Essay V. I
I told myself to imagine she was my great-aunt, that going to her house-on-the-lake would be like visiting an exotic country.
The doorbell rang while it was still dark outside; she had left the truck running. My mother firmly instructed me to go answer the door. I twisted the deadbolt, slowly until it slid back with a condemning thud. The first thing I saw were her hands. They were smooth and her fingers were long and tapered like in all the hand-crème commercials. The fingernails were cut almost to the quick, exposing the raw pink skin underneath. I was terrified.
“Hi Sarah” she seemed utterly sure that she was where she was supposed to be, talking to who she was supposed to address. I wished she would be anywhere else, talk to anyone else. She told me her name was Marion. It was French and reminded me of fairytale heroines. So I decided to trust her.
My mother came to say goodbye, smearing a kiss across my cheek and wiping toast crumbs off my jacket. Then she propelled me onto the porch towards M-air-I-ohn, and closed the door.
The houses at 45, then 47, then 49 La Vuelta blurred in the window as the truck sped northeast. The hours on the digital clock in the dashboard clicked and rotated like the arrivals and departures board at Heathrow. It was as if the stronger I wished we would never arrive, the closer we got, as it the progress of the tires on the dusty road was fueled by the apprehension that jarred my stomach.
There were four other girls in the truck: Dakota, her brown curls shivering as she readjusted her headphones. Madeleine and Laurel sat next to Dakota in the backseat, and watched me watch them, giggling. Sara was asleep against the window, her breath making clouds on the glass. She was clutching her pink stuffed duck while snot dripped glistened above her upper lip.
I leaned forward, resting my forehead on the cool glass, bumping my head every time the truck hit a bump or pothole. By the end of the trip I had an angry red bump the size of silver dollar sitting like a bindhi between my brows. The truck lurched as we turned onto a gravel road, my head thumped painfully against the window, making my eyes water. She turned down the music and looked back at us, smiling at something above my head.
Gradually the sky began to lighten. The truck pulled into a rugged, overgrown driveway just as the sun was beginning to make the leather of the seats uncomfortably warm. Marion wrenched the key out of the ignition and stepped down into the clouds of red dust that had been sent flying into the air.
She hauled on the backseat door. I felt exposed under the sun’s direct light, which caught me in the eyes, but which framed her in a red-gold blaze of dust and daylight. The rays wrapped around every strand of her frizzy black hair. I was so jealous of her curls, so sure that Joan of Arc, and Boudica, and Queen Isabella of Spain had possessed curls just like Marion’s. That’s why I followed her into the house, holding Sara’s hand and dragging my jacket in the dust.
We stepped into a hallway that smelled like mothballs and vacuum bags. Then I saw the lake. I was stunned. The water winked and dipped, beckoning from beyond the sliding glass door. The glare on the glass hurt my eyes. She watched, unconcerned, as I dropped Sara’s hand and marched to the door. I stood there, looking out at the lake, for what must have been nearly two hours.
I remember looking at the dilapidated dock, encroached on by the foamy green algae that floated just below the surface, ready to grab swimmer’s bare arms and legs. Vines stretched from the warped willow tree on the right bank of the lake, they seemed to be pulling the tree into the water, slowly coaxing it year after year.
That afternoon Marion called us all into the large sunny central room. We sat in a circle, scabby knees scraping boney shins. She passed out frozen strawberry pop tarts, and gave each of us a box with our names written in green cursive across the top. She must have thought I spelled my name like the other Sara, without the “H”, so she had left it off. I loved her for that; it seemed more elegant when spelled that way.
My box held a blue and a black pen, a black and white-speckled notebook, and a journal with thick, egg-colored pages and a blue and green marbled cover. I hugged the journal to my knees, leaning over as I craned my neck to see what was in Madeleine’s box.
Just as I reached out to touch the red and pink cover of the journal that Madeleine held out to me, Marion said, “Well, girls, welcome to my home, and to your first day of writing camp. We will do writing exercises in the mornings and you are free to do what you want in the afternoons.”
She rocked back onto her heels as she knelt, smacking the front of her thighs and smiling so widely that her whole face wrinkled to accommodate her grin. I remember wishing that she really were my great-aunt; that I could sit on her lap and smooth out the crows feet and dimples of her face with my thumbs. I settled for adjusting the sleeves of my jacket, which would take me several more years to grow into.
Marion told the five of us that we would sleep in the loft, that all meals would consist of lemonade (the kind from a powder), Beef Ramen (the type in an orange packet and looks like over-permed hair), and strawberry pop tarts.
The following two weeks are more impressions for me that memories, the pervasiveness of light, the warmth, being simply, basically, happy. What I do recall has the texture of an old Polaroid, grainy and tinged with a color it did not originally possess: the beautiful assault of bitterly cold water as it hit bare skin when I jumped off the dock, the early morning pilgrimages I made every morning we were there.
Just after dawn I would get up and wait until I could hear the other girls’ slow breathing. Then I tiptoed barefoot down the cold stairs from the loft to the kitchen. I knew that there would be a crisply folded slip of paper waiting on the kitchen table, with a note at the bottom in scrawling green ink.
Each morning I would slide the note across the surface of the table, replacing it with a new story or observation I had penned the previous day, neatly folded into quarters. Then I would go back to bed, saving the old poem, festooned with her notes, for later. Sleep would come easily then, secure and content in the knowledge that Marion would get up in a few hours and go directly to the kitchen. She would take my poem off the table, and save it in one of the deep pockets in her denim shorts to be read later that afternoon while the five of us swam.
I liked, and still like, to imagine that she smiled to herself, with the knowledge that she was fostering in me a passion to write; smiling as she pulled the strawberry pop tarts out of the freezer, placing them on the counter to thaw.
