The Color of Water in July (4 page)

“Well, who knows what will happen,” Jess said. “I may never get married. I’ll just have a career.”

Mamie peered straight at Jess, over the top of her glasses. “Young women have a lot more choices nowadays. This is a good thing. I just have one piece of advice for you, Jess. Figure out what matters, then hold on to it. That’s how you keep things together. By not letting go.”

Jess stared out the window of the upstairs bedroom toward the trees, a dense wall of green that blocked out the light. For a while, they continued their task in silence. Jess and Mamie each sat perched on either side of the bed, ankles crossed neatly, folding pillowcases in the same precise way, and then stacking them between them on the chenille bedspread. “Miss Mamie,” she said finally, “you know the other cottage down around the other side of the Tretheway woods out toward Loeb Point . . . Any idea who lives there?”

Mamie laid down the pillowcase she was folding and smoothed it several times before she answered. She prided herself on knowing all the goings-on around Pine Lake. Of course, nowadays, there were lots more condos and time-shares—people up from downstate—weekenders. Those people just didn’t count, didn’t mean anything, were basically invisible to the “real” summer people, ones like Mamie, who had spent a lifetime of summers along the piney shores.

“The Painter family,” Mamie said firmly with a hint of distaste. “Not our kind of people.”

Jess, in her mind’s eye, could see the boy in the red swim trunks paddling off toward the point in the red canoe.

CHAPTER FIVE

M
AMIE

When I first visited Coventry Manor, three years ago, I was wearing my little mink jacket. It was a cool, bright Texas day. I had planned my first visit for January, when the weather is chilly, because I tend to think that there is no occasion that can’t be improved by dressing in mink.

At the time, I was in quite good condition, except for my palpitations, and had dressed with care for the visit. I wanted everyone to know that I, Mrs. Mamie Tretheway Cleves, had choices about how I would square things away.

The thick plate-glass front doors of Coventry Manor swoosh open as you walk through them. Inside, there are marble floors and various sitting rooms, furnished with Queen Anne–style mahogany chairs and stiff little velvet settees. I was going to move there before I needed to, before I became a burden to Margaret, when I could still install myself with pleasure into my new little home. Then, I knew how it went after that. At Coventry Manor, they would move you upward, closer and closer to the uniformed nurses and the motorized hospital beds. Up and up, closer and closer to heaven.

Margaret, bless her heart, came all the way from London to help me move in, but I was the one who arranged the furniture and placed the cutlery neatly into the sideboard drawers. I had only lived in an apartment once before in my life, and oh, the pleasure of it. Not more than five steps to anywhere. I reveled in all the clean, gleaming surfaces, and in the order; no more than needed and no less, yet still pretty and pleasing to the eye.

One of Margaret’s greatest failings, if I may say so, is in her housekeeping. That girl was positively piggish, right from the start, shoelaces untied, ribbons falling out of her hair, leaving her things in a tossed-off trail behind her, here a school paper, there a sock, and a few steps later, a shoe. It was just like that when she came to help me move into Coventry Manor. She sat on a sofa in the middle of the room, feet up leaving marks on the coffee table, saying to me in that ridiculous drawl of hers, “Now, Mother, you shouldn’t be straining yourself.”

I was grateful, though, to have an opportunity to talk to Margaret about the cottage.

“About Journey’s End,” I said to Margaret the second afternoon she was there. Margaret was sitting on my good green-brocade sofa, holding her cigarette so as to balance the long ash that was sticking out the end. I was anxiously eyeing the sofa, wondering if it would be ruined and whether my upholstery man was still in business or had already retired.

Margaret looked at me blankly, a look that I knew well, a look that she had perfected as a child. Margaret looked right at me, and she said, sweet as can be: “Journey’s End . . . What in the hell is that?”

It wasn’t her incessant cursing. I had long grown used to that. It was that implacable face, that innocent tone of voice . . .

The long ash on Margaret’s cigarette tumbled off, missing the green brocade, leaving a little soiled pile on the tufts of the cream-colored carpet. I picked up the sheaf of papers I had before me, my notes about Journey’s End written out in blue ink on a yellow legal pad.

“I own a piece of property in Michigan, as you know.” I read to her from my handwritten notes. “There are two separate matters. One is the cottage with its contents, and the other is the adjacent woods.”

Margaret continued to look at me without curiosity, as though I were describing a completely unfamiliar place, though she had spent every summer of her childhood there.

“Last month, I donated the woods to the Little Traverse Conservancy—a charitable organization that will preserve the woods in their natural state and protect some bird habitats. For now, I have retained the cottage and its contents.”

Margaret leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette.

“Upon my death, I have appointed the trustees of the Wequetona Club to act as executors.” I stopped for a moment, watching Margaret, wondering how she would react.

“I have chosen to let the cottage pass out of the family, Margaret. There are many worthy Wequetona families . . . ” Margaret didn’t look up. “The proceeds from the sale, of course, will go to you and Jess.”

“That’s fine, Mother. Just fine. Whatever you want to do . . . ” Margaret wasn’t even looking at me; she was picking some dirt out from underneath one of her fingernails. I never could understand that girl. I paid for her to go to the very best schools, and she always affected this lower-class drawl, and the most repulsive kind of personal hygiene you could imagine.

“I’m afraid that’s all there is,” I said.

It was the last kernel of my daddy’s once-impressive fortune. I think I have lived in a way that was appropriate to a woman of my station. I can’t say I have ever had to scrimp on anything, and I was careful to set aside whatever might be needed for the future.

About Journey’s End, though, I confess a muddleheaded sentimentality. In the cottage above Pine Lake, I could always close my eyes, and there they would all be: Mama before her nerves set in, Lila smiling and skipping down the walk, even Daddy, tall and clear-eyed, cheeks flushed with success.

For the longest time, I thought I could hang on to that thread, imagined passing the cottage on to Jess, taking her through it step-by-step, teaching her the rhythm of the year. Open it in May: throw wide the windows and let in the light. Close it in late September: shut it up tight as the fall chill creeps into the air. At Wequetona, I see that other families have managed to do it, passing their cottages along from generation to generation, just as they pass their characteristic blue eyes or stooped posture or thin hair.

I’ve arranged it so that Jess and Margaret won’t have to return to Journey’s End in order to pack it up and sell it. The Club will handle the sale, and I know that they will see to it that the cottage goes to the right kind of people—another family that will doubtless go in and brighten up the inside with fresh paint and colored summer chintz. New people, new dreams, another try.

That first night, after Margaret left, I slept in my own bed in Coventry Manor, in my little white room, with only three pieces of my mahogany furniture: a bed, a dresser, and a vanity table. Two sketches of Pine Lake, one in rain, one in sun, hung on the pastel wall. Even with the TV on low, sitting in my bed, I could hear the hum of the elevator as it sped along its tracks, the electric ding that it made when it stopped at my floor to let passengers out.

I thought,
Mamie, you’re a free woman again.
I didn’t sleep much at all that first night, awakened less by the few buzzy and metallic sounds in the building than by the absence of the familiar creaks and groans of the old houses where I had spent my life. And when I needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I was shocked by the cool angularity of it: smooth, pale linoleum and sleek, unstained porcelain that had seen nothing of having lived a real life.

CHAPTER SIX

J
ESS
,
AGE THIRTY-THREE

“Of course, we can’t do anything ethnic . . . ” Russ was saying. He was hunched up in a wicker settee in the living room, knees jutting out, poring over the Fine Dining section of the
Northwest Michigan Guide
. “You can’t do anything ethnic between Yonkers and Oakland.”

“Oakland, Michigan?”

“Oakland, California. You know. Gertrude Stein. ‘There isn’t any
there
there’?” Russ flipped the pages of the newsprint throwaway impatiently. “But at least
there
they have decent ethnic food.”

Russ was something of a food snob—something that Jess knew she should appreciate more. He took her to excellent restaurants, and made gourmet meals for her. But her own taste had always run to simple stuff, something that Russ didn’t really understand.

“I know a place that makes good burgers,” Jess said. “Of course, who knows if it’s even there anymore.”

“Let’s do it,” Russ said. He slipped his arm around her as they made their way toward the car. She shrugged it off, and then stole a glance at him, but Russ wasn’t the sensitive sort, and he didn’t seem to notice that she was pushing him away. Maybe that was one of the reasons that she’d stuck with him, and that everyone assumed they were getting serious—because when she pushed, he stayed around anyway.

They circled downtown three times, looking at all the restaurants lining Main Street: whitefish houses, soup restaurants, and ice cream and popcorn shops.

“I’m so disoriented,” she said. “I would have thought I could find this place blindfolded . . . ”

They were about to give up, when Russ turned one more corner and she spotted the old neon sign with half the tubes burned out.

T
H
D
CKSI ER

The Docksider

Inside, same scarred-up tables, same jukeboxes on the tables with old seventies tunes you could flip through while waiting to order. The Wequetona kids used to come here a lot, probably still did as far as Jess knew. They would ride their motorboats into town late in the evening and dock at the city marina.

People were smoking at the bar. The waitress showed them to a darkened booth in the corner and Russ ordered two beers. Jess looked down at the battered table and remembered nights from the old days, coming in bone chilled and windblown from the boat ride across the lake, when the scent of beer and cigarettes, boy-sweat on crew-neck Shetland sweaters, and the jukebox playing “Midnight at the Oasis” made her feel all buzzy inside. At age seventeen, she used to light up a cigarette and blow smoke rings at the ceiling. Now, she sat fingering the initials of the unknown lovers carved into the battered tabletop.

Russ was talking—telling Jess everything he’d read in a local guidebook: about the lumbering business at the turn of the century, about Ernest Hemingway’s descriptions of Indians in the Indian camps. She could tell he didn’t know she wasn’t really listening. She rubbed the beads of condensation that had gathered on the outside of her beer glass, looking, without really meaning to, over Russ’s shoulder, past the shiny bar top, to the door.

Jess had watched someone walk out that door once, his back to her, leaving her behind. Now, it seemed as if only minutes had passed since that night, and that soon the door would swing open again. Jess reached down and fished around in the bottom of her purse. There, in the zippered lining, she felt a forgotten cigarette, bent and shabby like an old tampon, and the familiar bulge of her lighter. She pulled them out and lit up, inhaling deeply on the first breath.

“I thought you quit!” Russ said.

“I did,” Jess said, forming her mouth into an O.

Just then, the bar door swung open, revealing a pretty woman whose shiny chestnut hair was pulled away from her face, and behind her a taller man with dark, wavy hair, worn longish. He was wearing a plaid polar-fleece shirt jacket, and, strapped to his chest in a baby carrier, there was a baby about six months old. Startled, Jess stared past Russ toward the doorway, which now framed the couple, the man with his arms looped loosely around the baby. His knees were slightly bent and his hair framed his face. His stance was one of particular grace—at once athletic and nurturing of his baby child.

“Oh, not here,” Jess heard the woman say. “Look, people are smoking.”

Jess felt herself straining, almost rising from her seat. Was it . . . ? Could it be
him
?

“Yeah, let’s try the Villager,” the man replied in an unfamiliar voice. As he turned to follow his wife out the door, the streetlight illuminated his face, and Jess saw the face of a stranger. She sank back down in her seat.

“Are you okay?” Russ asked. “You look kind of pale . . . ”

“It’s the nicotine,” Jess said. “I’m not used to it anymore.”

Jess picked up her glass and took a long swig of beer, letting the cold liquid sear her throat. Heat was rising along her cheekbones.

Russ reached out and put his hand over hers—even Russ, obtuse Russ, had picked up on her agitated state, on the awkward bulkiness of her shapeless desire.

He smoothed a lock of hair from her cheek and sat silently, looking at her face. She felt like telling him everything—just getting it off her chest.

“Russ . . . ” She studied his face, wondering if he would actually listen if she opened up and told him what was really on her mind.

But Russ liked to fill silences with the sound of his own voice. “Hey, we’ve got to make sure we get some blueberry jam. It’s a regional specialty . . . made with berries gathered by hand . . . ” Russ wasn’t a good listener—but wasn’t that one of the things she liked about him? Unlike other men she had dated, Russ wasn’t that interested in her past—not interested enough to want to pry.

By the time they got back into the rental car, Jess had whittled her desire down into a more manageable lump; it started somewhere underneath her collarbone and sat in the pit of her stomach, leaden but contained. She was not like her mother. She knew how to keep her passions simmering well below the surface.

Ardor unleashed was something she knew all about from Margaret. “Look what the cat drug home,” Margaret liked to say to Jess over breakfast. Jess would look up from her breakfast and see a bland and rather ordinary-looking fellow. Jess imagined her mother literally snatching these men unsuspecting off the streets, where they would find themselves not much later tangled and moaning in the sheets of Margaret’s bed. Margaret always paraded around the apartment stark naked, her poofy breasts bobbling, sometimes the fishy smell of sex still upon her. Early on, Jess thought she understood sex pretty well: it was actually quite common, but people pretended not to notice; it had a tendency to be noisy and to stink. The part Jess never got was where all the painful leave-taking came from—every love to Margaret, no matter how unpromising at the start, ended inevitably in fountains of tears and frantic phone calls from train stations. That was how Jess gained her early impressions of love.

During the ride back to the cottage, Jess had the window rolled all the way down so that the sound of the rushing wind made conversation nearly impossible. Russ tried shouting to her a little bit, but she kept saying, “What, I can’t hear you?” and finally he fell silent.

Toni Miller Barnes came highly recommended. She was a Miller, of the Miller cottage, a Wequetona girl who had married badly and gone local. Still, she had a small trust and enough affectation to make it in the business of catering to cottagers, a little interior decorating, a little real estate, and a sure eye for teaching new money how to look like old.

“Chippewa sweetgrass baskets,” Ms. Barnes was saying. Jess and Russ had spent the morning combing the cottage for anything that looked Indian, taking everything down and lining it up on any available tabletop in the living room. Actually, Jess did most of the work. Russ had brought an astonishing variety of books in his overnight bag.
The Navajo Rug
,
The Ojibwa of Northwest Michigan
,
The Appraisers Guide to Native American Handicrafts and Antiques
. He spent most of the morning lying on the wicker settee in the living room, reading aloud to Jess from the books while she moved systematically from room to room, picking up objects that seemed to have possible value.

Jess had been washing dishes at the kitchen sink, looking out the back window, when Toni Barnes pulled up behind the cottage in her navy Volvo station wagon and marched toward the back door of Journey’s End. Jess dried her hands on the clean waffle-weave dish towel and stepped forward to open the back door.

“Jess!” Toni cried out. “After all this time! You look exactly the same. Exactly!”

Jess poured lemonade into tall blue-glass tumblers and led Toni through the cottage. Toni was chattering brightly as they walked through the shadowy interior and out onto the sunny front porch.

“I’m so delighted that you called me, Jess. Of course you know that Miss Mamie was something of a landmark here at Wequetona. Everyone in the Club has been wringing their hands worrying about the cottage’s sale. Everyone wants Journey’s End to stay with one of
our
families.”

Russ got up from the hammock and walked over to where Jess and Toni were standing. Slipping his arm around Jess, he said, “Ms. Carpenter wants to get the best possible price, and it should be worth quite a bit more as soon as we finish the renovations and do the photo shoot for a national magazine. Nothing else interests us at all.”

Jess was surprised, but not ungrateful for Russ’s action. She was perfectly capable of dealing with her own transactions, but she really couldn’t stand Toni Barnes, had never liked her. It was only bad luck that they were dealing with her at all. When she had called the RE/MAX office, the receptionist had said, “Wequetona Club—oh, that would be Toni Barnes.” Jess didn’t at first realize it was Toni
Miller
Barnes. After they had spoken by phone and the connection had been made, it felt like too much trouble to look for anyone else.

“I thought the Club had dropped all the ridiculous membership regulations,” Jess said.

“Well, there was some awkward legal story, someone threatening a lawsuit or some such. The board went through an emergency process, and the regulations were dropped.” Toni leaned forward and lowered her voice slightly. “Everybody seemed to think that doing things informally, within the Club, would be a better way to go. Inside sales, word of mouth, that kind of thing.”

Jess mainly wanted to sell the place soon and get back to New York. With Mamie gone, she found it unbearably sepulchral: a tomb for summer memories, a repository for long-forgotten souvenirs. But she didn’t want to be hoodwinked into selling the cottage for a song either. As a research librarian in the French manuscript collection, in New York, her small salary didn’t go very far—she was still paying off student loans, and her mother was so profligate that she called occasionally, rasping into the phone, “I’m broke and in Bangkok, can you wire me some money, please?” as though Jess were the Bank of New York, and not a poor librarian who spent her time arranging and stacking old manuscripts.