Afloat (3 page)

I flip the selections back and forth taking my time, and I finally choose ‘Hollywood Nights' by Bob Seger, a song I always pick first. He presses F8, a song by James Brown. We both agree on Michael Jackson for the last one. My song begins suddenly, the line about the girl standing bright as the sun. Bryce motions to a couch full of people I haven't met yet.

The girls in his group are singing along, ‘he was a Midwestern boy', and waving their martini glasses in time to the music.

I glance at them, then back at Bryce. ‘Thanks,' I say. ‘But I'm meeting Rummy.'

He smiles at me. ‘Well, you're welcome to join me. I promise not to sing.'

I am half pleased at appearing so indifferent and half mortified to have refused his offer. Sitting up at the bar alone as the sing-along turns into shrieking giggles, I decide if Rummy doesn't arrive soon I'll have to pretend to talk on my phone. Taking it from my bag, there is no signal.

The Cock is small, and caters to the island workers, not the tourists. It is brightly lit by fluorescent bulbs, and the chairs and tables are white plastic. Against the left wall and out of place are two leather couches – probably cast-offs from a family living room – and against the right wall the bar extends the length of the room.

Rummy arrives when I am halfway through my first pint.

‘He'll have a gin and seven up,' I tell the bartender.

Rummy sits down heavily on his stool, sweat on his face even though it's cool outside. He shakes his head.

‘I've never had such a stressful job before,' he says.

John sets the gin and seven in front of him and Rummy eyes it warily before pulling out the straw and draining the glass.

‘I'd rather have my rye and ginger,' he says.

He motions to John and asks for a shot of rye whisky in his ginger ale. John shrugs. Rummy turns back to me.

‘So have you ever heard of Hamilton, Ontario?'

I think for a moment. ‘I've heard of Newfoundland. My parents saw a moose there, a huge one by the side of the road.'

He decides to ignore this. ‘That's a different province. Do you like Lifesavers?'

‘The candy?'

‘They were made in Hamilton. For seventy years, every Lifesaver sold in North America was made in a factory down the street from my house.'

‘No shit,' I say.

I lean back on my stool and turn my head slightly to see what Bryce is doing, while Rummy continues.

‘You could tell what flavor they were making because of the smell. On the days when they made butterscotch, the whole street would be lined with people. Neighbors. Kids. Standing around. Sniffing.'

Bryce is sitting back on the couch, looking relaxed and, I think, a bit bored amid the shouts of the girls around him. He looks over and nods. I lean forward again and look at Rummy.

‘I like the green Lifesavers,' I say.

He rolls his eyes at me. ‘Green is not a flavor.'

Drunk already from the vodka he sips during work, Trainer joins us, slamming his empty water bottle proudly on the surface of the bar. He slides into the high-backed barstool next to Rummy, slinging his backpack off his shoulder. Trainer is tall, large, and bearded, his Cleveland Indians hat frayed at the edges and lined with sweat stains. He looks at me, then at Rummy.

‘You're the Canadian,' he says, as a statement.

Rummy says
yes
as if he's resigned himself to this new identity.

‘Where are you from again?' Rummy asks.

‘Sandusky. You know Cedar Point?'

‘No.'

‘The amusement park.'

‘Sorry.'

‘Well, it's in Sandusky.'

Trainer turns and looks straight ahead, sipping his Belvedere and soda until Rummy asks if he's ever heard of Hamilton. Trainer hasn't, but has been to Toronto. They begin discussing the city while I concentrate on appearing interested, wondering if I should go to the bathroom so I can pass by the leather
couch. Soon, however, Trainer's favorite haunts in Ontario's capital command my attention. He orders another drink, and attempts to enlighten Rummy and myself.

‘Well, my first time I was eighteen. I'd been chatting with this guy from TO online, and we'd agreed to meet. He was thirty-six. I told my mom I was going to see the Hockey Hall of Fame.'

‘That's in Canada?' I ask.

Trainer ignores me and continues. ‘Got there after nine hours on the Greyhound, and he takes me to this pretty seedy place.' He pauses. ‘Well, pretty much any bathhouse I've been in is seedy. We bypassed the slurp ramp for the hot tubs. You guys know what a slurp ramp is?'

Rummy and I shake our heads.

‘It's like this platform with curtains all around you, and in the curtains are slits about waist high to stick your dick through.'

I imagine Trainer naked, fitting his penis through a hole in a stiff curtain. Immediately his life seems much more interesting than mine.

‘So, whatever, that's not my bag, we went to the hot tub. It's like, really crowded. I had to walk down the steps with my wang flopping from side to side until I reached the surface. So the hot tub's just full of these floating dicks, literally.'

‘So what do you do when you're in there?' I want to know.

‘Whatever you want.'

His second drink finished already, he orders a Bud this time, and winks as he lifts the bottle to his lips. ‘Predictable is boring,' he says.

Although I roll my eyes when he says this, I'm often susceptible to the type of people who make these sweeping pronouncements.

John's Yellow Submarine is the drink special, written on a chalkboard next to the Pac Man video game. The ingredients are listed as blended vanilla ice cream, Baileys, and banana liqueur. I order one of these next, and it comes with half a banana stuck upright onto the side of the glass.

Trainer confides that he trusts Rummy because he's from Canada. There is no particular logic to this, only Trainer's perception of Canadians as being the coolest people in the world.

‘Canadians are funnier than us,' he states. ‘And I don't feel like a homo in Toronto.'

‘And we make great Lifesavers,' Rummy adds.

Trainer wants to know what the hell he's talking about.

‘I like the green ones,' I say again.

Bryce arrives beside me at the bar to pay his tab, and tells me he's meeting someone down the street.

‘A buddy of mine,' he says. ‘You'll probably meet him.'

I want to go with him, to pretend I was just leaving myself, but he's bought me a beer and I can't leave it.

He sets it in front of me saying, ‘Labbatt's, right?'

I nod and thank him, and, without breaking eye contact, he says, ‘No problem. The first of many.'

I don't turn to watch him go, but I know when he's gone.

‘He seems nice,' Rummy says.

When I leave the bar at two thirty alone, Trainer is walking with difficulty up Main Street, held up by someone half his size.

He gives me a wave and yells, ‘Juan here is helping me home tonight because Juan is so fucking hot. Isn't that right, Juan?'

Juan nods and looks pleased.

As I walk towards my bike, I have a sense of how important
this all is. Of how each star is warm and the night is good and the sound of bikes and horses should be recorded so that everyone can hear, everyone can know how important this all is. These thoughts are interrupted by me falling over.

That's what it was like in the beginning; the magic of new people and the openness of sky. The flicker burning of discovery and the sensation of everything way ahead and waiting. It's funny how quickly I adapted that summer. How easily I slid into the flow of things, like stepping into a river and letting myself be carried away. I learned the customs instantly, the job in a single day. I envied the other girls for their quick opinions, long nails, and loud laughter that turned heads. I suppose I always stood out though – my straight hair that wasn't blonde, eyebrows that weren't plucked too thin and with a way of listening hard that made people tell me things, even when I had nothing to say in return. But now I am glad for that.

I do a lot of thinking these days, when I'm not busy with everything else. It is the island I think of most; sometimes my hands feel tired and bloody from battering on the door of the past, begging to be let back in.

After all these years I still have my tea in the same mug, washing it after every use by hand. With a small black picture of a birch bark canoe, the elaborate cursive script of
The Tippecanoe
is still visible, perhaps only because I know where it is. I pour half a cup of boiling water over the teabag and poke it about with a spoon, the scent of bergamot rising as the water turns black, bitter. Steam from the kettle clouds the kitchen window white and wet.

Outside the oak leaves have turned brown but have not fallen. The yellowing grass is not quite dead. St. Paul in the
fall. Hunting season is just beginning: bear, snipe, trout, deer. Crossbow hunting only, for the adult bucks. Not that I've ever gone near a rifle, but I know enough to make small talk with the neighbors when I'm forced to. Althea next door is ninety-six and owns a lever-action Marlin 336 SS. ‘The components are stainless steel so it'll survive anything,' she explained of her fifty-year-old deer rifle. ‘Now pretend that pumpkin is someone's head,' she told me, pointing into her backyard and hoisting the gun up to her shoulder. Two days later I was still scraping pumpkin guts from the siding of my house. Althea keeps the rifle loaded under her bed in case a foul-weather hunter decides to become an opportunist. I go over sometimes to help her read her mail.

These last fifteen years hunters have become a common sight in our neighborhood backyards, out for deer or raccoons when the city is shut down. I keep my pantry stocked and my head down. I'm too old to play with guns.

Having nothing else to do, I begin worrying briefly about the weather predicted for this evening, the hurricane of snow bright red on the digital radar, descending south from Alberta in the mad mix of hail, rain, high winds, and huge drifts of snow we have come to expect.

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow, my mother would say in her odd, cheerful wisdom. In her day she would have been right. But the storm is two hundred miles across, fully equipped with its own shadow. A 6.5 capable of darkening two states at a time.

Taking a bottle from under the sink I fill the Tippecanoe cup to the top. Even if the storm descends, the new armored city snowplows will be out along with the high-capacity salt trucks and national guard weather vehicles; I decide it will probably miss St. Paul altogether. It must. When it does, I will indulge myself – wondering thoughtfully if my own
determination to
believe
can alter an omnipotent predetermined outcome. This morning it's still about ten degrees, and almost sunny.

Anna appears in the kitchen with a denim jacket over her sweatshirt, dark hair in a bun, huge purse bulging with items gleaned from our morning's work. It seems like we have been clearing for weeks – sorting, throwing everything away.

‘I'm off. Be safe tonight, Mom.'

‘Is that a new purse?' I ask.

She checks the thermostat, then lines up my afternoon pills on the kitchen counter.

‘It
is
new,' I say. ‘It's a
leather
purse.' I make a mooing sound and she rolls her eyes.

‘I don't
eat
cows, Mother, but I've decided I don't mind wearing them.'

‘You're getting old,' I tell her, pleased.

She pats me on the shoulder. ‘No more ice cream before bed, remember.'

This morning I answered the door to Anna in my nightgown, ice cream stained all down the front from last night when I fell asleep watching television. The last of the carton melted all over me, but I'd been too tired to get up and change. It was a cold, sticky sleep. Anna had looked at the material, and up at me. ‘Mom, why do you look like you took a chocolate bath?'

‘It leaked.'

She helped me with my bath then, though I could have washed myself.

‘Keep an eye on the weather,' she tells me now. ‘It's a 6.5.'

We both look out the window.

‘It will be fine,' I say, confidently. ‘Look, a blue jay.'

She doesn't see it, but she didn't look either.

The front door shuts behind her and she walks into the wind chimes that are hanging too low from the roof's overhang.

‘Goddamn you,' she says matter-of-factly.

The hollow pitch of the chimes echoes in my head long after I hear her car start and drive away.

In the quiet minutes that pass in her absence, the blue jay in the oak tree is still, and I wonder if it isn't a branch after all. If I could lift my arms properly and be sure I had a proper grip on the rock, I would go outside to see if I had imagined him, or if the bird would fly away.

I want Anna to come back, to make her watercress and banana sandwiches on multi-grain bread and talk about the advanced downward dog
asana
she is practicing for yoga and the different essential oils she uses on her mat.
Lavender and geranium. For balance
. I want another voice besides my own internal narrator – someone aloud and real to keep me from pulling up anchor and sailing into the past.
Wallowing
, Anna calls it.
Remembering
is different from wallowing, I told her once.