All-Season Edie

by Annabel Lyon

  Beyond the reeds chuckles a river that maybe can, maybe can’t be navigated in a pedal boat. On the opposite shore, large trees with tangled roots overhang the water, trailing long shawls of moss. All of these things look very interesting, but just then a cloud passes over the sun, and a breeze pushes long wrinkles across the lake. It’s cold and maybe it’s time for lunch anyway. When I get back to the jetty, the rowboat is still there, but the fat boy is gone. I lock up the pedal boat and return the key and the life preserver to the office and forget to ask about the fish. I only remember when we sit down for lunch, which is cheese sandwiches and dill pickles and grape juice.

  “Dad,” I say, “are there fish in the lake?”

  Dad, who has spent the morning in a deck chair under the pines reading the newspaper and drinking coffee from a green ceramic mug, looks a little dazed. “Fish?” he says, looking over the tops of his reading glasses. “Oh, I imagine.” Which is a silly answer, since I can imagine them perfectly well on my own. What I want to know is whether they’re really there. Hopeless.

  After lunch, I decide to go for a swim. Dad gives me a long lecture about the dangers of going swimming right after a heavy meal, which I listen to impatiently. By the time he finishes, enough time has elapsed that I won’t get a cramp and drown or whatever it is that’s supposed to happen. “Everyone expects me to drown today,” I inform Mom testily, digging through my bag for my towel. It’s a nice big scratchy towel with orange and white stripes. I don’t like soft cushy towels: They get the water off, but they don’t make you feel dry.

  I race for the door, but Mom stops me. “Edie,” Mom says, and I do a squirmy little impatient dance. Mom has a blue plastic bottle in her hand. “Just stand still while I put some sunblock on you,” she says. “It’s dangerous to get too much sun.”

  “Why?” Mom pours the coconut-smelling white lotion onto her hands and rubs them together. “Cold, cold,” I add, dancing up and down as Mom rubs the lotion briskly into my back.

  “You could get sunburnt. You could get headaches. You could get skin cancer. Too Much Sun Is A Bad Thing.” Mom makes it sound very official, like Are Those Hands Clean? and How Many Times, Young Lady? and Not Until You’ve Eaten Your Vegetables. “What about your sunhat?” Mom’s voice pursues me down the path. Whew—got away just in time.

  Down by the jetty I find a big stick, which becomes my trident since I’m Neptune, God of the Sea. I stab at the little tadpoles and scatter them. “Ha ha ha,” I laugh in my deepest God of the Sea voice, until it occurs to me that I don’t really want to spike a tadpole. So I throw the stick away and float on my back and spit mouthfuls of water into the air like the beluga whales at the aquarium. Then I spend the rest of the afternoon lying on my towel under the trees, reading my book as the shadows slowly lengthen, until Mom calls me in for supper.

  “Come on,” I say to Imaginary Dex, who’s lying on a towel beside me, reading one of her teen magazines.

  “Five more minutes,” she says. “I’m taking a popularity quiz. So far I’m nine out of ten.” I walk back up to the cabin alone.

  In the evening, we walk over to the office so that Mom can phone Dexter and Dad can phone Grandpa. Dad says it’s too expensive to call long-distance on the cell phone from here. I look at a rack of tourist brochures while Mom and Dad pass the phone back and forth and the lady who checked us in, who’s older than Mom, prods at a Game Boy with her thumbs. “Fudge,” she says every now and then.

  “I know, honey,” Mom is saying. “I know. I know. I know. I know.” She listens for a long minute. “I know, honey,” she says. “Me too.” Then she says to me, “Want to talk to your sister?”

  “No!” I say.

  I swear I can hear Dexter’s little mosquito voice, at the precise same instant, saying, “No!”

  “Homesick,” Mom mouths to Dad as she hangs up, making an isn’t-that-cute face.

  “Aw,” Dad says. Then it’s his turn to dial. “Mom?” he says. Mom—my Mom, not Grandma—looks over my shoulder at the brochure I’m holding. It’s for houseboat rentals on a different lake. “No, it’s great!” Dad says. “It reminds me of that place you used to take me when I was a kid, that fishing camp up past Hundred Mile House, you remember? Kind of sleepy and basic, but in a good way. Edie’s loving it. I wanted to tell Dad about it, to see if he would remember. Oh, he is?”

  Mom looks up from the brochure.

  “No!” Dad says. He sounds extra-hearty, like he’s disappointed and doesn’t want Grandma to know. “No, we’ll call later. He should sleep if he’s tired. Give him our love.” He hangs up.

  “Grandma!” I say.

  “Oh, sorry, sweetie,” Dad says. He’s frowning and tapping his mouth with his fingers. “You can talk next time. Do you think I should have reminded her about Dad’s medications?”

  This last bit is for Mom. “I think she’ll have it under control,” Mom says, linking her arm through Dad’s. I follow them back to the cottage. Dad has his glasses off and is rubbing his forehead again. It’s dark now, and the lights we left on make the cottage look almost as cosy and inviting as a houseboat. That’ll be good to pretend in bed tonight: that we’re in a floating house, rocking gently on deep, dark water, and if the cable breaks we might wake up far from shore and have to figure out how to get back.

  The next day, I decide to do yesterday backward, which means swimming in the morning and boating in the afternoon, with lunch remaining in the middle. Not long after breakfast, I put on my bathing suit and take my towel down to the jetty, and here’s the fat boy, dabbling at the water with his toes.

  “What’s your name?” the fat boy asks.

  I have to think about how to answer this to avoid teasing. My full name is Edith Jasmine Snow, but the kids at school generally call me Edie-Snow-Peadie, and I don’t want to tell him that. Mom calls me Edith, after my great-grandmother who died, which, let’s face it, is pretty creepy and weird, and, besides, I hate the name Edith. Grandpa always calls me Albert, which is too completely perplexing for words. “How old are ya, Albert?” he’ll yell at me, and I’ll stand dazed, wishing he’d go yell at Dexter for a change or drop dead or something. “Edith is eleven, Grandpa,” Mom will yell in his ear. “Eleven, huh?” he’ll yell. “Sure is old for a dog.” For a while at school they called me Torpedo after I won the underwater-holding-your-breath-swimming contest, and I kind of liked that, but pretty soon they forgot about it. Dexter calls me all kinds of things, none of which is worth repeating. All the time I stand there thinking about this, kind of balancing on one foot and chewing my thumbnail, the fat boy just looks at me. Finally I say, “Dusty.” Dusty is the name of my cat.

  “Are you sure?” he asks.

  I give him one of my looks and he says quickly, “Hey, whatever you say. Dusty it is.”

  “I know your name,” I say, changing the subject. “Robert. I heard them calling you.”

  “He’s not my father,” Robert responds.

  I stare. He says, “My mother’s my mother but he’s not my father. I don’t want you to think he is because he isn’t.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Want to go fishing?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Robert says. “But it’s the wrong time of day.”

  “So?” I ask.

  “So nothing,” Robert says. “Have you ever caught a fish?”

  “Of course not,” I say, rolling my eyes and making the raisin face for practice. “Puh-leeeeze.”

  “I bet I could, if I tried,” Robert says pensively. Then he corrects himself and says, “I bet we could,” and I decide I quite like Robert, even though he isn’t always easy to follow. All that stuff yesterday about caskets, for instance, and now this man who isn’t his father. “I have a fishing rod,” he says. “Only I’ve never used it.” We look at each other and then out over the water, critically, considering. The lake is all sunlight and innocent tadpoles and happy little wavelets. But further out, hidden now but surely there—oh, surely— long silver shapes knife in and out of the reeds an
d slip ghostlike through the depths, unsuspecting.

  “Oh, boy,” I say. “Watch out, fish.”

  Robert goes back to his cottage and gets his fishing rod, which is bright red with a black stripe around the reel and silver earring-hoops for the line to go through. He also has a tackle box with hooks and weights and lures. There are artful little candy-colored insects, lemon and silver wasps and mint green flies and red licorice rubber worms and other confections of wings and tinsel and thread, designed to tempt the greedy fish. They’d look very nice on a Christmas tree.

  After lunch, we take turns casting from the jetty for practice, which works okay once we get the hang of it, but we don’t even catch a single tadpole. “The fish must be farther out,” Robert says when it comes time to go in for supper. “Next time we’ll take a boat out to where it’s deeper.” We agree to meet the next morning for a day’s serious fishing.

  At suppertime (tomato soup and wieners), I ask if I can get a fishing rod.

  “Next year, maybe, if you’re still interested,” Mom says. Oh well.

  From then on, Robert and I go out every day in the big rowboat and fish different parts of the lake. For a while it’s quite satisfying to sit still for a long time, holding on to the end of the long taut line that slices into the water. We each bring a book and take turns slumping in the stern, reading and pulling long arcs with the rod, which feels very professional. We fish the middle of the lake; we fish in the shadow of the big trees; we fish the mouth of the little creek; we fish up the windy end of the lake with the private jetties. Nothing. I decide fish are smart.

  “Something isn’t right,” I declare flatly. “We’re doing something wrong.” Robert nods glumly and sighs and reaches for the oars.

  Finally we go to the office and ask the old man. He tells us to try closer to the reeds around dusk. He peers briefly at our lures, then goes into the back room and comes out with a jam jar full of dirt, which he hands to Robert. “You’ll have better luck with these,” he says.

  “What is it?” I ask suspiciously, highly skeptical that a jar full of dirt can hold more attractions for a fish than the sparkly lures.

  “Live worms,” the old man says. Robert quickly puts the jar down on the counter and we thank the old man. “Just pull one out and hook it on real good,” he says. “They work like a charm; the fish just gobble them up. Have fun, kids.”

  Robert hastily picks up his fishing rod and tackle box and the boat key and the oars and both life jackets, leaving me nothing to carry but the jam jar. “Oh, sure,” I mutter. Will I be able to feel them squirming through the glass? What if the lid comes off and they jump all over me? Eeeewwww, I think, yuck, yuck, as I pick up the jam jar and walk very calmly down to the jetty. I place the jam jar so carefully in the bottom of the rowboat that Robert, who follows me, wide-eyed and lugging all the other equipment, doesn’t even smile when I slosh my hands vigorously in the lake afterward. There, I think. Who’s afraid? I’m not afraid.

  We row silently out to the reeds. When we get there we spend quite a few minutes making everything shipshape. Robert can’t seem to find the perfect hook, and he keeps tying and untying different ones to the rod. I have to knot my shoelaces three times each before they’re comfortable.

  Finally we run out of things to do. The jar is still sitting there.

  “I’ll open it,” I say. “You can hook.”

  “You go first today,” Robert says, hastily offering me the rod.

  I shake my head. I reach down, grasp the jar firmly by the throat and twist the lid. It’s stiff and comes open with a jerk, which freaks me out so much that I drop the jar. It falls on its side, spilling some dirt and one worm. There it is. Quickly we snatch our feet back. “You klutz!” Robert yells.

  “I even tipped one out for you!” I retort, instantly angry. When I’m angry, I stop being scared. I set my feet flat on the bottom of the boat, right the jar and snatch the hook from Robert’s hand. We glare at each other. Suddenly Robert grabs the worm and throws it overboard. Then he throws the whole jar overboard and the lid too. They sink.

  “My worm!” I say, although I’m in fact enormously relieved.

  Robert won’t look at me. He takes up the oars. “Sue me,” he says, but I have no idea what this means. All the way back to the jetty, we don’t say a word to each other.

  We never mention the worms again.

  The next morning, I actually pay attention to my parents’ conversation. A fly is droning and butting against the window (stupid—painful and stupid), which makes me look up in annoyance from my crossword puzzle. It’s going badly anyway. Who’s ever heard of a three-toed South American sloth, let alone knows what its official name is? Mom is fanning herself with a piece of paper the dry peachy color of car-sick pills, printed with smudgy purple ink. It’s an advertisement for a local fair. Mom is telling Dad the fair is sure to have herbs and pottery and goats and local artists and baking and other interesting crafts. Very good for Edie.

  Oh my god, I think.

  “Oh my god,” I say. “Crafts? No. Uh-uh. Absolutely not. You can count me out.”

  “Eee-hee-dee,” Dad says, trying not to laugh. “Don’t swear at your mother.”

  “Edith,” Mom says, “you are coming with me tomorrow to the craft fair and, furthermore, you are going to enjoy yourself and that is the end of this discussion.”

  I cross my arms on my chest, as if to say that this fight isn’t over yet. “She’s just like Dexter was at her age,” Dad says to Mom, and they smile at each other and then at me.

  “OH MY GOD!” I shout. “How dare you compare me to that—turd?”

  “That settles it,” Dad says. “You’re going to the craft fair tomorrow.”

  “Damn,” I say.

  “And no cheese for you tonight.”

  “Double damn,” I say.

  “Or tomorrow either,” Dad says. “Are you learning these expressions from that boy you’ve been hanging around with? That little fat boy?”

  “Robert is not FAT!” I shout. Well, he is, really, but he’s my friend, so I say, “Anyway, so what if he is?” And then, for good measure, I add nastily, “I would take being fat over going to a craft fair ANY DAY OF THE WEEK.” And with that I stomp into my bedroom to change out of my bathing suit.

  That evening, we make our nightly after-supper visit to the office to phone home. This time, Dad goes first.

  “Dad? Dad?” he says. “Dad! How are you? No, we’re fine! Are you fine? We’re fine! That’s great!”

  Mom and I are having a thumb-war while we wait. Quietly, I say, “Why is he talking like that?”

  “He’s nervous,” Mom says, quietly too. “It makes his voice go all funny.”

  “Why is he nervous?” I ask.

  Mom pins my thumb.

  “Okay, we were having a conversation,” I say. “That doesn’t count.”

  “Best of five,” Mom says.

  “Trout, I think,” Dad is saying. He glances at the woman with the Game Boy, who looks up long enough to nod, looks back down and sighs. Her game makes a farting sound to show she lost. “Trout,” Dad says confidently. “I sure wish you were here! You could give us pointers! Maybe next year!”

  “Us?” I say to Mom. Dad hasn’t come fishing once. She pins my thumb again. “Do you mind, while I’m talking?” I say. Dad hangs up. “Grandma!” I say.

  “Oh, sorry, sweetie,” Dad says. “Next time.”

  Mom phones Mean Megan’s house. She starts to say something, listens for a minute and then says, “Oh, honey, I know. I know. I know.”

  I roll my eyes at Dad, who smiles at me vaguely. I know he isn’t paying attention.

  “Edie wants to talk to you,” Mom says, which is a lie, but she gives me a look and holds out the phone. “Be nice to your sister,” she whispers.

  I take the phone. “Hex on Dex,” I say.

  “Greedy Edie,” she replies. I hear her snuffle.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “What a
re you doing?”

  “Going to an extremely fun craft fair tomorrow.” Mom gives me a look.

  “What did you have for dinner?” Dex says. “We had tofurkey. Megan’s family doesn’t eat meat.”

  I tell her that’s because they’re from outer space, and she laughs. Then she says, “Don’t make me laugh. I’m upset.”

  “What’s that word again?”

  “Tofurkey,” Dexter says. “Tofurkey, tofurkey, tofurkey.”

  I say, “Tofurkey, tofurkey, tofurkey.”

  “Brat,” she says. I give the phone back to Mom.

  “See?” Mom says to the phone. “We miss you too.”

  “No we don’t!” I yell so Dexter will hear.

  The next morning, after breakfast, I put on shoes and socks for the first time since we arrived at the cottage. Then I bounce up and down on the itchy sofa while Mom organizes her handbag on the kitchen table.

  “Where’s Dad?” I ask as we walk to the parking lot. “I bet he’s in the bathroom. I’ll go tell him to hurry up.”

  “Get in the car, Edith,” Mom says. “Your father’s not coming. He—has a headache.” She looks a little raisiny as she says this.

  “Too Much Sun?” I ask. Mom presses her lips a little more, but now her mouth is twitchy. She turns the key in the ignition. Then she puts her arm on the headrest to look over her shoulder and starts backing cautiously toward the lane. “Let’s hit the road,” she says, and I laugh. Sometimes she says funny things like this, and then I know we’ll have a good day.

  We drive for about half an hour, take two wrong turns and finally arrive at a large, muddy, breezy field where the sky is sagging darkly with rain. There are tables set up with local people standing around in windbreakers, chatting and drinking coffee from thermal cups. Mom buys a green cardboard box of blueberries. The blond lady at the table wants to give me a taste, but I can tell Mom doesn’t want me to eat them until they’ve been washed. “Is okay,” the lady keeps saying, “zese ah oh-ganically grown, yah?”