Afloat (13 page)

The family stands, licking and staring.

‘I thought God was a man,' says the youngest son finally.

I wonder if his wife is dead, or left him. I put my head down, like I'm praying. There is a two-year waiting list to get married on Mackinac. Each church and public space is booked
at ridiculously high prices, years in advance. Some churches hold as many as three weddings a day. At least once a day on my way to work, a slick black carriage slides by pulled by high-stepping horses, carrying a woman in white and her new husband. They wave like royalty, the carriage full of flowers and ribbons. And why not? They have paid for their perfect fairytale, one that I get to live every day. I wave back.

My mother was married in a turquoise dress, my father in a cream suit with raised texture like paper towel. The ceremony was held at Holy Trinity in Cheyenne in 1978, and the reception was at my grandparents' house – the wide brown prairies and too much sky waiting for them out each window as they ate potato salad and downed champagne. Their wedding photographs are small and square with a white border, only wide enough for the important things, everything else left out.

‘I never knew what to do next,' my mother confided to me.

She had thought maybe they would buy a farm.

Sometimes Bryce will ask me to take a nap with him. Like cats we pick a piece of grass in Marquette Park and lie together, on the back of this great turtle called Mackinac. The grass is sometimes damp, or sometimes it's so hot and sharp it burns my skin and we have to leave. Lately, however, the weather has been perfect, and we can lie for an hour or more. When older couples or families walk by looking for a place to picnic with their Mackinac T-shirts and ice-cream cones, Bryce will put his hand on my breast, and they will keep walking.

‘I wonder if people wish they were us,' Bryce said once.

Bryce and I love having sex outside. On an island full of tradition and other people's weddings, it feels good to do something daring. Sometimes in between a lunch shift and a dinner shift Bryce and I will have sex in the forest. With half
of the island designated a national park, there are endless opportunities to go naked without worrying about wandering families becoming unwilling observers. There is a clearing we discover where the ground is covered with leafy plants and grasses. Five minutes later, Bryce is drying off his wet penis before putting his shorts back on, and I'm placing my palms together, trying to press away the grassy imprints that itch long after the marks have disappeared.

I watch my candle burn until it is time to go, needing to leave before it burns out; needing to believe it won't. When I leave Blue is at the end of a wooden pew near the door, her hands covering her face, her head bent. Her shoulders move up and down beneath her T-shirt. I look around, but there is no one waiting for her. I guess happiness isn't guaranteed just because you're on vacation. Maybe that's why the island has so many churches. I want to sit next to her, put my hands over my face and not be alone when I do it, but I decide to leave St. Mary's, seeing no one else, not even Father Kim.

I tell only Bryce about my mother.

‘That's awful,' he says.

And that's all he needs to say.

I fold up my mother's letter from so long ago, the familiar handwriting tight and small. Something to keep.

The heating comes on softly, the hum of the furnace sweeping up through the floor which means the temperature outside has dropped at least five degrees. I imagine Althea will call soon to tell me it's a 6.5, to remind me where she hides her good jewelry, her platinum wedding ring, to make sure I remember the key to her front door is in the birdfeeder. When she calls I will not talk about the weather though, I will tell her about my visitor, how I have been waiting, but it's not too much longer now. The weather is a few degrees cooler but that is all and I might even tell her a story or two to make her understand. I look up at Mary, counting the minutes. My prescriptions are delivered tomorrow. There is no mail today, I checked twice. The phone doesn't ring.

Yesterday after Anna left for her Thursday yoga class, someone called asking for Alan. A marketing company. I told them he wasn't in at the moment, feeling confused, embarrassed. When I hung up, I stood for maybe a minute before collapsing slowly. I don't know how I managed it; I can barely sit on my own toilet anymore, let alone the floor. But there I was. I had to crawl all the way across the kitchen and use a chair to help myself up again.
What a fucking joke
, I thought while on my hands and knees, crying, then laughing, then crying again,
to have such a useless body
. I had only a few moments to recover, sitting upright on the chair that saved
me, before I had to leave for my appointment. Dr. Trevor was expecting me.

I went to him yesterday because I was lonely. He's a male doctor, it doesn't matter to me one way or the other, but I think men doctors are softer. All through my twenties and thirties I had a woman, feeling that pap smears and breast exams were less awkward this way, but she was the sort of woman who would stand up before she asked, ‘Is that all?' – daring me not to have anything else wrong with me. Dr. Trevor has been my doctor for the last fifteen years, taking the practice over from his father. There are almost no men left in family practice anymore, but this man is warm and kind with no interest in surgery or brains – the areas of medicine that would bring him serious money. I got my hair done downtown at Scissors before my appointment.

I stopped being embarrassed ages ago. My graying pubic hair sprouts everywhere, untamed; I used to keep it trim when I could still get my leg on to the toilet seat to shave properly. My armpits I can still manage, but they are sweaty by the time I get to his office. My stomach has crease marks from the skin hanging over skin; I no longer apply the scented shimmering lotion that used to shine when my body caught the light. The thin slivers of scar travel across where my breasts used to be; the Victoria's Secret catalogues still come years and years too late. Alan used to read them in bed; Anna takes them home now to flip through. All of this I am used to now. He's just a doctor. A man doing his job. I am nothing to him, an aging body.

I told him my stomach was hurting and he pressed a hand to my belly and asked, ‘Do you feel any tenderness here?'

His hand was dry and warm and all at once I imagined him sliding his hand lower, sliding his fingers into me asking, ‘How does this feel? Down here?'

I imagined this and my body was younger, my thighs smooth and taut, my toenails painted red, my underwear black and made of lace, and I remembered my perfect body lost somewhere inside the one I have now. He pressed the other side of my stomach. ‘What about here?'

I nodded as if that's where it hurt.

Lying there so sexless and bare, I wondered if there were some instances where despite ethics and codes of conduct and society, the doctor and patient could not control themselves – if somewhere, it must have happened, they were both too wild to resist. I wondered if the doctor, a man of course, became hard underneath his white coat as he returned to the room where his female patient had undressed, if it came as a surprise, if the woman knew her effect on him, if it was calculated. I wondered if, while giving her a breast exam, he brushed her nipple ever so slightly and she gasped, involuntarily perhaps, at the sensation, if he would return to it, questioningly at first, and then encouraged by her breathing and the crinkle of the clean white paper underneath her body as she arched her back, with more certainty. I wondered if he would massage her breasts while she rubbed the front of his khaki pants, grabbing and pulling at him until he lay down on top of her. There wouldn't be time to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation, because everything would be wet, erect, urgent. The condoms would be in his desk drawer. He would be married, or they both would, and despite the circumstances the sex would be routine – quick, but satisfying, absent of any kinky additions like tongue depressors or stethoscopes. She would think about switching doctors but wouldn't, because secretly she enjoyed this complication in her life.

Is it absurd to fantasize such things?

I surprised myself, how quickly my feelings turned like that, not realizing they were so near the surface, waiting.

‘It's your posture,' he said.

He'd determined that my imaginary stomach complaint was the result of my leaning over when I walked, cramping my insides.

‘When you walk imagine a string pulling you straight up towards the ceiling.'

‘Am I going to get a hunchback?' I asked.

He laughed. ‘If you were going to have a hunchback,' he said, ‘you'd surely have it by now.'

I collected my things quickly and left. I bought a coffee from the drive-through on the way home, but the young woman didn't let me get a proper hold of the cup before she let go, and it dropped. It splattered on the pavement between us and the young woman said, ‘Oh, fuck, just a minute,' but I drove away. I didn't know where to go and didn't want to go home – back to the memories I had no place for.

I drove around the familiar city streets slowly, looking too often in the rear-view mirror, wondering where I had gone. My hair did look nice, and driving past the post office where Alan used to work I hoped to see one of the men or women leaving on their route so I could pull over and say hello, but it was too late in the day. There was no one. Looking at my reflection again, I remembered something Bryce told me long ago about the
Salt Lake Tribune
. The obituary section, he said, had ‘before' and ‘after' pictures. Not after death, but after youth. It was like a Where's Waldo he had said, staring into the second face and trying to match up the bone structure, the shape of the eyes, to determine if this was indeed the same person.

I drove around for a while, still not wanting to return home. But in the end I did.

Now I am sitting up straight in my kitchen chair, still watching the clock. I can't decide whether or not I can still
hear the warning siren, it seems a part of the atmosphere now, the sound registering unconsciously perhaps, but not really there like the chirping of birds or the sound of waves after a day at the beach. Perhaps I should have asked Dr. Trevor about my hearing.

I remember the invisible string, and concentrate, sitting straight in my kitchen chair because I can't believe it's ever too late in life to worry about getting a hunchback.

This morning Velvet sends me to pick up a prescription arriving on the first ferry from St. Ignace and the dock is busy with cigarette-smoking porters and ferry workers sorting out the morning's orders. On my left are four boxes of tomatoes, eight boxes of black straws (Bryce says all the restaurants use the same straws so they can borrow from each other if they run out), and a bag of mail in a canvas sack marked
PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE
. On my right is a case of maple syrup and a ready-to-be-assembled oak dresser in a cardboard box. At the end of the dock Rummy stands alone, watching the departing ferry move slowly out into the lake towards the lighthouse. As it disappears around the edge of the island, he flicks a coin into the water, but he doesn't turn around.

Velvet's prescription is not at the dock, and one of the porters tells me to try the island's medical center.

The center is impressive: pink granite and tinted glass with metal bike racks out front. There are no wooden shutters, tubs of geraniums, or wind chimes hanging from the eaves. It is functional, set back from Market Street so its modernity doesn't offend the landscape. Community flyers on the door advertise Mackinac High School's Italy fundraiser, Maureen's Art Exhibition at Old Warren House, the book club led by Father Kim, and a community meeting about the proposed bike helmet legislation. I return to the Tippecanoe with two thousand milligrams of muscle relaxant.

Yesterday Brenna came to work complaining the center
doesn't offer abortions. Blue had followed behind her into the change room, looking horrified.

‘On this fucking island? They'd make a killing,' Brenna said.

‘Why are you corrupting Blue with all your ungodly sin?' Trainer yelled through the closed door.

Blue quit this morning, and she must have packed last night as she apparently left on the first ferry. She was a small silent girl from somewhere outside Chicago, and Bryce says she drank the vanilla latte syrup when she thought no one was looking, so maybe she's better off at home.

Rummy finally arrives late for work and carrying his newspaper and Brenna pounces on him, pulling him into the walk-in cooler impatiently, her Tiffany bracelet shiny against her tanned forearm. He emerges after a few minutes, still carrying the paper and looking upset.

His parents send him the
Sunday Star
via overnight delivery every week, and he retreats with it to the Voodoo Altar – the ornate walnut end table decorated with carved faces is a Velvet family heirloom which also serves as the staff break table. I join him quietly, both of us sipping Velvet's gourmet coffee thick with cream and sweet with sugar. Sitting across from him it feels like our own kitchen table, our own home, fresh with the smell of coffee and the Tippecanoe's famous chocolate croissants; I imagine we are married, as Rummy fits the sort of imaginings I have about husbands, which aren't many.

We sit together every Monday; no one else is interested in his current events, and no one ever asks to read the paper when he is finished with it, although someone usually manages to start the crossword. ‘Hemingway's paper,' he calls it. He is in his second year of journalism at a place called Ryerson, and usually when he reads he says things like, ‘Now
this
is news' and, ‘This Siddiqui guy, his column is really something.'

Today he says nothing.

‘What do you think about Blue quitting?' I ask.