Skinny Dipping (8 page)

He picked up the caramel cashew bar and took a bite. On the other hand, he’d been standing here like an idiot for almost five minutes with not a word from above.

“You know what? I saw a liquor store in this little town I came through,” he said to the ceiling. “Maybe I’ll drive up there and pick us up a bottle of wine.”

When Prescott spoke, he didn’t bother to hide his relief. “Yes,” he said. “You do that.”

“Scootch your shirt up so I can work on your back,” Vida said.

Mimi willingly complied, settling on her stomach atop a stack of beach towels on the picnic table, her chin resting on her forearms. Tension drained out of her like sand out of an overstuffed levy bag. Not that there was that much tension to begin with, a fact Vida never hesitated to point out.

“You’re unnatural,” Vida said, disgusted. “I don’t have to do much more than look at you and you release like one of those finger puppets that collapse when you push up on the bottom.”

“Consider me a testimony to your skill,” Mimi murmured.

The memorial had been two days earlier, and most people had returned from whence they’d come, leaving behind a handful of diehards.

“Go on with your story,” Vida said, drumming the heels of her hands on either side of Mimi’s spine.

“Where was I? Oh, yeah. So I said, ‘Oops.’”

“No!”

“Well, what would you say to a guy you’ve just told has a son who’s a geek, a hermit, agoraphobic, friendless, and probably deservedly so since he has just ruined a perfectly decent view with his hideous attempt to compensate for his undoubtedly inadequate masculinity?”

“Oops?”

“Oops,” Mimi confirmed.

“
Then
what did you say?”

“Nothing. Naomi chose that minute to send Ardis to Valhalla.” She corrected herself, “Though technically I guess it was Ardis’s picture that was being sent to Valhalla.”

“It’s too bad you made such an ass of yourself. He was a fine-looking man.”

“Yup,” Mimi replied sadly. She hadn’t seen him since the party, though she had wandered along the footpath a couple times, hoping he might be out. Out doing what? Chopping wood? Hardly.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way you could smooth things over? I know!” Vida paused in her massaging to snap her fingers. “You go over there and say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize Prescott was your son.’ Just don’t mention you’re a psychic.”

“How many times do I have to tell you guys? I’m not a psychic; I’m a medium. I only talk to the dead, which, now that I think of it, Prescott looks like he might be, so I suppose technically I might have been in communication with him,” Mimi said; then her face twisted in self-contempt. “Forget I said that. Way too harsh. I just get so pissed off every time I look at that monstrosity. Besides, you have to admit, he does look like a zombie. A chunky zombie. A goth Peter Pan. It’s that black hair and white face. He’s gotta dye it.”

“His dad has black hair,” Vida said, hands working on autopilot. “Maybe Prescott is better-looking in person. It’s hard to tell from a few glimpses. He’d almost have to be, wouldn’t he? I mean, look at the dad. Yum.”

Mimi half turned over to look Vida in the eye. “You’re not even trying to be subtle, are you?”

“We love you. We’re interested. Where’s the harm?”

“You guys need to get a life.”

“Gee, and that’s just what we say about you. Listen—”

Mimi was saved from having to listen by the arrival of fourteen-year-old Frank, Vida’s son. He came loping around the corner of the cottage and skidded to a halt.

“Geez!” He slapped a hand over his eyes and stretched out his other scrawny arm, pantomiming groping for the cottage. “I think I’m blind!”

“Smart-ass,” Mimi mumbled, reaching behind to flip down the hem of her oversized T-shirt.

“I’m at an impressionable age,” Frank said, splitting his index and middle fingers and peering at her out of one eye. “You could scar me for life. I think I saw something. I’m not sure exactly what it was.”

“Ha. You should be so lucky,” Mimi said. “What do you want, anyway?”

Frank dropped his hand. “There’s something going on over at the Big House. Some sort of conference. Birgie said I better come and get you cause you’re involved.”

“Involved how?” Mimi asked, more bothered than interested. Mimi understood that Birgie didn’t want to be at the family powwow any more than Mimi, but she’d expected more from her great-aunt than an arbitrary “misery loves company” summons.

Frank shrugged. “Dunno. Birgie said it was important, and I should make sure that you come and to tell you that if you duck this meeting, you’ll regret it.”

“Crud.” Mimi scooted off the picnic table. “Are they still fussing about Naomi and the pontoon? Good riddance to the damn thing. It’s not like it was even seaworthy. And I said I was sorry to Debbie.”

“Did you
really
tell Debbie to shut up?” Vida asked, her mouth falling open. “I thought they were kidding. I can’t imagine you doing something like that.”

“Me, neither,” Mimi said uncomfortably. “I don’t know what got into me. I must have been channeling Ardis.”

“Even Ardis never told Debbie to shut up. Honestly, Mimi, you have untapped depths.”

“Birgie said something about a vote,” Frank persisted, obviously taking his job as messenger seriously.

If someone was calling for a vote, that could only mean that people were disagreeing about whatever it was they were voting on. Mimi didn’t want to spend any of her valuable free time (just because a thing was plentiful didn’t make it less valuable) listening to her relatives debate the merits of a yearly snowplow service contract versus a flat per diem rate.

“Can’t your mom go in my place?” she asked, looking at Vida. “I don’t care enough about whatever they’re voting on to make a decent decision, and Vida here—”

“How could you possibly know that?” Vida asked.

“I sense it,” Mimi said, fixing Vida with a level stare. “Hello? Medium! I
sense
things.”

“I thought you only spoke to the dead.”

“Sometimes I sense things, too.”

“Hm.”

“Can you really sense things?” Frank asked. “Because Dad says he thinks you really believe you can talk to dead people but you’re embarrassed about it and Mom says it doesn’t matter what we think, it’s what you know that counts,” Frank said. “Birgie says she isn’t saying what she thinks and Chuck says it’s a pile of crap and that you are nothing but a swindler who makes a living out of conning people.”

“Really,” Mimi said.

“Yup.”

“Which one is Chuck?” Mimi asked.

“You don’t know?” Frank asked.

“Are you kidding? There’s only been about twenty teenage boys around here this summer, all blond, all tall, all built like scarecrows.”

“Well, can’t you
sense
it?” Frank smirked.

She didn’t reply. She simply rolled her eyes back in their sockets and shivered dramatically. “Chuck is the one with the cracked front tooth and…and a scar on his right knee he got playing soccer this spring. He did make the goal, though…” Her voice drifted off.

The smug smile slipped from Frank’s face. But he wasn’t an adolescent boy for nothing. “Lucky guess.”

Mimi shrugged. “Think what you want. You still haven’t answered my question. Can Vida be my proxy? Wait. I sense she can. I hereby declare your mom my proxy.”

At this point, Vida, who’d been listening to the prior exchange with a long-suffering look, said, “And I hereby decline. You’re the legal heir; you’re the one with the vote, not me.”

“One of six.”

“I don’t care. It’s your duty.”

“Crap,” Mimi said. Her gaze fell on young Frank, still assessing her closely. “Hey, Frank. How’d you like to be my proxy?”

Frank’s blue eyes blazed with teenage empowerment. “Can I, Mom?”

“No, he cannot,” Vida said firmly. “You have to go, Mimi. It’s a small enough responsibility. Not nearly as big as keeping up the e-mail list or doing the tax property reports.”

“I didn’t do those,” Mimi said, honestly surprised. “Ardis did.”

“Yeah,” Vida said. “Sure. With your ‘help.’ Ardis told Birgie you’d done it all for years.”

“What a load.” Mimi didn’t like having her role embellished. More important, she sure as hell didn’t want people expecting her to do stuff. She just often happened to be around at the same time as Ardis because she liked it up here and Ardis happened to like it up here, too. Only a complete ass wouldn’t offer to look through some papers or maybe add up a couple columns of numbers to help someone out. She wasn’t a complete ass. “I just did what Ardis told me to do once in a while.”

“How long? Ten years? Fifteen?”

“What difference does that make?” Mimi asked, exasperated. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Debbie says Great-Aunt Ardis had supernatural powers, too. No, wait. I think she just said she was a witch,” Frank piped in apropos of nothing. Both Mimi and Vida looked at him silently before they turned back to each other.

“Big deal or not,” Vida went on, “the bottom line is that you know more about this property than anyone else and if a decision needs to be made about it, your input might be valuable. Might save time. Might save money.”

Clearly, Mimi was not going to get the rest of her massage. “Okay, okay. I’m going.”

Frank accompanied Mimi to the Big House, casting furtive looks at her, which she ignored. She decided to let him stew in his own juices, the little smart-ass. Besides, she didn’t want it leaking out that she not only knew the names of all her little second, third, and God-knew-how-many-times removed cousins but could identify them, too. It was important to keep the mystery alive in a relationship, especially a relationship in which she wanted to keep the upper hand, as she did with all Olson adolescent males.

She knew her “second sight” was a matter of some speculation amongst in-laws and shirttail relations. But generally once a new addition to the family realized Mimi wasn’t going to fall into a twitching fit and speak with a male voice, the murmuring passed. The older Olsons never had seemed too impressed. Of course, Ardis had purportedly been blessed with “powers,” too, and could be counted on to make vague and unsettling predictions like, “Gonna be a lot of mosquitoes this spring,” or “Septic’s gonna need pumpin’ next year.”

Mimi used to wonder why no one ever asked her to chat up the Olson dead until she recognized that for the Olsons, calling up the dead was on par with arriving unannounced on an acquaintance’s doorstep during the dinner hour. Minnesotans just weren’t that forward. Or at one time hadn’t been. More and more, her clientele, once stolid, God-fearing, no-nonsense Scandinavians, were forsaking their grim Ingmar Bergman roots for New Age feel-goodism. What self-respecting Lutheran wants to feel “good” all the time?

Mimi mourned the passing of that dour, stone-faced generation. The world was becoming homogenous, nothing left to set one person or family apart from another. Nothing to link one generation to another. No common traits, no shared traditions, no cultural identity.

Take, for instance, Chez Ducky. How many average, run-of-the-mill, middle-class families had something like Chez Ducky, a place haunted by hundreds of Olsons and rank with genetic memory? Not many. What would happen when there were no Chez Duckys, just once-a-decade family reunions at some interchangeable resort on an interchangeable beach that was as without flavor as it was without history? That’s the point Hank Sboda was missing. He might be able to drag his family to Cabo San Lucas with the money he’d make, but he wouldn’t be able to drag the memories of a dozen generations of Sbodas with him.

“Do you, like, see things?” Frank asked, interrupting her thoughts.

“All the time.” She stopped and touched his arm, her eyes wide with feigned concern. “Don’t you? Does your mother know?”

Frank snickered. “Forget it.”

“Okay.”

A few yards from the house, Frank spotted a trio of his male cousins sneaking off into the woods and with a mumbled, “Ah, I gotta go,” shot off after them.

Making it to the Big House, Mimi slipped through the back door and into the long corridor that divided the place in half. The room to her left, a sort of parlor, ran the entire width of the house, while its twin on her right had been divided into two rooms, a back kitchen and a front dining hall, “dining room” being too formal a term for something Mimi imagined might have been found in a lumber camp. It was here the Olsons had assembled, some sitting on the benches, others on overstuffed armchairs dragged over from the parlor, and a few perched on the padded vinyl kitchen chairs dating from the fifties.

Debbie stood at the end of the table, talking. Everyone appeared to be listening to her. What was Debbie doing talking? Naomi was the Olson from that branch of the family with a vote, not Debbie. Mimi slipped along the side of the room and took a seat behind Johanna and Charlie.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

“Well, if you’d moved your butt a little quicker, you’d know,” Johanna whispered back over her shoulder, tugging anxiously at her long braid. Charlie grumbled.

“Well, I didn’t, so I don’t. Just tell me this, what am I going to vote on?”

There was a pause, a distinct hesitation as Johanna’s fingers stilled on her braid. “Whether or not we’re going to sell Chez Ducky.”

Mimi laughed softly. “Okay, I’m a slacker and I don’t take my Chez Ducky voting responsibilities seriously enough. Point taken. Now, what’s this about?”

Johanna turned. Her eyes were grave. “Whether or not we’re going to sell Chez Ducky.”

Mimi’s gaze shot to the back of her great-uncle Charles’s head. “Charlie?”

He didn’t turn around, just gave one terse nod of his head.

And just like that, all of Mimi’s breath left her. She didn’t remember exhaling, she was sure she hadn’t made a sound, and yet abruptly, violently, her lungs were empty, her chest muscles paralyzed.

“Debbie is telling us how much we could get for the place and what kind of percentage she’d be willing to take to sell it. She’s getting her realtor’s license, you know. Soon as she takes some sort of test.”

“So I heard,” Mimi said numbly, her gaze locking on Debbie, standing now in the middle of the group like a hostess in an infomercial. They couldn’t seriously be listening to her? To
Debbie.
Debbie was, well, she was
Debbie.
Perennially looking for things and people to fix, better, integrate, improve. Olsons didn’t want
improvement
or
bettering.
They wanted things to stay the way they were, without anyone messing with them…didn’t they?

Mimi’s gaze traveled around the room. Some people were nodding, others looked skeptical, some looked unhappy, but all of them looked interested.

This couldn’t be happening. They couldn’t
really
be considering selling Chez Ducky. Not now. When Mimi was dead, fine. Frank and his cousins could subdivide the whole thing and become millionaires, but she wasn’t dead, and neither was Birgie or Johanna or Naomi or Charlie.

Or Half-Uncle Bill, whispered the insidious voice of common sense. Or Gerry and Vida, with two boys heading to college. Or Elsie, who needed a new car. Or Hal, who’d talked about starting up a fishing-guide business. Or half a dozen other grandchildren and grandnephews, half sisters and stepkids in the room. Being unmaterialistic was one thing; being a fool was another.

Mimi’s heart began to pound, fear spiking her system with adrenaline. Fight…or flight? No contest. Mimi did what she usually did when her emotions threatened to get the upper hand. She decided to run.

She started to get up, but Johanna snagged her wrist, pulling her back down. “No one’s decided anything yet,” she murmured. “Just listen.”

Mimi tried hard not to listen, but Debbie’s voice was like a scalpel, cutting through whatever defensive images she threw up: floating on the lake, playing canasta with Ardis at the Formica kitchen table, the pumpkin malts at the Malt Shop in Minneapolis. Even her hitherto unvanquishable daydream about George Clooney disappeared under the onslaught of numbers Debbie heaped one atop the other. Huge amounts of money. Unimaginably huge amounts.

Debbie laid it all out for them: how they could sell the land to a developer, netting close to three million dollars; how the money, according to the terms of the partnership drawn up by the grandsons of Abel Olson nearly a hundred years ago, would be divided amongst the original partners’ heirs per stirpes, which meant that an equal share would follow any remaining branches of the original family members.

Debbie then proceeded to outline her part in the proposed sale. As soon as she received her realtor’s license she would represent the property, taking only half the usual broker’s fee.
Should
the heirs decide to sell. A stern look told them what fools they’d be not to.

At this point, someone asked Debbie just when she would get her realtor’s license. Debbie cleared her throat and told them she was certain she would pass her realtor’s exam this next time round and have her license by Thanksgiving.

Everyone fell silent. Then Birgie cleared her throat and Mimi nearly swooned with relief. Birgie loved Chez Ducky, too. She was the head of the family now. She’d put them back on track.

Except she didn’t. Instead, Birgie looked around, spied her sitting in the back of the room, and said loudly, “What do you think, Mimi?”

Mimi, caught smirking at Debbie, blinked. “Huh?”

“What do you think about this deal Debbie here is proposing?” Birgie asked, planting one hand, elbow akimbo, on her thigh and pivoting on her seat.

What did
Mimi
think? She thought it was horrible, ludicrous, logical, blasphemous, and sensible. But she wasn’t going to say that. Not until someone else said it first. She was an audience member. She always had been. Audience members didn’t have speaking parts. “I dunno.”

Birgie held her gaze a second, then blew out a gusty sigh. “Me, neither.”

Birgie rose and made her way through the crowd of people, heading for the door. Conversation started up again, faces puckering thoughtfully, questions addressed to Debbie rising from the group. Mimi couldn’t believe her eyes. The new Queen Bee was heading for the hive door, and no one was taking note.

Mimi started to speak, but her protest caught in her throat. She’d lived her entire life by a philosophy of letting things happen. Sure, some things just demanded that someone do something, and in this case that someone was Birgie. But Birgie was at the door, her hand on the knob. And now she had opened it. And now she had left.

In a daze, Mimi got up, vaguely aware of curious gazes following her, voices quieting. She caught up with Birgie as she lumbered down to the beach, the little dog Mimi had noted earlier frolicking behind her like a pilot fish dancing after an orca.

“Where are you going?” Mimi asked, trying to subdue the panic in her voice.

“To look at the lake,” Birgie said. “Don’t know if I’ll see it this time of year again.”

Mimi refused to accept the implication. “Why didn’t you
say
something? Do something?”

Birgie stopped at the end of the dock, squinting out over the black, mirror-still surface of the lake toward where the old raft floated, barely visible. A loon piped mournfully in the distance.

Birgie tipped her head back, scanning the sky above. It was thick and dark, clouds obliterating everything but an occasional fleeting window into the starred sky above. The light from the hurricane lanterns inside the cottages behind them did little to illuminate the thin strip of beach.

“The new places’ll all have yard lights,” Birgie said. “People are awful scared of the dark these days.” She sat down on the end of the dock, grunting as she bent over, and started untying her Reeboks. She yanked off a shoe and began tugging at her sock.

“Birgie?” Mimi prompted.

“What did you want me to say?” Birgie asked, carefully tucking her sock into her shoe and starting on the other foot.

“Tell them selling is a stupid idea.”

“Well, I’m not so sure it is,” Birgie said, standing back up and beginning to unbutton her shirt.

“Of course it is!” Mimi said. “We can’t re-create this.” She waved her arm toward the blackness.

“You’re right. In fact, maybe we can’t re-create it next year.”

“What do you mean?”

“Next year Fowl Lake will be ringed with houses. Not cabins. Not cottages. Big old houses with three-car garages and security systems and satellite TV dishes.”

“So? Who cares?” Mimi asked. “We own the entire southeast corner of the lake. The only house near us is Prescott’s. I’ve been thinking maybe we could burn that down after he leaves.”

Birgie’s hands stilled at her bottom shirt button. “You’re kidding, right?”

Sort of.
“Of course I am. Besides. He’d only rebuild. But that’s not the point. Down here we can pretend the other stuff, the houses and all, aren’t happening. We can ignore the north end.”

“And the west side?” Birgie asked nodding across the lake.

Two hundred yards away in the dark, you couldn’t even see the other side. “We can ignore them, too.”

“Really?” Birgie grunted. “You shoulda said that, if that’s how you feel.”

“I thought
you
were going to say it.”

Birgie shrugged off her shirt, folded it, and set it atop her shoes. She reached behind and unhooked her bra, a magnificently anachronistic double-D-cup Maidenform. Her breasts fell toward her waistband.

“I’m not sure I agree,” she finally said.

“What?” Mimi’s voice rose.

Birgie pushed her shorts and panties down simultaneously past her knees and stepped out of them, adding them to the pile of clothes. “Sometimes it’s tough to figure out if what you’re trying to hold on to is already gone.”

“This is
not
gone,” Mimi said firmly.

“Next year there’ll be yard lights,” Birgie repeated kindly, her compassionate gaze holding Mimi.

This was flat-out bizarre. Birgie was neither compassionate nor kind. She was phlegmatic. Mimi waited for her to say something else, her heart still racing, and hers was not a heart that raced easily or with little provocation.

Birgie turned and waded into the water.

“Wait!” Mimi called. “We still have to talk!”

“Feels warm,” Birgie called back. “Come on in.”

Crap.
Mimi kicked off her flip-flops and yanked her T-shirt over her head. She didn’t have a bra on underneath. She jerked down her sweatpants, almost tipping over as she hopped one-legged in the sand trying to disentangle herself.

“Hey!” a voice called from back by the Big House. A porch door swung open on squeaking hinges. “Hey, Mimi and Birgie are going skinny-dipping!”

Excited female voices answered this announcement from deep in the house. Someone else let out a whoop of pleasure. “Last one in!”

Mimi kicked free of her sweats and splashed noisily in after Birgie. She had to talk Birgie into taking her place as leader and leading these dear idiots back to the land of sanity. Once the women were convinced, that would pretty much be that. Birgie was already shoulder deep in the water, moving with the slow, intractable force of a migrating mammoth. On the beach, the little dog bounced in anxiety.

“Wait up!” Mimi called. “You’re worrying the dog.”

“Not my dog,” Birgie said, rolling over and commencing a slow backstroke. “I’m gonna miss skinny-dipping.”