Wish You Were Here (58 page)

“Sorry,” he shouted from behind his shades.

“For what?”

“For being a jerk.”

“That's okay. You can't help it,” she said, an old joke, worn but still with shifty implications, in this case a peace offering, temporary and happily accepted.

The windshield was crazed, nearly opaque. She sat up to help him with traffic, swiveling to check on the kids. They skirted the no-wake buoys for the marina at Prendergast Point, cut behind a big cabin cruiser with two women in their twenties in bikinis and joined the main lanes. It was like getting on the highway. The hull thudded against the waves, Sam shouting “Unh! Unh!” to get a laugh. She held on to the bare grab bar built into the dash, letting the speed and noise pour over her, washing her clean. It had to be past three but the sun was still high. On the far shore the trees gave way and she could see a truck climbing a long hill. It was Thursday, somewhere people were working, and for the first time since they'd arrived she felt truly on vacation, emptied of all responsibility.

They curled around Long Point, and Ken cut the throttle. As they slowed, the boat settled into the water. The air thickened, the humidity clapped back in place, and they could hear birds and, behind them, the motors of other boats. In the woods, behind a chain-link fence hung with signs, the old mansion glided by, a stucco imitation of a French villa. It was part of the state park, but they'd run out of money to fix it, so it sat there derelict, windows sealed with plywood, and each year when they swam in the cove Lise wished they could take it over, the whole family eating their meals on the broad stone patio. She and Ken had been inside once, years ago, before the children. The place smelled of mold and campfires. Deep maroon wallpaper from the twenties was peeling off in sheets;
someone's sneaker sat on the mantelpiece, decoratively centered. She'd been too spooked to make love, and Ken had been disappointed, a fantasy of his thwarted.

She so wanted romance now. This should have been enough—a motorboat and a ruined villa, a moody starving artist of a husband. Mary Stewart could spin a thriller from less, with the right heroine. As a teenager Lise had wanted to be like the young, untried women on her covers, governesses and college students abroad unfailingly described as lissome or winsome. She really thought she would grow up to be one of them, plucky and windswept. What an idiot she'd been.

Ken killed the engine and climbed over the windshield and she handed him the ceramic anchor, an overgrown ashtray. He tied it off on the bow cleat and played out the line until it hit bottom, then lashed down the excess.

Sam asked why they couldn't go tubing. Lise ignored him, stepping out of her shorts.

“How come we always have to go swimming first?”

“Don't be a wiener,” Ella finally answered him.

“Okay, who's going to go first?” Ken asked, unfolding the ladder.

Usually the boys could be counted on to do anything that put them in the spotlight, but Sam was grumpy and Justin wasn't biting. Ella and Sarah hung back, loath to show enthusiasm.

“Somebody,” Ken said.

“I'll go,” Lise said. “I'm not afraid.”

There were no protests, so she climbed over the windshield and pushed herself upright on the hot bow. The boat rocked beneath her feet, making her shift her weight; she crouched and put her arms out for balance. She chose to go off the starboard side, straight at the mansion. She needed a step or two to clear the edge of the bow. She thought of the kids paralyzed from diving in quarries, telephone poles and old pilings lurking under the surface. The mansion must have had a dock. Steamboats probably stopped here to let guests off.

“Jump,” Sam prodded.

“How deep is it?” she asked.

“Don't worry,” Ken said, “it's like twenty feet.”

She decided to play it safe and go feetfirst, then wavered.

“Come on,” Sam urged.

She gathered herself up, swayed back and hurled herself toward the edge, measuring her steps. She pushed off, flying not up but straight out, and tucked her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms tight around her shins in a cannonball.

She hit the water hard, a shock to her bones. The cold closed over her, and the silence. She let her weight take her down into even chillier depths.

When she opened her eyes there was only a yellowy, shining hint of the surface above, the water green and swamplike, silted. The cold stilled her heart, isolated its beating against the faint, silvery sound of propellers passing far out in the middle of the lake, submarinelike. She could see herself on the muddy beach, limp and white-lipped, eyes open like a fish, her slicked hair a shocking contrast. He'd take pictures of her then, rolls and rolls of film, coveting her a way he never did in life.

She'd never know. Her own buoyancy pushed her, will-less, to the surface. The castle was gone, nothing but trees above her.

“How is it?” he called, and she found him, standing on the bow in his silly short-shorts.

“It's nice,” she lied.

The whole point of her not going on the boat was so they could talk. Meg had hoped Arlene would clear off and leave them alone. While Meg invented likely errands to send her off on, she installed herself on the porch with her novel and a tall glass, half listening to the Pirates game on the Erie station.

It was too hot to walk Rufus, too hot to sit on the dock. Her mother took the rocker beside Arlene and Meg took the glider, conceding defeat, if only for the moment. As always, Ken had left her the hard job, slipped
away, blameless, while she confronted her mother. Despite her train wreck of a life, their roles had stayed the same. She thought it was by default, or weakness on his part, not a show of faith in her, but she was willing, maybe even eager, to be wrong.

The three of them read in the shade while the sun glittered on the water, the noise of the boats like a racetrack, then quiet for a time. The Pirates were winning in Chicago. In the middle of a sentence she would be drawn into the game, the shouts of the crowd or the announcers joking with each other. They were still advertising Iron City beer, a staple of her teenage years, Vitamin I, and she remembered cutting school and drinking in Frick Park, walking the gravel paths far into the woods, sitting on the side of a hill and looking down the valley at the busy steel mills and the gray Monongahela. She would be with James and Gina and Sully and Ray, and Teddy, who smoked Newports. Spring or fall, it didn't matter; the days seemed promising, an adventure. For lunch they'd hit the Open Pantry, getting gross premade hoagies wrapped in plastic and cold quarts of pop, more cigarettes, a new lighter. As the afternoon wore on, they'd slow down, knowing they had to go home.

“How was school?” her mother would say over the dinner table.

“Boring,” she'd say, and go up to her room and listen to music.

It didn't seem twenty-five years ago. Nothing seemed twenty-five years ago, but it was, and for a moment she saw the past like a forgotten country spread out behind her, a landscape seen from a speeding car, the backwater towns and cracked streets and shabby apartments she'd lived in still there, and the girl she'd been, as if she could recapture her (redeem her) by returning to that hillside in Frick Park and start again.

She couldn't, just as she couldn't help but fall under this spell of regret. She was especially susceptible here, now, afraid she wouldn't be able to persuade her mother to keep the place, that—as with her life and her sobriety—it was already too late.

“You're thinking,” Arlene said. “That's not allowed.”

It's dangerous, Meg wanted to say, but blamed the mesmerizing glare of the lake. “It's like diamonds.”

“I hope the children have their sunglasses,” her mother said. “Sun like this can do permanent damage to your eyes.”

“If you look directly into it,” Arlene tweaked her, but too quickly, as if coming to Meg's rescue.

Meg appreciated the gesture, but thought it called too much attention to her, and really, she didn't need any help. As with so many of her mother's random observations, there was a judgment attached, an implied failure on her part, even if Sarah and Justin happened to be wearing their sunglasses. At another time in her life, Meg might have seen her warning after the fact as purposeful, designed to hurt, but this summer, with larger things on her mind, she'd acquired enough distance to understand that this was simply the way her mother saw the world—as a place you had to prepare yourself against or face dire consequences. She wasn't so much malicious as thoughtless. She would have said the same thing to Lise or Ken or to Arlene. She would have said the same thing twenty-five years ago.

Maybe it was the way her mother was raised, her grandfather and grandmother White religiously strict. Yet when Meg remembered them, she recalled how the two of them watched TV after dinner, planted in matching chairs for hours, both of them smoking, sharing the same ashtray, her grandmother heaving herself up to get them each a bowl of ice cream to eat with the local news. No, it was just her mother, her tentative, judgmental nature. If you made the right choices in life, you might be rewarded, but if you made the wrong ones, you were doomed. Meg had been wrestling with that idea for forty years, hoping to disprove it. Only her pride kept her from admitting that she'd given up, that her mother had won.

She needed a cigarette, needed to get up and move around. As she expected, Arlene tagged along after her, the screen door slapping shut. They stood under the chestnut and watched the boats, their dazzling sails. She looked for an opportunity, waited until Arlene had gone on about the heat wave in the Plains and the forest fires in the west as if they shared a personal stake in them.

“They were bad last year too,” she agreed, and paused, clearing the air. “Listen,” she said softly, and bent closer. “You wouldn't be insulted if I needed some time to talk to Mom alone, about the house?”

“Of course not. I think it's a good idea.”

“Any suggestions?”

“Tell her we like it here,” Arlene said. “Tell her it's cheaper than anyplace else. I know she still wants to come up next year. The only reason she's selling the place is because of your father, I'm convinced of that. It's not hard to care for, especially with the new roof.”

She gestured toward the cottage in full view of her mother, and Meg had to turn her around.

“You don't think it's the money?” she asked.

“I think she sees it as one more thing to take care of. She's taken care of a lot in the last year.”

“She didn't have to do it all herself.”

“That's her way,” Arlene said.

Meg didn't respond to this, relying on Arlene's solemnity to cover her. The lake and the radio filled the silence. It was too large of a subject, her mother misguidedly trying to insulate her and Ken from their father's illness, if that's what she really thought she was doing. Helping him die with dignity. It was a fight for another time.

“I was thinking you might go out to the store and get something we need for dinner.”

“The shish kebabs. We've got an order in at the Lighthouse. I don't know if that'll give you enough time.”

“All I need is an hour. Not even.”

“I'll just drive around if I have to,” Arlene said, and now Meg wanted to say she was sorry, that she wasn't in the way.

“Thank you,” Meg said, and laid a hand on her shoulder, and Arlene brightened, grateful—like Justin, Meg thought—to be part of things.

“Good luck,” Arlene said.

Back on the porch, Arlene waited until the Pirates had batted before she announced she was going out to the Lighthouse. “Any special orders?”

“We have more than enough dessert,” her mother warned. “Someone's going to end up taking one of those pies home.”

“Not me,” Meg said, comic relief, as if to distract her.

When Arlene had gone, her mother turned off the radio. “I think it's a habit,” she said, “always having something on. I do the same thing now when I come home. Two minutes haven't passed and I've got my music going. It's like having someone else in the house.”

“I know,” Meg said. “With me it's the TV.”

“That's worse.”

“I don't watch it. It might not even be in the same room. It's just hearing another voice.”

“I'm sure that's it,” her mother said.

They subsided, pleased with this rare agreement, and turned to their books. Meg held off, not wanting to be too blatant. Her mother was quick to see any serious difference of opinion between the two of them as criticism, and took criticism as a personal attack, went defensive, whether that meant dismissing her concerns as foolish or lashing out at her. Her father and Ken had spoiled her, Meg thought, going along with anything just to placate her. Stoned or sober, Meg refused to, and their fights escalated from clashes over small concrete issues into tests of higher principles and finally, irrationally, into proofs of who they were and what they owed each other. She had to avoid anything that sent them down that track. She thought everything depended on how she started.

The day couldn't have been a better example of why they should keep the place. It's so nice, she might say—a misstep, since her mother would know she was leading her somewhere.

I wish it was always like this.

This is what I love about Chautauqua.

In her book, Kinsey was driving around in her little red Bug, tailing someone, breaking down the case in her head. Meg needed to think like that, analyze the situation and get ahead of it, know what buttons to push. Good luck, she thought. She'd never had that ability, not with anyone, let alone her mother. All she could do was tell her how she felt and hope she would be merciful, a tactic that worked in group but nowhere else.

She closed her book and set it on the table, an opening move her mother noted. The light through the trees was turning golden, honeyed like a beer commercial. The water near shore had gone glassy. Her mother looked up from her book to see what she was doing, and Meg was waiting for her.