Summers at Blue Lake Page 3

  In homage to my indecision, I left some of my jeweler’s tools in cardboard boxes. Basic tools, like my torch and soldering pad, sat under the hood ready for fire. I had been nervous about transporting a tank of acetylene gas on my long trip (made ever more volatile by my rattled state of mind), but I had managed to transport and unpack it safely, without incident. With my equipment arranged, I was ready to test the flames and the ventilation hoods to make sure they worked. The room had an immaculate feel that told me it was not truly a working space. Looking around at the empty studio, I could not find a scrap of metal to use in my experiment. I sighed. My scrap metal container was deeply buried underneath my lathe in the largest cardboard box, and that was still somewhere in the garage. Regardless, I wanted to at least light my torch and make sure the connections were satisfactory. Just as I turned on the gas for the torch, I noticed my wedding rings still twirling on my left hand. Bingo! I felt the laugh spring from deep in my throat.

  Oh yes, there had been another woman, perhaps more than one. But the discovery of one had been enough to send tremors through my skin, my organs, and even my teeth. The timing was horrible. I heard news of Nonna’s death three nights after Bryce’s forced admission. My tremors progressed into vomitous seizures that quaked until dawn. Dr. Radcliffe gave me a couple of options, and I chose the one I could hold in my hand and swallow with water.

  Those hours were dark with the revelations and fuzzy with my medication. I asked Bryce to advise the mortician. Both men tried their best to neutralize the solemn emotions with their navy pinstriped suits. They did a good job. At the viewing, nobody could determine which man was the husband and which was the funeral director. I kept my wedding rings in place for the parade of card club members, neighbors, and former brides who shook my hands and kissed my drugged cheek. My failed marriage could liven up next month’s card club. Card club. Deck of cards. House of cards… falling.

  What did Bryce tell his girlfriend for those three weeks? She never called the house, but even unnamed, she still seeped into our home. A handout from a realtor. A strange towel in the laundry. But mostly she made her presence known in Bryce’s refusal to respond when I attempted to provoke him, which was often. We made our way home from the funeral, back to Michigan, where I counted the days. One, two, three—taking a breath. Four, five—listening to my own heartbeat. Six, seven, eight, nine—watching the clouds for rain. Finally on the tenth day—folding my summer clothes next to Sam’s in the big suitcase. I packed the car as Sam watched from the east-facing bay window.

  “I need to go. Just for a few weeks. I have to empty the house on Mulberry Street. We’ll sort things out when I get home. End of August at the latest.” I spoke bullets instead of sentences and phrases.

  “You don’t need to do this. I’ll get a place.”

  “I’m taking Sam and the dog. Don’t do any legal stuff. Wait until I get back. Promise?”

  “Bobbi”—he never called me BJ—“look, I’ll give you a fair settlement. You can keep the house. We can work out custody.”

  “Promise me you won’t do anything!”

  “I … okay. End of August.”

  The rings were still on my hand. I pulled at them. Fingers that only weeks go had flesh enough to keep the rings in place now surrendered them easily. Bryce had given me the diamond on the day he finished law school. The ring had a round stone with a wirelike band. Nothing special. Though I was ecstatic over my prospects, my inner artist had cringed and had set about to make a wedding band that would ignite the diamond on my hand. I had done it, too, with a beautiful ring of overlapping gold leaves like a laurel crown. My clients continued to request that ring, often enough that the ongoing orders kept me from the despair of scanning the classifieds for a real job requiring an alarm clock, pantyhose, and a team mentality.

  I shifted the band to my right hand. It had always been more a present to myself than a symbol of Bryce’s fidelity. That was obvious. But what was this diamond ring? I clamped it to a small stand where, with precision, I aimed the hissing, blue flame of my torch. Soon the metal started to color in the heat. I took my pliers and wrenched back the prongs on the setting until, with a satisfying clink-a-clink, the diamond bounced off a clay crucible and onto the counter. As if to applaud, the rain stopped its whirring and echoed clink-a-clink on the roof of the lean-to. The sound of rain and falling diamonds.

  Yes!

  I opened the back door and stepped outside. The rain fell upon my hands and neck. Jules slid by. He wanted out, a desperate dash into the weather. I didn’t move back into the shelter of the house. Even after Jules had dampened my thigh with his return, I remained outside. The weather summoned me into a trance, and I obeyed the call of the thunder, letting the rain bejewel me.

  ♦ 5 ♦

  1983

  THOUGH I HAD MADE FRIENDS at the lake in previous summers, I was never eager to renew these friendships. It was too much work to figure out how the local cliques had rearranged themselves over the course of a school year. The girls would eventually come to me if I ignored them long enough. The beach was sparsely populated, and I attributed the lull to an unusually cool and rainy spring. Because of the lake’s chilly reception, potential beachgoers questioned whether the baton had officially been passed from spring to summer. I did not care about the relay of the seasons. I wasn’t at the beach for the purpose of water sports; I just wanted a quiet place to read. I spread out my beach towel on the pebbled sand and opened a book from Nonna’s cache of Harlequin Romances.

  “I don’t read them for the sex,” she had confessed to me. “I read them to be young again.”

  As a kid, I had read good quality literature: Newbery Medal winners, children’s classics, and Little House books. But at thirteen I was in a literary wasteland. Nothing seemed to span the gap between juvenile fiction and adult literature. V. C. Andrews gave me mild hope, but I had already read her latest scandalous book in a series about a brother and sister’s forbidden love. Grandma Lena snorted at Nonna’s stash of romances, but I was glad to have something to read. No matter the subject, books were educational. “Better than television,” I told Grandma Lena.

  At first I could not understand why the nineteen-year-old secretaries fell in love with their contemptuous, thirty-eight-year-old bosses. What was appealing about being stern and pompous and conceited? But within reading a few volumes, I not only accepted the backward principles of attraction, I absorbed them.

  “Hi, BJ,” the voice above me loomed anonymously in the bright sun. I assumed the voice was calling someone else until I heard it again.

  “BJ, I’m talking to you.”

  I turned a squinted eye in the direction of the voice.

  “BJ?” I asked.

  “For Barbara Jean, silly.”

  Karen Sewicky threw her towel down next to mine. She had been one of the girls in the group into which I was assimilated during last summer’s visit. I couldn’t say that we had been great friends, but I had given her my address before I left for home, and she had mailed me a few short letters on terminally cute and heavily stickered stationery. Karen plopped down beside me with an expectant smile. Her presence was not a welcome interruption. Blaze Cunningham was about to undo the top button of Angelica’s gauzy silk blouse. He was the sexy tennis pro. She was his stepfather’s niece in need of a solid backhand shot.

  “Mom told me that Travis had an accident at your place. I wish I had been there. My God! He is so cute. Too bad I’m not old enough to join the card club.”

  “Yeah, too bad.” I flipped to the next page where more breathlessness awaited me.

  If Karen was hoping to jumpstart her love life by talking to me, she could do it after Blaze’s hands sought Angelica’s creamy spheres of pleasure. And aspiring to the card club? It was laughable. I did not make it known that I was already a reluctant member.

  “Ooh. You’re burning.” Karen took some Hawaiian Tropic SPF 4 out of her bag and handed it to me. The bottle was sticky, sand encrusted, and
it smelled strongly of coconut.

  “I’ll wait until after I go for a swim,” I said, ignoring her gesture and continuing to read.

  Karen cast her eyes downward with rejection. I caught her reaction out of the corner of my eye. Just what every teenager needs—more emotional manipulation. It was obvious she was not going to leave me alone to enjoy a good sex scene.

  “Come on. Let’s get in,” I said, disguising my disgust.

  She perked up. “Great!”

  When I stood I got the full view of Karen in her summer attire. She was gawky, all legs, in a pink striped cotton bathing suit with a ruffle around her hips. Featured in teen magazines, this style was popular with many girls my age, and they all looked equally stupid. My suit was solid black. Compared to me, Karen looked like a baby doll. I walked two steps ahead of her so nobody would mistake me for her babysitter.

  Though the lake was cold this early in the season, a few people were already swimming or floating on inflatable rafts. Karen hemmed the edge of the water. Her big toe dipped in and out like a needle on slippery gray satin. I plunged in with a small yelp. I had been so caught up in my book that I had forgotten to flip onto my back. The water clarified the differences in my sun exposure. On my front, the lake water was refreshingly chilly, but on my red side, it was so cold it burned the back of my legs like a whipping. Once my hair was wet, I started to feel better.

  Karen remained tentative, standing on the shore. She looked small and alone. Karen was used to being at the center of a large gathering of girls, but I surmised that her friends must belong to the group headed for Camp Susquehanna in the Poconos. I had overheard card club mavens discussing, with both delight and trepidation, the mass exodus of their daughters for the month of June. Karen had it rough. She might have pined away in her bedroom awaiting stories of poison ivy and cute counselors, but her parents wouldn’t allow it. They were forever shooing her away from the house where Clarence Sewicky III, esquire, had his law office. Karen’s mom, Clarence’s junior by about ten years, was his secretary. She took Tuesday mornings off to come to card club and Thursday mornings off to get a manicure.

  Karen’s mom wasn’t on my list of top mothers, but I had a fascination with her. Unlike my own mother, who was as artless as she was considerate, Karen’s mom always seemed to be perfecting her polish and using bad news as currency. Certainly, Joyce Sewicky was a valued member of the card club because she gave away hints, without jeopardizing attorney/client privilege, about which marriages appeared to be in trouble and who would file for bankruptcy. She never told us anything that would not be public record sooner or later, but we felt duly informed. Always, as a reminder of the delicacy of the situation, she would press one perfectly manicured finger to her lips and whisper, “Ssh.”

  Now, for the first time, I wondered how Joyce had met Clarence. Was he her surly, older boss who suggested, no, ordered her to wear her hair down during dictation? Had they cleared off his desk in an act of passion? Clarence was not a handsome man, so the thought spiraled down to the realm of the icky, like the idea of old people or fat people or your own parents having sex. Would I have to confess these thoughts to Father Thomas when I got back home in August? Two months seemed too long to go without cleansing one’s soul of sin.

  I dove under water and held my breath as long as I could to clear my brain of the disturbing images. Hail Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou amongst women… When I emerged from my watery confessional, Karen was still standing at the water’s edge, but she was no longer alone. Travis was standing beside her.

  Even from a distance I could make out the scene in detail. Travis had long abrasions on his upper body from his run-in with our roses, but I didn’t focus on him. Instead I watched in dismay as Karen’s hips leaned into their conversation. The bathing suit ruffle that had looked so immature now fluttered coyly against her upper thigh. Karen laughed, and then laced her arms across her chest as she moved pebbles around the sand with her toe. I couldn’t believe that I had actually felt sorry for her.

  Instantaneously the image of Jimmy Fuhrman popped into my mind. I longed to be back home in Virginia with Jimmy—the two of us taxiing around the swimming pool with Sue Lipkowski glaring at me from the snack bar.

  How I wished that Mary, full of grace, had more power than simply interceding with God on behalf of my tawdry musings. Why couldn’t she be more like Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz? There’s no place like home.

  I shivered, but there was no way I was getting out of the water and back to my book with the two of them standing there ignoring the whole world—and worse, ignoring me.

  NONNA WAS SHELLING PEAS and watching General Hospital when I returned to Mulberry Street.

  “Margot and Travis are coming to dinner. You just missed Lena. She went out to get some steaks.”

  On the TV screen, Luke Spencer was embracing his sister, a prostitute turned nurse. “Don’t worry, Barbara Jean. I will be fine. I’ll call you when this is all over,” he said. Luke was the only one to call her Barbara Jean. Everybody else on General Hospital called her Bobbie.

  I had never heard of anybody else who had my same name—anybody who was alive, at least. I was named after Dad’s sister who had died at age seven in a car accident. The first Barbara Jean was a cute, blond-haired girl. In the last picture before her death, Barbara Jean sported a smile with many voids, as if her baby teeth had preceded her in death.

  “Her adult teeth just never did come in,” my dad would say before putting the picture back in the drawer.

  The Barbara Jean on TV was a dark-haired temptress and, in a word, voluptuous. The directors kept her out from behind the nurses’ station as much as possible.

  “How about if you call me Bobbie?” I asked Nonna. I was drinking a Coke out of a can.

  “Save it for your stage name. Bobbie Foley. Hmm.” She paused and looked up at an imaginary marquee. “Then again, it doesn’t sound so good.”

  “Karen Sewicky called me BJ today. What do you think about that?”

  “BJ Foley. Hmmm.” No marquee this time, just the TV.

  “Do you like it?”

  Nonna looked away from her stories. “What is all this fuss about your name?”

  How could I explain to Nonna that this brink of womanhood stuff really sucked? I was tired of having passionate feelings without an object of desire, and tired of having a bra without breasts. What were these tentative protrusions I was growing, anyway, these demi-boobs? I was stuck halfway between the gapped grin of my child aunt, Barbara Jean, and the lush womanhood of Bobbie, the nurse. Maybe it was as simple as changing my name. Abracadabra, Barbara, Bobbie, BJ. If I could name my next incarnation, I could live it.

  “I’m just tired of Barbara Jean. So when Margot and Travis get here, would you please call me BJ?”

  Nonna resumed her shelling. “Okay.”

  I left the room to change out of my wet bathing suit. Once I was in the hallway, I pulled the front of my suit away to view my chest. It had looked bigger in the mirror that morning. Against my cold wet suit, my breasts had shrunk away to mere nubs. UGH. I snapped my suit back into place.

  “Nonna!”

  “Yes?”

  “Please tell Grandma Lena to call me BJ.”

  I waited for an answer.

  “Okay, Nonna?”

  “Okay, BJ.”

  ♦ 6 ♦

  2000

  I HAD WANTED TO SHOW Sam the summers of my youth, but though the house on Mulberry Street supplied the architecture, it was missing the spirit. How could we live within its sandstone walls for three days and still feel so empty? I tried everything. One afternoon, I barricaded Sam in the kitchen with me. Together we recreated Nonna’s lemon chicken from a recipe card my mother had passed down to me. (Nonna never wrote down recipes for her own use.) The kitchen began to take on the familiar aromas, and I thought we were finally reviving the aura. But after I finally took the bird with its accompanying citrus cloud out of
the oven, Sam turned to me and asked, “When we are done eating, can we go home?”

  He spent his mornings in front of the television feeding videos of the Star Wars trilogy into Nonna’s ancient beast of a VCR. Every time Sam put another movie into the mouth of the thing, I said a little prayer that the VCR would not digest the tape. They were all I had to entertain Sam on rainy mornings while I cleared out Nonna’s belongings.

  Finally, on the third day of rainy boredom, I strapped Sam into the car and circled the nearby towns looking for anything with kid appeal. Chuck E. Cheese’s, glowing orange from its seat across from the strip mall, beckoned us. Not only could Sam expend his pent-up energy in the game room, but I could also grab a gallon of milk from the grocery store at the end of the strip. The additional errand made the outing seem less of a bribe on my part and more of a compromise.

  Inside the restaurant, an attendant stamped our hands with some ultraviolet numeral that was supposed to bind me to my child. It didn’t work. As soon as he was in the door, Sam tore away from my grasp and raced toward the skee ball.

  “What about over here in the ball pit?” I called after him.

  “Mo-om, I’m almost six,” he said, nearly beyond my range of hearing.

  I wandered over to the food counter where two high school girls were trying to correct a mistake with the previous order. After the cash register started beeping, they called their manager, a college girl, over to help them. As is the way of most managers, she took care of the problem with a plastic smile and the twist of a little gold key. When it was my turn at the front of the line, I realized that I had been so absorbed in the drama that I had not given any thought to what I wanted to order. Embarrassed, I chose the first pizza combo and discovered later that it was large enough to feed a family of four. Sam came running over for his plastic cup full of tokens, and after trying a round of Hungry Hungry Hippos for myself, I went to wait for our food.