers or cousins, he would have teased me mercilessly and pulled pranks, but that was not him. He always had his nose in some thick book or was active in some equally autonomous behavior. Last summer during my visit, he spent the whole time sitting on Nonna’s porch making his own fishing lures. At first I tried to draw him into conversation or an occasional game of tag, but to no avail. He looked at me as if I was more of a pest than the critters he was simulating in his art of making bait. I guess I didn’t blame him. I mean, he lived alone with his mother, Aunt Margot, who, though far from dull, could be counted on to do only so much. Even with that allowance, there was no denying it: Travis McKenzie was about as much fun to be around as a detention monitor.

  However, I knew it was senseless to object to Nonna and Grandma Lena’s attempts to bolster camaraderie between us. The fight wasn’t even fair—two grandmas against one me. My only hope was that Travis would say no to an invitation to spend time with his spinster aunt, her same-sex lover, and their granddaughter. Travis was fifteen. Even he couldn’t be stupid enough to walk into that trap.

  Nonna was just adding the last icing rose to the top of the cake when we heard someone yell “Jesus Christ almighty!” from the powder room off to the left of the kitchen.

  “Either Janelle is having trouble with her wedding dress in there, or we’ve just had a divine visitation,” Nonna said without a flinch.

  During the week, my grandmothers’ house was a bohemian carnival—hard to ignore even if one was pouting. Monday through Thursday, Nonna and Grandma Lena lived a carefree existence that included weekly pinochle parties, barbecues on the back patio, and poetry readings on the porch. Sometimes, brides would stop by during the week to be photographed for the newspaper or to pick out a design for the wedding cake. Most times, they ended up joining the party, not leaving until their heads overflowed with stanzas of sonnets that would slur if they tried to give them a voice. Nonna’s rum drinks saw to that.

  Janelle Swanson had not had any rum drinks—being that it was only nine o’clock in the morning—but she had had two Greek coffees. Grandma Lena came running in from the rose garden where she was preparing for a photo shoot under the arbor.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  I just shrugged and sneaked another fingerful of icing.

  Grandma Lena knocked on the door.

  “Are you okay?”

  Janelle emerged from the powder room with a twisted expression on her face.

  “I just can’t get it to close. I don’t know what happened. It fit fine at my last fitting.”

  Janelle was wearing a replica of Princess Diana’s wedding dress, for what was intended to be a replica of the entire royal wedding, down to the horse drawn carriage and tiara. She even planned for the event to coincide with Charles and Diana’s second wedding anniversary. I wanted to gag. It was safe to say that while most girls my age fantasized about the princely event, I had the tendency to see weddings through my grandmothers’ eyes—as nothing but work, a royal pain in the ass.

  Grandma Lena swung Janelle around, and I could see the gaping expanse of her skin framed by each side of the buckling zipper. There was no way she would get that zipper closed. Grandma Lena wouldn’t even be able to bridge the gap with some of the huge double clips she usually put into service for emergencies such as this.

  “Janelle, honey, did you just start oral contraceptives?”

  Janelle slumped over.

  “The Pill, hon, did you start taking the Pill?”

  By the way her back was quaking, I could tell that Janelle was sobbing.

  “Yes,” came the tiny voice, “about four months ago. I was going to wait until right before the wedding, but we couldn’t wait, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well,” Grandma Lena said with a frown, “you
’re not the first bride to put on a little weight with the Pill. Let’s see what we can do.”

  By “we,” she meant me. Grandma Lena took me off cake duty to become the photographer’s apprentice. Lena positioned me in a crouching pose behind Janelle’s full skirt. I then had to reach my arms up and hold her dress together so it wouldn’t flap forward for the pictures.

  Within minutes, my arms started to ache.

  “Remind me never to go on the birth control pill,” I said after the tenth click of the camera and the fourth change of position.

  “Oh yeah?” Grandma Lena said. “What are you going to do?”

  “The rhythm method,” I said in repetition of my Catholic upbringing.

  “Oh, Lord,” Grandma Lena said with a laugh. “Well, be prepared to wear a maternity wedding dress.”

  “I’m not going to have sex before I get married,” I said, and changed position again to ease the shooting pain in my left arm. As I did so, I could feel Janelle’s giggle.

  “Sure, laugh at me for having values, but I’m the one holding Princess Diana’s dress closed so nobody gets a peep at the royal bum.” I was being insensitive, but I didn’t care.

  Grandma Lena’s voice came from around the great folds of cloth. “I apologize for her, Janelle. Our Barbara Jean is experiencing her first heartache. You’ll have to forgive her.”

  I didn’t want Her Highness to forgive me. I just wanted everybody to leave me out of it.

  “Okay, Barbara Jean, you can rest a minute, I need to reload my film. How about we move over to the Peace Roses beside the clematis.”

  I helped Janelle with her train, and we picked up and moved about ten feet to the right.

  “So did he dump you or did you dump him?” Janelle asked. I hated having small talk with the brides. As a group, they were pretty egocentric. My big day. My dress. My bridesmaids. My shower. My fiancé. But now I almost wished Janelle would talk about herself.

  “What do you think?” I fanned Janelle’s train out behind her the way Grandma Lena had taught me.

  The winding sound had stopped, and Grandma Lena opened the back of her camera.

  “He broke it off with you?” Janelle offered sympathetically. I had been talking about her dress, but somehow she thought we were still on the subject of my pitiful love life.

  I played along. “Yes, and if you must know, it was because I’m not as promiscuous as some girls,” I said. It wasn’t true, but I emphasized the sins that had landed me this undignified assignment in the first place.

  “Barbara Jean, that is enough.” I heard Grandma Lena’s sharp voice. “Get back into position.”

  “I’m tired, Grandma Lena.”

  She just looked at me and held her camera in ready position.

  “You already took plenty of full-length pictures. Do some head shots now,” I said and marched off to help Nonna clean the kitchen before the big card party.

  PERHAPS THE PIVOTAL CHARACTER to my summer transformation, from sulking to semicontent, was Vera Wagner. That summer, Vera fled Pennsylvania for Montana, on a mission to save her newborn grandson from that “dimwitted, debutante hybrid” that had married her son the year before. Grandma Lena had appointed me to replace Vera as her pinochle partner at the weekly get-togethers.

  “I never know what to bid,” I objected.

  “Nonsense. You could play pinochle before you could read. Besides, Vera and I always had a system.”

  Which meant they cheated. All the women did, but as long as we didn’t call it cheating and never actually said the words aces or spades, nobody complained. Before Vera’s eyesight declined, the signals were gestures. Last summer, Grandma Lena had switched her indications to a few throaty chirps.

  As it happened, my eyesight was very good. So good, that I didn’t need Grandma Lena’s system; I had one of my own. When Mrs. Bomberger had four red aces and one black one, five little A’s danced around on her bifocals. Seeing them, I passed emphatically, then cleared my throat so Grandma Lena would do the same.

  Nonna suspected my device. When we played against her and her partner, Gladys Metz, they would put away their reading glasses and reach for the pack of cards with the jumbo numbers. We hardly ever beat Nonna and Gladys, which inspired some rather irksome qualities in Grandma Lena.

  The ladies initiated me into the club the very first Tuesday of my summer vacation, after the fiasco in the garden with Janelle Swanson. It wasn’t much in the way of ceremonies. Nonna reintroduced me to women I had known since I was born, and they embraced me with kisses that smelled of cheap cosmetics and old coffee.

  “Enough of that smooching, gals. Barbara Jean, you can sit down now. We have a tournament to play.” Nonna clapped her hands in anticipation of the competition.

  I would not exactly use the phrases “fed to the wolves” or “trial by fire,” but I jumped right into some seriously aggressive play. With my cheat-sheet on standard bids, I learned quickly to cover my confusion and to fake whatever I didn’t know. I discovered which women were playing as a social grace (and wouldn’t notice a misappropriated trick) and which women had keen eyes (and would expose the aforementioned foul). Nonna belonged to the latter group.

  Sometime during the third round of card playing—after all the good gossip had been exchanged and before lunch—we heard the sound of the lawn mower.

  “I told that boy not to cut the grass on a Tuesday.” Grandma Lena, particularly churlish after losing the second round to Nonna, thumped her knuckles on the table to indicate her pass on the bid.

  Seated next to the picture window, I could observe Travis on the John Deere riding mower. Even sitting down on the tractor, he seemed taller to me than the last time I saw him. His hair, a little longer now, curled in lawless, dark waves around his neck. His shirtless figure revealed tanned, though underdeveloped, pectoral muscles, but my gaze followed the purled and bronzed knobs of his shoulders as he steered the tractor toward the front of the house.

  “Barbara Jean? Barbara Jean! You won the bid. Are you going to name trump?”

  I glanced at my cards and the red haze before me.

  “Hearts, I mean diamonds.”

  “Which is it? Heart or diamonds?” Mrs. Peale asked.

  I glanced at Grandma Lena who was pulling on her earring.

  “Definitely diamonds,” I said, placing the king and queen of diamonds on the table to collect my four-point meld.

  I looked up to see that Travis was nearing the window. He saw me, and for a second, he looked perplexed, as if he didn’t know who I was. Then, just as recognition came, we heard a crash, and Greystoke, the smallest cat of the three, jumped from his sunny window ledge.

  “What was that?”

  Grandma Lena ran to the window, followed by the more agile guests. I didn’t move because I already had the queen’s box for this event. Queen of diamonds and jack of spades. Or was it the queen of spades and jack of diamonds? I could never remember which two cards made up pinochle. Either way, this jack was in trouble.

  In his moment of distraction, Travis had wedged the John Deere under the porch. Wedged it good, too. Reverse gear was doing nothing to rectify the problem. The gentle bucking of the tractor loosened the trellis from the porch, and an ancient vine of prickly roses soon descended onto Travis’s naked torso.

  “Son of a bitch. God damn it!” he howled loud enough for all the ladies to hear through the open window.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Bomberger.

  Each woman shuffled amusement and concern in her head like a new deck of playing cards. All except for Grandma Lena, who saw the scene as a terrorist act, a suicide bombing of her gentle roses. She hurried to police the scene, but Nonna pulled her back from her charge.

  “Lena, I think our guests could use some refreshments, don’t you agree? I’ll take care of Travis.”

  “My roses—”

  “That vine was more thorn and bark than rose.” But Grandma Lena wanted to hear no more. She was still sulking from the last hand in whi
ch we did not make our bid, thereby losing to Nonna. My two grandmas stomped away in opposite directions. One to the realm of mushroom mini-quiches and social decorum; the other to the flowered curtain call of a John Deere, jack-of-diamonds, rodeo clown. And for the first time all summer, I smiled. This could be fun after all.

  ♦ 4 ♦

  2000

  IT RAINED FOR THREE DAYS after we arrived at Mulberry Street. Like a runner’s cleats on aluminum bleachers, the rain tapped the metal roof of the sleeping porch. The sound drove me into heavy dreams that I could not remember upon waking. Each morning, I awoke with my mind muddier than it had been the day before. Where was I exactly? Why was I here? What was my name? How old was I? But Jules would bark, and from the folds of his own questions, Sam would appear with crusty eyes and the comforting smell of baby bad breath.

  He crawled into the brass bed and snuggled beside me. His nightshirt, one of Bryce’s old concert T-shirts, lifted to reveal the abacus that was Sam’s spine. I pulled the shirt down, counting the bony beads as I covered them, and in doing so, I reconnected with the physical world, the world full of numbers and bones, bones and names. After I counted the bones, I spoke the name, Sam, holding the m in my mouth like the taste of a Life Saver I was trying to commit to memory. And he did the same with Mom. We nestled in the sheets, sucking on spearmint, on butter rum, until the flavors disappeared and Jules barked again—our cue to begin our day.

  Three days of rain were not unwelcome. I used the mornings to convert Grandma Lena’s darkroom into something that resembled the jewelry studio I had dismantled in Michigan. Almost unnoticed was the shift from the sour smell of fixer to the metallic taste of silver dust. Nonna had donated most of Lena’s photography equipment to the college years ago. The vacated space was an excellent match for my purposes—even better, in some respect, than the studio I had pieced together in Michigan. The rear lean-to of the Mulberry Street house had ventilation hoods, large flat worktables, and the possibility of daylight.

  When I first pulled off the brittle black blinds, I was dazed to see the pervasive nickel color of the horizon. If the gray scale was any indication, I was ascending in my efforts. I had no intention for the studio on Mulberry Street to be a permanent installation, though perhaps I was lying to myself. What was permanence anyway? I had a few commissions to finish this summer, but September, like the neutral country of Switzerland, was noncommittal and far away.