by Jacob White
Ted was talking to Zach and me about the newly widened bridge and tax dollars, though I didn’t believe he thought very often about either. He said the place just wasn’t what it used to be. I got up to relieve my beer-full bladder, and as I tried to weave through the plastic chairs, I lurched to the side, felt a sear across my thigh. “Fuck!” I said, watching the grill tip into the lake. The Forester girls screamed as cinders shot wildly across the water. The grill coughed out a loud boiling hiss and quickly sank. I stared at the confusion of smoke that lingered across the surface. I’d had too much beer, and even as laughter exploded behind me I felt my face crumple and spew tears in a sort of ecstasy of pity. In the dusk, thankfully, no one could see this. “Watch out, Winston!” Zach yelled, doubled over. Ted appeared beside me and gave a congratulatory slap on the back, pointing at the water. I hurried up to the bathroom.
I’d returned and eased into my flimsy chair amid a lull in the conversation when, out of nowhere, Jean said, “Oh—Ham got a job!” Everyone looked at me, then cheered and laughed and toasted me. I explained how I’d been hired to teach shop at a high school over in Clover. I would start in the fall.
Everyone glanced at the water, where the grill had gone in. Again, hilarity overtook us.
I raised my beer and said, “To the fallen digits of Clover High!” Everyone realized I was drunk, I think, and laughed at me with quiet affection. Zach leaned over and gave me a jostling, one-armed embrace.
It was dark then, and as we waited for the show our talk fell to murmurs. I felt full from the burgers and beer, but warm, loved, and incredibly peaceful. Then I glanced over and saw my wife. With some alarm I realized she shouldn’t have been kept out this late. In the course of the evening her laugh had become a sort of silent, undulant leer, barely discernible by the lake lights that caught her wet teeth and eyes. She was sick, I suddenly realized. She shouldn’t have been out. I had to get her home. I had to get her back immediately, I decided.
“Jean,” I called, pushing up from my chair.
And just as she turned to me, the lake welled with a wide cheer under the pink pulse of the first explosion.
• • •
Those summer days grow harder and harder to recall. It’s February; everything has been over for six months now, and the days are pulling me into someone I don’t recognize, like it or not.
Yesterday I was wrestling the drawer in and again summoned forth that cigarette. When I saw it I sat back down. The winter light outside was bluing toward evening; frost encroached across the window wells. I found myself taking the butt in the tips of my thumb and index.
I wondered which, between this desk and me, will outlast the other.
I continued turning backward through the history, reversing my wife’s progress, setting each page faceup on my right, revealing each time on my left the blank back of another. I couldn’t help running my fingertips over the blankness, feeling those ridges of script. What was it I hoped to conjure from those ripples?
I put the cigarette to my lips. I breathed in the singed hollowness of its tip.
February.
• • •
I have learned that sometimes there is a final “rally” before the end. Days before dying, hours even, people get out of bed and stand bolt upright. They open curtains and get dressed for church, yell out for five hamburgers. They whiz out of the driveway on a squeaky-braked bike.
By August Jean was no longer having good days. The pain kept her in bed mostly, and even the act of my sitting her up against some pillows was enough to take her breath away and make her queasy and dizzy. A Charlotte doctor gave her drugs to keep the pain under control, but nothing like what they’d give her in hospice when finally we took her, just days before the summer unraveled.
A week before that move, two weeks before the end, I returned from another spurious golf outing at the pool and found her standing in the kitchen wearing a sundress and large straw hat I’d never seen.
“It was up on the closet shelf,” she said, following my gaze. “Jumped right on me.”
I asked what was she doing, whether she was okay, and if that was a bathing suit she had on under.
“I feel like a swim,” she said. “I feel like a swim in the lake.” A shadow, something like that of a bird, seemed to flicker faintly over her eyes.
And so it was that we decided to take up the Foresters on the long-standing offer to use their boat, docked behind their house, keys in the ignition. I went to the bedroom and pulled the golf trousers off from over my swim trunks and stuffed a duffel with towels and sunblock. Back in the kitchen, Jean stood at the counter making bologna sandwiches. She iced them down, along with three beers, in a small cooler. The straw hat had a remarkably cheery effect.
Across the street, we practically tiptoed through the Foresters’ yard, sidestepping pansies and buttercups, avoiding the gaze of windows. Walking down the sagging pier, I sensed that behind me Jean was looking down at the old beach, at the mussels in the shallow, tea-colored water.
I pulled the moldy tarp from the inboard-outboard Bayliner and left it bundled on the dock. Oxidation chalked the hull, and the interior’s beige and navy vinyl was speckled black with mildew.
It was a Saturday, and the channel shook with dozens of buzzing boats and jet skis. I climbed in the boat and held out my arms, but she waved me off. The sharp-pitched rollers discouraged skiing and made Jean’s climb into the boat, with her weakened legs, visibly difficult. A hundred yards out, four or five boats had moored together; a radio’s station identification laser-gunned across the water.
Jean pulled herself into the passenger seat, gathering the tote and cooler beside her, a bit out of breath but smiling. When I turned the key, the engine chugged weakly to life. Finally, together, we could slip out onto the rollers.
As I idled into the channel, Jean, in the back-facing seat, must have watched the shore, the houses, the whole peninsula get smaller, flatter, more indistinct. Soon we were rocking precariously, boats squalling by and sloshing wakes over the gunwales, and it became clear I’d have to speed up and get on top of the water. I had never driven a boat before. I eased the throttle all the way down.
We rollicked wildly up the channel, chattering over wakes, crashing through rollers, stung by unexpected whips of water, both of us crouched over in our seats, feet wide-planted, holding to the windshield. A plastic cup swirled up from the floor, floated for a moment between us, and flew away; then my Winston Racing hat was gone—I looked back in time to see it hovering over our white contrails. When I started to loop back, Jean leaned over and grabbed the wheel, shaking her head. Her own hat too was gone. We couldn’t hear a thing but the hilarious rage of that boat.
We were out of control, but Jean never told me to slow down. It seemed we were past that.
I searched endlessly for some quiet lagoon, but down every cove we veered toward there paraded a succession of skiers, tubers, and obstinately puttering pontoons. I continued farther and farther up the lake, still at full throttle, bones aching from the vibration. Up by the dam, we finally discovered one cove that was mostly empty, save a few bass boats drifting in shadow along the shore. The water smoother there, I let off the throttle, and the shock of silence washed in with our own bloated wake, which mounted toward the stern as if to swamp us.
It was a short cove, and we idled all the way to the end, curving out of sight from the channel, and finally found our lovers’ lagoon. I cut the engine.
“We’re lost now, Ham,” she said, weakly lifting off her sundress.
“It seems. I think we’re near the dam.”
“Well. It’s sure nice to be away.”
“It is nice,” I said, unsure of precisely what she meant.
We crawled up into the open bow and lay there with our feet up on the windshield. Messiaen pondered quietly from the radio as water blipped about the hull beneath. A crow throate
d from the pines. The sun lay over us heavy and raw. It felt good to overheat, to sweat.
Once a year, you may notice, our lake “flips.” That is, when the water’s top layer becomes colder than the bottom layer, the two instantaneously invert. Overnight the lake’s surface turns crimson as bottom mud is lifted to the top; the colder surface level is subsumed, introducing, inversely, a clarity to the lake’s bottom. This phenomenon lasts for two days or three days at most. . . .
After our sandwiches and beer, Jean climbed up on the bow and dove out into the lake. There seem few human gestures that so defy death—or, say, ignore it—as a solid dive, with its pure, piercing action. It is a beauty hardly human.
As she sprang off and arced firmly through the air, the flaccid flesh of her thighs and buttocks shuddered around the explosive hardening of her long leg muscles. Chin to chest, hair startled outward as in some girlhood summer, Jean seemed to achieve an assumption of flight. Fingers pressed, toes tapered: a beauty no longer human. It seemed she could pierce through everything, even death. If there was a splash, I do not remember it.
There was silence—she below the water, I on top.
Then she surfaced. Screaming.
I leaned over and only then deciphered beneath the lake’s bronze the cloudy hulks of firs. All around the boat. A Christmas tree dump, likely set up by fishermen. Probably everyone else on the lake knew about it. Some local tradition. Jean scrambled toward the boat, flailing at the surface and trying not to paddle too deeply. But she was caught—a blackened twine had tangled around her ankle and foot. She yelled as though I were not right there, reaching down to her. Behind her a brown fir broke the surface and seemed to sigh. She screamed again. “I’m right here,” I called. “I’m right here.”
Memory, like history, yields to different layers, and I don’t want those final September weeks to be what stays on top, what reflects off the surface. If I look back, that’s what’s most vivid: the smell of tomatoey vomit that filled our bedroom; the way Jean’s underwear hung loose between her legs; how the jaundiced cheeks ruined her smile; the sight of her lying in bed at night under that alkaline-amber streetlamp, body curling and uncurling, mouth opening, knuckles striking the headboard her father made for our wedding and that we’d thought, tying it so carefully into the moving van, would bring us closer to home. She grew strange to us. She began to wander, and one morning I watched Zach walk clothed into the pool we never got around to cleaning, startling her as he took her naked, floating body in his arms and carried her inside the way I’d once seen him carry a quarry worker with a broken leg and lay him down in the back of a pickup truck. That was the day we took her into hospice.
It’s those images that are brightest, I’m afraid—those weeks when I forgot about love, about my wife’s touch; even forgot what she had looked like as I stared at her gaping, gasping face. Thinking of that is enough to keep me down in this basement forever.
Three weeks after she died, I was wandering the afternoon-lit house one day in October and found myself sitting again before this desk. Neatly folded laundry was stacked on the dryer: she’d been too weak to carry it up—both of our lives sifting and settling, finally, into this basement. I knew before opening the drawer that the history had been completed, that I’d find again one neat stack, the blank back of its final page turned up at me. But it wasn’t wholly blank, that final surface. Having slogged through this place, she had tried to begin again with what she had failed to find:
Running running in from the lake in through the screened porch Feet wet with sand and pine needles with blood mussel shell in through the porch to Grandma rocking running running
And what more was there to say? What more?
I turned the back page over and began to read. I read backward through the whole history, trying, I guess, to retrace her footsteps—chasing her, just as she chased whatever it was she was after. Just as our old historian chased what he was after. Beneath our lake, he writes, lies an older lake, and beneath that lake runs a river—the old Catawba, moving still down a furrow along the lake’s belly.
Surely this summer isn’t the history we wanted. Surely what we’d wanted to live on is the story of how we met at a contra dance forty-five years ago, held in spin by our pinprick pupils, falling in love quickly and fiercely. Or the tale of that icy morning Jean gave birth to Zach. What I want is a history of the contours of her face, her jaw line, of how she smelled, and her dishrag laugh. But I’ve only this history; that other stuff runs beneath it. I’ve only this one to keep afloat with. Maybe it was the same for this old ghostwriter: I sometimes think of that army-issue machete, of the war he must’ve fought in. And yet it was this other history he adopted, or that adopted him.
Even as my memory fails, even as I reach out for something of our life, for some darkening murk of memory, I must at the same time seal myself off from it, cauterizing the past beneath this last summer. If I do not stay on top of this lake, I’ll drown. I’ll drown and there’ll be nothing of us left. Perhaps the lake will absorb me and this ultimately unimportant pain—just as it absorbed that wisp of her blood, which for all I know swims out there now somewhere, which for all I know turns the lake red for one day every winter.
What slices deeper, finally, than a mussel shell on a child’s sole in summer?
I hadn’t known about that, by the way. In her occasional and reluctant indulgences of that memory, she never mentioned the blood, the bite of shell in her sole.
“It’s all right,” I said that day as she lay on the boat’s nylon carpet, wrapped in a yellow towel. She wouldn’t let me hold her. “It’s all right. It’s just trees. Just old trees.” Again she slapped me away, and I squatted next to her for ten minutes, two fingers on her ankle as she curled into herself and howled.
Then, later—hah!—the boat wouldn’t start. The radio must have drained the battery. We sat there waiting for a boat to come by, but there were none. The afternoon was getting late. Finally I went up into the open bow, rocking the boat with my steps, and pulled up several cushions until I found some mooring line. I leaned over the front of the boat and tied one end into the prow’s eye hook. Then I tossed a cushion over and dove in after it.
One arm around the cushion, the other holding the rope over my shoulder, I kicked until the looming shape behind me began to turn and move. After I got through the slime-fingered trees, it took me an hour to reach the mouth of the cove in this manner. The sun had got behind the trees. The channel was mostly emptied, a few boats hurrying by on their way home. Eventually one peeled off toward us. I let off stroking and floated on my back, panting and dizzy.
I felt the water thrum as the other boat eased alongside.
“Winston?”
The channel had gone glassy, the light a deep orange. After Zach and another kid helped us in, I could do little but crumple to the ski boat’s floor, leaning my back carelessly against the knees of teenage boys and girls. The boat was a true inboard, with an engine hatch humped right in the center. I sat in one aisle, Jean in the other, leaning against a pile of life vests behind the captain’s chair. Zach drove.
“What about their boat?” Zach said. “We could tow it back.”
I waved it off. I was out of breath. “So much for being neighborly,” I said.
I could only see the top half of my wife’s head over the engine hatch, her brow like the pitch of a meek tent, the eyes black and bitter as pine forest.
Zach looked at the girl next to him. “Time left for a pull?” he asked, grinning, his knuckles glancing her thigh. Clearly he’d known these four kids all summer, which explained the coming home wet, the glorious tan. He stood, letting the girl slide into his chair. He pulled from the bow a long, flat, fiberglass board with rubber boots on it, what I now know to call a wakeboard. He threw it in the water and then picked up the handle of a rope tied to the roll-bar tower above us and threw it, too, into the water. He dove in. He came u
p and whipped his hair into a bird’s beak at the back. In no time he was on top of the water.
He’d spent the summer on the lake, yes. A summer on the lake. Would he eventually try to balance his whole life on the pearl of this summer? Would he discover one day how slippery were these moments of grace?
Imagine my son. Imagine him there on the coppery flats, swinging out next to the boat. The rope slackens, and he seems almost to stop. Then he digs in his heels and leans back as if to sit down—the rope tightens, the tower above us creaks, the boat seems to bog—and he is whipped in, cutting a quick buttery slit toward the wake. His wet hair trails behind him, as do the strings of his cut-off jeans.
My son explodes into the air. He is upside down, his now-long hair sprayed out toward the water; he is gliding over the far wake, over the flat water beyond—lifting, still lifting.
I had no idea. He is marvelous.
The tower creaks more loudly and the boat teeters as, with some sinewy grace, an upside-down Zach pulls himself back around, lats rippling. Caught in this moment, in this knot of time and space, he is utterly strange, strange in the way of true and awesome beauty.
I try to understand the violent grace we are seeing, knowing that I will be unable to remember it. The violence with which one history ends, the beauty with which another begins. Between my wife and me, the engine growls massively through its muffled hatch, deafening both of us. I can see only the top of her head, her hair in a private fury.
He lands—his weight punching the water; the board makes a satisfying tamping sound. A sound that expresses my son’s density. The rope slackens, snaps taut again; the boat heaves. Fiberglass crackles around us. I can hear the squeak of his rubber bindings as he carves back toward the wake.
He falls once—smacking hard into the water, ripped from his bindings. The boat circles. “Fine,” he faintly yells. “One more.”
