Summers at Blue Lake Page 6

  As a form of self-flagellation (what other reason could there be besides penance?), the bride had chosen to wear a beige suit. The wedding party didn’t require anything from Lena’s emergency kit, but at the reception, I gave the maid of honor a wintergreen candy anyway. It matched the roses in her bouquet and would do nothing but improve her breath after her repeated assaults on the crudités platter with ranch dip. Twice in the same day, I did the Hokey Pokey.

  It had been a long day, and I was tired, but happy about the pay I received for my work. When we got home, Nonna was standing, hand on her hips, in the middle of the kitchen.

  “That phone has been ringing since you left. That girl hasn’t stopped calling here all day.”

  “Who?” I asked as if I didn’t already know.

  “Joyce Sewicky’s girl. If she talks as much as her mother…” Nonna’s voice trailed off and then surged again. “Well, you just better call her back, that’s what.”

  I reached for the phone, but before I picked up the receiver, it rang.

  “Hi, Karen.”

  “How did you know? Never mind. I have got to talk to you. Meet me at Kampmeier’s in ten minutes.”

  I hung up the phone and shrugged at Nonna.

  “Calling all afternoon for that?”

  “She wants me to meet her at Kampmeier’s,” I said. Suddenly I did not feel quite so tired.

  Nonna shook her head and handed me a five-dollar bill along with directives to be home before dark.

  Kampmeier’s had the best hot fudge sundaes in the world, or so their billboard claimed. They also had a ten-hole miniature golf course. I was hoping we were going for golfing and not because of the sundaes. The two wedding dinners, both with stuffed chicken breast and wedding cake, weighted my stomach as I pedaled my new bike to meet Karen.

  “Please no ice cream. Please no ice cream,” I moaned with the hum of my bicycle wheels.

  As it turned out, we neither golfed nor ate ice cream. The place was overflowing with tourists in town for the annual Blue Lake Craft Show.

  “Let’s ride out to the Zechman’s bridge,” Karen said. It was a demand, not a suggestion.

  Zechman’s bridge was more of a balance beam than a thoroughfare. It was wide enough for only pedestrians or a single bike to pass. We parked our bikes and sat underneath on the cement supports.

  “Okay,” Karen began. “I want to ask Travis to come to the Red, White, and Blue Lake celebration with me.”

  “So.”

  “What do you think?” My approval was preordained. She didn’t wait for my answer. “I have four tickets. My dad’s on the committee. You can ask someone, too. We’ll go on a double date. My parents won’t let me do it if I don’t double. Oh my God, he is so adorable. I will just die if he says no.”

  “I don’t know anybody to ask.” I really didn’t.

  “I thought of that. You can go with Ray, my brother’s friend.”

  “Mushmouth Ray?” I had met him several times over at Karen’s house, and I could never understand a word the guy said. He had a mouth full of orthodontic devices that spilled out onto his head and neck.

  “He’s quasi-cute, and he said he’d come with us.”

  “You just think he said he’d come with us.”

  Karen ignored my flippant remark. “It’s all set. I just need one favor.”

  “What?”

  “I need you to talk to Travis for me. Ask him to come with me.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I can’t let him think I am too interested. Please. For me? Make it sound like you need him to balance out our group.”

  To refuse was not an option. I had been chosen for the role of Karen Sewicky’s best friend, but I had to defend the honor. That summer she made two requests of me, to be her emissary with Travis and to sneak her into Macy Killian’s wedding and pig roast.

  Macy Killian was a local celebrity. She had been Miss Pennsylvania 1980, and currently, though she read the weather on Z Rocks FM, she was applying for (and would most likely land) a similar assignment in the more conspicuous world of television. Her real name was Marcia, but she had changed it to Macy when she started doing pageants.

  That request was still days away, but I had my present assignment. Karen made me double swear that I would ask Travis within twenty-four hours.

  “I’ll call you as soon as we get back from our church picnic around two o’clock,” she said.

  I didn’t call to her attention that it was five hours shy of my twenty-four hour allotment.

  ♦ 12 ♦

  2000

  BLUE LAKE RECEIVED ITS appellation as a result of miscommunication. There was nothing blue about it—not even a slight tint of azure or cerulean or any of those paint box hues. If you were naming the lake for its color, then perhaps you would have chosen Drab Lake or Lake Pewter, and then only if you were being kind. The original name was Brubaker Lake because Jacob Brubaker’s farm butted up to the south side of the water. But in the 1920s, a surveyor with a bad right ear heard the name as Blue Acre Lake—a silly mix-up since the lake spanned almost five hundred acres. When the county map came out in 1923, the large body of water in Juniper Township was simply labeled Blue Lake.

  And, as the name had evolved, so did the memory that I held of the lake. I remembered it as being bigger, more picturesque, and less noisy. A teenager zoomed by on a Jet Ski. Who were all these people?

  For Sam it was all new and unspoiled by expectation. He was enjoying his first experience on a boat. I took pictures of him wearing his orange life vest and green swimming trunks that came down past his knees. Together he and Travis steered the craft. I sat in the back, eating the wind as it blasted my face. Nothing about this place called to my senses, and that surprised me.

  I closed my eyes and imagined I was under the surface of the water. I could see myself grown, thinner perhaps, but not in teenage proportions. My hair was waving like the surf, and air bubbles, those tiny gems, rose up from my mouth. Under the mirrored plane of the lake, I could dart around ancient fossils of fish and slide away from all time, simultaneously hiding and playing the seeker.

  This lake was the place I had always conjured if I could not get to sleep, if my day kept rewinding and playing again. I’d shut off the redundant worries, mentally dive into the lake, and imagine hearing the sound of my exhalation as it bubbled underwater. It never failed to soothe me. But here I was gliding along the lake’s surface, and it was not the place I thought it should be. For one thing, this lake brought anxiety instead of calm. It was more secret than solution. Bad memories surfaced after a decade’s deceit. The real Blue Lake, not the one of my dreams, was subtle and mocking, with one memory in particular.

  Nonna had been livid the evening of my fourteenth birthday when I had returned from these very waters with a small hickey on my neck.

  “I’m old enough to kiss a boy.”

  “Not on my watch you aren’t.”

  Unbeknownst to me, my mother had been waiting in the living room. She had been there for two hours. It had been a surprise. Well, hello there, young lady.

  And Travis had just disappeared into the decades. I had watched the hickey fade from my neck as the people around me dissolved their relationships. Mothers, daughters, sisters, aunt. With the moon and the bruise on my neck, the family I knew had waned.

  But this was the present. The motor slowed. I opened my eyes. Travis stopped the boat so we could swim and get some lunch. Before the motor was silenced, Sam was already in the water. His vest allowed him to paddle around as if he could really tread water.

  “Mom, watch me!” Sam thrashed himself around in a circle.

  “Stay near the boat, Sam.”

  Travis handed me a life vest, but I refused it. I felt shy without knowing why, and I turned my back to remove my T-shirt.

  “BJ, I never did tell you why I came over to the house the other day.” Travis said.

  I turned around. He had removed his shirt also and was standing be
fore me in his navy swimming trunks. Travis was taller than Bryce, and more fit. Not noticeably so, but I could see a natural toil in Travis’s arms that my husband had to buy from a gym. I hated myself for comparing the two men. These days, anybody standing next to Bryce would win favor, and I wanted Travis to earn his passage back into my realm, not gain it by default.

  “Oh, I guess I just thought you were there to say hello.” I adjusted the strap of my bathing suit, wishing I could also reposition my cleavage without being obvious.

  “That, too. But the real reason is that when I was talking to Karen the other day at the greenhouse, she said that Anja had made a bequest to me in her will.”

  “She mentioned to me that there were a few small ones, but we didn’t get specific. What did Nonna leave you, the John Deere?”

  “Hardly.” He laughed. “No, she left me the paintings.”

  “Paintings?”

  “Her father’s landscapes.”

  There it was. On the same day that I lost my place of calm, my lake oasis, I lost the family heirlooms that I most identified with my past and my destiny. I alone loved those paintings, and Nonna knew it. They were the reason that I went to art school. I studied painting and metalsmithing, for Christ’s sake. Why would Nonna give them all to Travis? As far as I knew, Nonna and Lena had not spoken to nor heard from Travis in years, nor his mother Margot for that matter.

  I didn’t reply to Travis. Instead, I looked into the sheen of the water for my reflection. Nothing about the face I saw looked familiar. This mer-self contorted and laughed as my dry body remained sober. I dove into the image hoping to break her spell. But my anger accompanied me, like hot metal, forged and ready to be annealed. Or was it healed? I let all the air out of my lungs and sank down as far as I could. Into deep Blue. I had been wrong yet again. There was no God in this lake.

  ♦ 13 ♦

  1983

  JUNE DAYS STRETCH FOREVER, but my ambition did not. When I did not see Travis all morning, I let the time slip casually by. After the busy day I had helping Grandma Lena, I was not eager to accomplish anything but my own agenda. Not that there was anything remotely important on my to-do list. I slept in until eleven and then spent the last sliver of morning writing long overdue letters to my friends at home. Toward midafternoon, my loitering turned into fear when I realized that my deadline was near. I needed to find Travis so I could honor my promise to Karen. I discovered him in a trickle of smoke behind my grandmothers’ barn.

  “Jesus, Barbara Jean, give a guy some warning.” He was stubbing out a freshly lit cigarette in the wet grass. He had thought I was Lena.

  “It’s BJ,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I am not going by Barbara Jean anymore. It’s BJ.”

  “Sure. Whatever.” He lit another cigarette. I picked up the discarded one on the ground—Virginia Slims, lifted from Margot’s purse.

  “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

  “Shut up,” he said and handed me the lit cigarette.

  I was not old enough to know that there was a choice associated with the offer. Of my working vocabulary, “gross me out” and “gag me” seemed inappropriate. I took the cigarette with my left hand and pressed it to my lips for a quick inhale. Don’t cough. Don’t cough. But it was pointless. I could no more repress the ensuing hacking than I could stop the grass from growing.

  “Bar… er… BJ, are you okay?” Travis asked. He bent over to see my face.

  I dropped the cigarette while I was trying to catch my breath. It rolled into a muddy spot near the spigot.

  “That was my last one.”

  I glared at him.

  “Tough shit,” I said, still coughing.

  “So why did you come out here anyway?” Travis asked. He was annoyed and didn’t wait for my reply. “Are you going to help me with the garden? Lena wants me to hoe the rows.”

  The garden was huge, and the weeds were growing higher than the potatoes and bush beans that they separated.

  “What’s my take?” I knew he was getting paid.

  “You already robbed me of two cigarettes.”

  “Big deal,” I said.

  “I’m not giving you any money. I’m saving to buy a car.”

  “Look, I need a favor …” I began.

  “Oh,” he said, looking suddenly amused. “This should be interesting.”

  He wasn’t kidding. That favor cost me several more hours of unfettered summer—this time unpaid. I was angry that I had agreed to the labor when it should have been Karen, pulling weeds in my place. But some unnamed purpose drew me to the task. Beside me, Travis worked steadily in his pared down attire. His shirt lay crumpled next to our growing pile of weeds. Below the tanned orbs of his shoulders were white triangles of skin that seemed even whiter against the dark hair of his armpits. It was the lightest part of his body in my view. And I refused to think about the still whiter parts I couldn’t see. I couldn’t help but notice it when I lifted my neck. Little beads of sweat accumulated there on Travis’s ivory patch of skin until they dripped down his side or onto the earth we were tilling. In the same physical region, I was having my own problem as my bra strap kept peeking out from my Flashdance slashed T-shirt. But Travis wasn’t paying attention to me unless it was to bark more orders at my bent form. What did Karen see in him anyway?

  The garden stretched before us. The tomato plants were starting to swell with new green fruits. I watched as Travis pinched back the plants at the fork in the boughs. Then he tied the new growth to the trellises that supported each plant. Had Lena taught him those tricks? When he looked up, I returned my focus to my own job. My tasks were more primal, hoeing the rows and cutting spiny weeds away from the soil’s grip. Grunt work.

  Sometime around five o’clock, Travis released me from my servitude.

  “Come on, let’s go,” he said suddenly.

  “Where?” I asked, though I was running after him without much care about his response. As soon as we turned the corner I had my unspoken answer—the lake. At that hour, most of the local beachgoers had gone home, and the weekend guests were already the subjects of the weekend traffic reports. The sun was volleying low-angled rays from the lake to our squinting eyes. We raced across the beach to a long wooden dock, from which we dove into the water fully clothed, as in a soft-drink commercial—shoes, shorts, and all.

  “Oh, my pockets.” Travis pulled out his nylon wallet with its sodden five-dollar bills and a half a pack of raspberry Bubble Yum.

  “I am with you for three hours and I’ve ruined my cigarettes, my gum, and my money,” he said.

  “Your money isn’t ruined, and neither is the gum.” I reached out, grabbed the pack, unwrapped a piece of gum, and put it in my mouth.

  “Yuck,” Travis said.

  I blew a big bubble right in his face.

  Could it be? Could she really have feelings for Blaze Cunningham, the man who insulted her at every step, who abhorred her very presence? Angelina touched her lips, newly bruised with his angry kisses, and she knew it was true. She loved Blaze with every fiber of her being.

  I had been waiting for love to be like it was in a Harlequin novel. I did not notice this other thing that had crept up on me. This unnamed longing to be in another person’s presence even if it was just a friendly game of tag or a splash in the lake. When, years later, an arrogant future lawyer crashed into my life, I would count that experience as real, a love with substance, a romance with plot and the appropriate cast of characters. The feelings I had for Travis at age thirteen and three quarters did not even constitute a crush.

  When I got home a half hour before dinnertime, Nonna had a stack of messages for me, all from Karen.

  “When you call that girl back, tell her I can take a message. She doesn’t need to keep calling,” Nonna said.

  I didn’t even need to ask who “that girl” was this time. I knew.

  “I’ll tell her.” I kissed Nonna’s cheek. “I’m going out for a little.”

&n
bsp; “You just got back.” But she waved her hands in the air, signaling her resignation.

  “Just put some dinner back for me. I’ll eat it later.”

  With the lake still in my hair and clothes, I rode my bike to Karen’s house. I dashed up the stairs and opened the door to her bedroom. I was out of breath. Karen was sitting on her bed, painting her toenails when I arrived. Next to her sat a new Cabbage Patch doll, the latest bit of compensation Karen’s parents had paid instead of their attention. It was an inanimate reminder of their love, complete with a pacifier and a birth certificate bearing the name Evan Randall. Karen looked from me to the phone on the bedside table and back to me.

  “Well? Is he coming to the Fourth of July celebration?” she asked. Evan Randall, pacifier in his molded grip, smiled inarticulately from his pillow perch.

  “Travis will be there,” I said, fairly singing my answer.

  ♦ 14 ♦

  2000

  KAREN HANDED ME the opened bottle, and I waited a moment, just letting the cool, wet comfort of the glass exorcise the demon heat of summer from my skin. I was cranky from a day of working hard and accomplishing little. It seemed the only real achievement of the day had been to expand my growing list of things I still needed to do. Out of desperation for the absurd measure of the work at hand, I finished my list with, “Write a best-selling novel and find a cure for cancer.” I would laugh about my limitations if I didn’t feel so overwhelmed.

  I tipped the brown bottle in my hand and watched the pale bubbles as they rose to meet my mouth. The sweetness shocked my senses with the hundred memories of this very taste. I nodded, as I savored the root beer, knowing that it had succeeded in giving me what nothing else had this summer—namely a moment of pure joy. For so many weeks I had begun each day with only two imperatives, to distract myself with work until bedtime and to put on a brave face for my son. I actually braced myself against these obligations at every sunrise. But now, standing on my lawn with friends, I had confirmation that I would not merely survive, but that I also had the ability to experience pleasure, even something as fleeting as a swallow of pop. I looked around, but everyone was blind to my epiphany. The moment passed, but I had noticed it.