Afloat

by Jennifer McCartney

I do, and piccatta means ‘seared in its own juices.’ I tell Rummy and Trainer as they arrive what confit means.

  The Tippecanoe is almost empty and it’s raining gray drizzle outside. The heat from the early afternoon has evaporated taking the tourists with it, and I remember we left the bedroom windows open. Everyone stands around polishing silverware, drinking coffee, and helping each other with the USA Today crossword. We are stuck on twenty-three across, for which the clue reads: the abbreviation for a western state. We can’t decide which states constitute western states, or if the clue includes places which are southwest, like New Mexico. We agree on UT, WA, MT, and NV, but we won’t know which is right until the puzzle is almost done.

  ‘The woman at table twelve has fake tits,’ Brenna announces, as she enters the kitchen.

  Rummy immediately goes out to check and reports back with the authority of an expert that they are most likely fake. A few of the girls go out to look as well, while Trainer says, ‘It’s got to be Utah, because thirteen down is Ukulele.’

  He uses his black pen to fill in the spaces.

  ‘Did I tell you I got a new bike?’

  ‘Spare me,’ Trainer says.

  When I go out to check on my two tables, the couple that was sitting at table number five is now outside on the patio, the gray slate black and slick from the earlier afternoon rain. In fact the entire restaurant is outside, looking up. The air is wet with mist and there is a rainbow. A full arc seems to be projecting from the top of the lighthouse and curving over the entire expanse of the sky to fall somewhere by the last ferry dock at the other end of the island. Everyone is speaking softly, standing in groups. Table number five gives me their disposable camera, posing by the railing overlooking the water with the end of the rainbow falling behind them. As the mechanism makes a tiny clicking noise, I have a strange feeling in my throat.

  Trainer appears beside me, licking black crossword ink from his fingers.

  ‘God. A rainbow,’ he says. ‘What a fucking cliché.’

  Velvet comes to get me, making careful high-heeled steps across the slate. Her black blouse is unbuttoned in such a way the pale beginnings of her breasts are visible, and she tells me the water glasses on table nineteen are empty. Table nineteen has already paid and refused my last offer to refill their glasses. There is no point in telling Velvet this. I take one more look at the sky before I follow her in.

  As I approach the table, Velvet watching to ensure I do as she instructed, the couple are discussing the lighthouse. They turn to look at me.

  ‘Which one is the famous one?’ the woman wants to know.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Well, there’s the big white one, right there in the lake, and the little red one out there on the island across from us.’

  I squint out the window, disbelieving. ‘There’s two?’

  The couple look at me, and then out the window. The woman points: ‘That one, and then that one.’

  She points out the bright-red building and the lighthouse tower beside it. From a distance it looks like a house.

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I only ever noticed the big white one.’

  I could never figure out why the white one was called Round Island Lighthouse when it wasn’t on an island.

  Realizing I have pointed out the Round Island Lighthouse incorrectly now to over a dozen guests, I instinctively look over my shoulder to make sure Velvet can’t hear our conversation from where she is standing. Still holding the water pitcher, I awkwardly fill up their glasses without asking them, and retreat to the back of the restaurant where I decide I like the modern white lighthouse better than the famous one. Alone in the lake, the massive structure reflects the weather perfectly, glowing gold and pink with the sun, and turning gray with the storms. To me this is more valuable.

  Trainer stands next to me for a while, his only table having a relaxed dinner with Mango Carpaccio appetizers and Glazed Walnut and Arugula salads before the main course. There are three couples, all the men gray-haired, the women lipsticked. The sort of table where it’s awkward to drop the check, three hands reaching at once, everyone winking at you.

  ‘Guess how much their bill is?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Did you know there were two lighthouses?’

  He looks at me. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  I shake my head. ‘Four hundred?’ I guess.

  ‘Six fifty,’ he says.

  As he starts to calculate his tip I look out the window, but the rainbow is gone.

  Bryce tells me later on when I get out of work that he had seen the rainbow too, and had thought of me.

  Then he says:

  ‘I fucking nailed Brenna with a water balloon today.’

  ‘That’s the third rainbow I’ve ever seen in my life,’ I say.

  He puts an arm around me. ‘You’ll see tons more this summer, I promise.’

  I like that he feels he can promise me this.

  Then he adds grinning, ‘She was soaked.’

  Brenna is reading a book in which the narrator talks about waiters being a ‘bad emotional risk.’ These male waiters travel from restaurant to resort to hotel, learning, loving, hating, then moving on. This transient lifestyle has trained them to be incapable of longevity. They’ll be pleasant to your face and then spit on your relationship behind your back. And they like to sample lots of different dishes.

  ‘It’s so true,’ says Brenna. ‘It’s so my ex-boyfriend, Matt. He’s such a cheating piece of shit.’

  The other girls nod sympathetically and she turns to me.

  ‘You’re really lucky,’ she says. ‘Bryce is, like, husband material.’

  Blue says she can’t wait until she gets married. Her boyfriend’s name is Jeremy.

  Does the job make the man, or does the man take the job? I am optimistic. Bryce is a waiter, but he is very picky about what he eats. And I have it on good authority that he never spits in anyone’s food.

  St. Paul, 1:45 p.m.

  June something: days steady, heat really hot. Bryce wants to buy a log cabin outside of Grayling and raise emus for a living. Rummy says Canada is our largest trading partner. Ingrown hair.

  I never mothered my dolls when I was younger; I never changed their diapers or fed them plastic bottles. My toys were always teenagers, the stuffed bears on their way to the mall while the fat monkey got ready for dates with Applejack, the only male pony in the My Little Pony collection.

  Then when I was older I kept abortion in my back pocket like a condom, just in case. Bryce and I even talked about it, both of us feeling we were being responsible by discussing the possibilities. A mini baby. A cell blob. A clot of blood. That was all. We laughed about it back then.

  But when I was thirty I had no excuse for not wanting a baby anymore. Four years I had protested, while Alan would smile at babies and then look at me. There were times, I admit, when they made eye contact, warm and innocent in their new envelope of skin, that I wondered. But I was content to wonder.

  Pregnancy crushed me – by the eighth month my belly was so distended I looked like a starving child. In complete denial of the upcoming event – my body expelling a human being from between my legs – I spared my bump all volumes and editions of the Womb Symphonies, the Pea-in-a-Pod aromatherapy creams, the books designed to speed learning when read aloud to the fetus, and I continued working and drinking as if there was nothing else inside me but the things that belonged. Kidneys, liver, lungs.

  I did let Alan read the newspaper in a loud voice though, towards the end.

  I became too big to hide from the hands that would descend upon me in supermarkets. My black T-shirts and sweaters were long enough to cover all the skin of my stomach but not the shape of it, and still, bizarrely, the material would be lifted and strange female hands placed on either side of my bellybutton as if gaining access to some universal truth. As if this ability to grow other people under our skin connected us somehow. These joyful women were nothing like me, betraying me with
wonderful, hopeful stories of childbirths that made them look off into the bags of frozen corn and smile.

  Listen, baby, I would say alone, to my stomach. Don’t fuck with me.

  The depression afterwards nearly killed me. For the first few months, in the least violent of my dreams, I abandoned Alan and the baby in the middle of the night while leaking blood from between my legs. Before I could get out the door the leaking turned to gushing and I started to run, not even looking back at the crib as it began to float away on the rising tide of my own insides.

  We only had one child. I told Alan if I got pregnant again I would stab myself through the stomach. He patted my knee and said he thought the doctors had less intrusive methods these days.

  The New York Times had an article once long ago, about an elephant at the Calgary zoo that abandoned her calf, not knowing what to do with it. The staff made her watch as they cared for it, hoping to ‘kick-start her maternal instincts.’ Animal scientists came to study the mother, speculating as to what went wrong with nature. I wonder, really, just how unusual that is after all.

  Now Anna sits before me day after day, organizing me. Saving me. Fit and full-figured, her long hair dyed chestnut, she arrives each morning to rid me of my past. Her determination to purge these memories makes me wonder if she’s afraid I’m in danger of drowning – too many love letters, campaign buttons, and pressed maple leaves to sink my good judgment and understanding of time.

  From eight until noon, we put shoes in garbage bags, place cufflinks aside for charity, and discuss healthcare and the weather and current events. Some days I will nap in my leather recliner and when I awake in the afternoon she is gone. After wandering around the house calling her name, I will return to my chair to await her evening phone call.

  It is all the same to me, these constant and recycled daylight hours. Today is the exception. Anna understood I was nervous, though not the reason for it, and indulged me. She spoke clearly, gently, guiding me by the elbow from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen. She worries needlessly I believe, for whatever my physical ailments my mind is here, solid and thinking and faithful to the realities of which I need to be aware.

  Sometimes, I admit, she will see things I do not.

  ‘You have to get rid of these curtains from your bedroom,’ she said. ‘There was a spider’s nest in them. I tried Raid, but now they’re smelly and full of dead spiders.’

  I looked, and she was right. Anna’s Buddhist nature does not extend its generosity to the world of spiders. I tried to imagine they looked peaceful, thin sharp legs clustered together in the folds of my once expensive purchase. But they were dead and did not belong there, settling in the safety of my curtains and living with me, uninvited.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘How did they get in there?’

  She shrugged. ‘Who knows anymore.’

  As a young woman Anna took my youth and made so much more of it – for that I am proud, but also envious. In Oregon she was a volunteer firefighter, the next summer she taught rock climbing in Jackson Hole and the next it was Death Valley to participate in the movement to declare California a sovereign nation after the government’s attempt to redraw its borders and continued mismanagement of the RWP aftermath. The last winter, before she met Michael, she spent in the Florida Everglades giving riverboat tours among the alligators. We’d put up her letters on the fridge, searching each area online so we’d know where she was and what everything looked like. We suggested things she could go see, but of course she had already seen them. Just over a year ago she and Michael had returned from the opening celebrations at Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, the mountain finally whittled away, much grander than Mount Rushmore and postcard worthy, the man’s long arm stretched out in answer to the white man’s question: Where are your lands now?

  My lands are where my dead lie buried.

  His index finger broke off during a miscalculated blast of explosives, Anna explained in the postcard, his reach not quite complete.

  In my journal I wrote: One hundred years to carve a man into a mountain. Michael did not sign the postcard.

  This year is the first time since I was twelve that I have not kept a journal. My days are empty pages, which is not the same as having nothing to do. It’s the quality of life that’s changed.

  I flip the pages of my Mackinac life, switching over to the red journal, the brief scribbled memories containing whole worlds within them, but still the time goes slowly. St. Paul’s massive air-raid siren sounds suddenly, then again in thirty-second intervals, wailing into the quiet of my kitchen oasis. Without checking the city-issued pamphlet on the fridge, the sound registers as a warning, to turn the television to one of Minnesota’s weather channels; to call 1–800-RWP-INFO; to drive carefully as the National Guard weather vehicles are out; to keep children inside under a government-regulated roof. Alan and I had ours redone after the first storm with a cellulose-and-concrete-based shingle that’s still under warranty – With KEVLAR Roofing your home is your port in the storm. But this afternoon there is still no rain and no change in the lighting. A warning. It will pass. And soon the doorbell will ring, because it must. I look from the clock back to my past and, even as I calculate the hours I have left, it comes back, everything comes back, and the feeling so strange that I’m there and I can physically feel the aching. The air is what I remember most, the scent of summer, sugar, horseshit, and lake water – and the pages do smell of something, they must, and it’s not just the hallway closet.

  After a shopping list for Mackinac Mart that reads:

  beer

  that round cheese

  tampons

  I find a page filled with just one word written over and over and over again. In sprawling, capital letters, the word is: MORE.

  Mackinac

  The island gets busier as the summer progresses. There are more people, more boats heavy with families, more dinner reservations, more bicycles on the street, more tourists crossing in front of carriages without looking both ways, more money to be made, and more reasons to get drunk in the evenings.

  I have a table of children out on the patio. It is much too bright for a morning, almost hot and not yet eight thirty, which makes me annoyed that I spent from seven to eight wiping all the dew and mist from the patio furniture. The children are relatives of Velvet’s, and I realize I always pictured her springing forth full-grown from the pinnacle of a New York skyscraper, free from the messiness of youth and family. But here they are, staying as guests at one of the hotels down the road. Their parents have given the oldest daughter money to go out for breakfast, but Aunt Velvet tells me not to charge them, ensuring that I will not receive a tip. Children have no concept of tipping, and they are loud and all elbows and spit and should not be allowed in public spaces until they are fifteen. The morning parades before me as a chaotic and unrewarding waste of time.

  My head hurts.

  ‘Hi, guys! Who wants more syrup? How are the pancakes?’

  The chubby girl wearing a sailor outfit points to her brother and says, ‘He likes you!’

  All of them giggle except for the brother in a navy-blue blazer who likes me. He throws a sausage link at his sister, saying, ‘Eff you! I do not.’

  The sausage link hits the chubby sister in the face and leaves a grease mark, and I decide I like the brother back, waiting with my tray to watch what happens. The chubby sister stands up, hands on hips, and gets right in his face.

  ‘I’m telling Mom you tried to kiss Sara.’ She wipes her cheek and sits down, satisfied.

  ‘Eff you, if you do,’ he says, ominously.

  As I set down a pitcher of orange juice on the table, the chubby sister says, ‘Oh, I forgot. We won’t drink this if it has bits. Does this orange juice have bits?’

  I tell her there are no bits, that it is smooth and comes out of a machine.

  ‘Thank you,’ the chubby sister says.

  I wonder if they have servants at home and what they would do if I curtseyed. By the tim
e their breakfast is finished I have figured out that the quiet sister, the pretty one dressed in yellow, must be Sara, and I hope she has enough sense to ward off her brother’s advances.

  The twelve o’clock air-raid siren sounds its long, shrill marking of time, and my lunch guests jump in their seats putting hands over hearts and then looking around apologetically, reminding me that my lunch shift does not end until three. Every single customer sits outside in the heat of the sun, wanting to enjoy the view. Setting down cups of gourmet coffee, Zucchini Bread French Toast with Ginger Sorbet, and replacing fallen silverware, I am sweating, smiling, but I am far away. Underneath my uniform I have a bite mark on my thigh. The favor was returned, and it’s better than a tattoo. The evidence of a mouth.

  Bryce tells me things I’ve always wanted to learn, like how to make an origami cup from a square of paper, how to load a Remington 7600 pump action rifle although I will only watch, and he can sing along to all of John Denver’s songs – but not in a way that makes me embarrassed to listen. I despise working when he has time off; everyone else in the restaurant is pale, quiet, and maddeningly boring. He feels the same, which is what matters. We go everywhere together, stealing minutes alone in the walk-in freezer. We eat together and gossip and I feel like this place has a purpose and it is for reminding me that all that out there, all that does not exist on this island, are things I can live without. It’s too soon of course to feel this way and it will all be over anyway, but everything has sped up, compact and complete, to fit everything in, all this feeling into one summer season.

  I think we deserve one another. Both of us alone for so long in so many ways and now I can see there was a reason for that solitude. I have never been like all the others, how I imagine them to be, armed with long lists of past romances, checklists and ideas of what is right. I’ve had boyfriends named Andrew and Elliot who worked and loved with satisfying sufficiency, but I never dreamt of weddings. I have never imagined dinnerware and olive dishes. I have always been okay. I have no stories like the other girls here: ‘And then he followed me back to my house, slashed my parents’ tires. Not even my car. Fucking idiot.’