Surface Tension (3 page)

My parents still have a few really good friends around here from when we lived here, and they come out and spend the day with us. We bought this place when I was six. I remember how it was driving in here for the first time. I'd fallen asleep in the back, so the drive didn't seem to take too long, and when I woke up, everything was perfect. I remember everything glowing gold in the sunlight, and walking down the hallway to my bedroom. My bed was covered with stuffed animals. I remember that. It felt like home right away.

I remember fishing and running around like crazy and
doing whatever I wanted that first summer. Of course, that was when we lived in town and it was only a half an hour's drive to get here. But then we moved because of Dad's job and sold our house in town. Dad wanted to sell this place too, but Mom wouldn't let him because she and I loved it so much.

The idea was we would spend our summers here, like the Richardsons do, and Dad would commute to work. But now we live so far away Dad can only afford to take two weeks off every summer. I wish we could live here year-round like the Vizquels. That would be awesome. Maybe when I get older, I can live here full-time.

I wonder what it's like in the winter.

The golfers' wives are here hanging out with Mom. I like to hang around when the women are here sometimes. I like to hear what they talk about when they're alone and they don't know anyone is listening. There are two of them here today: Kay and Bonnie, the wives of Roger and Norm. They're all sitting around in their bathing suits, drinking wine coolers. I'm skipping rocks, perfecting my form for the world rock-skipping championships, which don't exist.

Mom is talking about the new restaurant that's going to start up right next to O'Malley's. Kay says something about the owner being a drunk. Bonnie says she doesn't think it's a great idea to open a new restaurant right next to one of the best restaurants on the lake. Mom says she thinks O'Malley's is going downhill.

They'll just sit there and talk all day long. All three of them are elementary school teachers, so they all have that teacherly kind of voice, really clear and a little too loud so you can hear it in the back of the room. I sort of feel like I'm
back in third grade, except my teacher is drunk on wine coolers and wearing a bathing suit.

Bonnie asks Kay about her new school, because I guess she doesn't like it. Kay says, “As soon as we started the ELA, all my time has been taken up with the standardized testing.”

With my dad and his friends, they're always doing something when they hang out, like golf or poker or watching a football game. They would never just sit around in the sun and talk. I can't even imagine what they'd say.

I'm half listening to the women while I'm trying to get the exact right rotation on my rocks so they'll skip more times. The rotation of the stone matters as much as the speed, but the angle that the stone hits the water is really the key. It has to be somewhere between parallel and slightly tilted up.

The conversation the women are having has stopped making sense to me. Something about a church, a minister, and the Bells' cottage.

I stop skipping rocks for a second and try to hear exactly what they're saying, but Mom notices me eavesdropping and stops the conversation.

There's a long pause where no one is saying anything. Then Mom says, “Want to see if you can go find a puzzle in the cottage?”

I could do that, except all the puzzles have missing pieces, but I guess I'll do something else anyway. This is getting boring.

Kay and Roger brought their daughter, Claire, out to the lake with them. She's my age, but she acts like she's about a hundred years old. We've never really gotten along. She's just so boring. Maybe girls are just different, I don't know.

When we were kids and I would do something stupid or funny, no matter what it was—even if it was just smashing up broken old bottles in the creek or trying to kill minnows by throwing pebbles as hard as I could into the shallow water— whenever I would do something like that, she would go straight back to her house and tell on me to her parents.

Not even like running back and crying to them. She'd kind of calmly walk back to her house, so I wouldn't even know there was a problem until the parents came back and said, “Stop killing minnows” or “Stop breaking bottles.”

I could never figure out why she hung around at all. She was just this mini-parent who would follow me around and wait for me to do something that crossed the line and then go tell on me. She once told on me for saying “Shut up” in her yard. And another time she told on me for crossing the street without permission. What the hell? What business was it of hers?

She always knew where the line was, but I never did. I never knew where it was or what it looked like. I just did whatever I did until I got in trouble.

She's inside the cottage. I guess I'll just go annoy her for a while.

She's lying on the green couch reading a book for school. I sit across from her in the old black leather chair, also known as the Bad Chair. It's the chair I used to have to sit in after Claire told on me, because my parents didn't believe in spanking.

“Hi, Claire.”

“Hello, Luke.”

“What are you reading?”

“Summer reading for school.”

“You have summer reading?”

“You don't?”

“I do, but I don't actually read it.”

“That's smart.”

“Thanks,” I say. “You want to do something?”

She looks at me sideways, like she's suspicious. “Like what?”

“I don't know. Something bad.”

She laughs, but not because she thinks it's funny, because she thinks I'm stupid. “No thanks.”

“Why not?”

“I'm not interested in doing something bad.”

“Really? Why not?”

“What's the point?”

“The point is, you do something bad, and then you get in trouble.”

“Why?”

“Um, because it's fun.”

“How is it fun to get in trouble?”

“Have you ever gotten in trouble?”

“Sure.”

“No you haven't. You've never gotten in trouble. Oh my God, that is hilarious.”

“Whatever.”

“No, seriously. Have you ever gotten in trouble?”

“I don't see the point of this conversation.”

“Oh my God, you are such a goody-goody.”

“Screw you.”

“Oh, the goody-goody said ‘Screw you.' I should go and tell your parents so you can sit over here in the Bad Chair.”

She doesn't say anything. She just goes back to reading
her book and ignoring me. Whatever, I'm going to go rummage through the closets and see if I can find anything cool.

Our cottage has lots of weird stuff in it from the seventies. We have a box full of hippie music that's fun to listen to because it's so freaking bad. We have a lot of Bee Gees music, and this lame bald guy who is famous for playing a cornet, which is like a high-pitched trumpet. It's so bad.

There are only two tapes that are any good. One is
Woodstock
and has Jimi Hendrix on it, but that one broke because I played it too much. Now the only good one is the Beach Boys'
Endless Summer.
I love to listen to it because it reminds me of when I was little and I didn't have anything to worry about. That's what we always used to listen to when we were driving up here in the summer.

I also like that it's called
Endless Summer.
I just like the idea of that. I wish there were such a thing as an endless summer. Sometimes it felt like it when I was little. I wish it still felt like that.

The little Vizquel boy is watching me from his lawn. I don't know why. He's always watching me, and sometimes he tries to wave to me, but I just pretend like I don't see him and I'm doing something else. I feel kind of bad, because I can tell he doesn't really have any friends, but I don't want to be stuck playing with an eight-year-old all summer.

Why doesn't he just play with his big sister or something? I don't know what it is that he thinks he's going to do with me.

He's coming over. I didn't think I made eye contact, but maybe I did.

He's so little. Why would I want to play with a little kid like him?

He says, “Do you want to play hide-and-seek?”

I say, “Not really.”

“Do you want to play freeze tag?”

“No, sorry.”

“Do you want to play Time?”

“I don't know how to play that.”

“I could teach you.”

“Uh, that's okay. I don't really want to play Time anyway.”

“Okay. I can play with you sometimes, if you want. I just have to ask my parents.”

“Okay, I'll let you know if I want to play with you sometime.”

He turns around and walks away. I don't want to be mean to him, but it's just, what if one of the Richardsons comes over all of a sudden and needs help with their boat? I can't be playing with a little kid when that happens.

The little kid's big sister walks out of her house and goes down toward the lake. She's my age, and she's wearing a bathing suit. She's got a body like a stick.

She walks the property line right past me. She's only about fifteen feet away, but she never looks up at me. Maybe she's mad because I wouldn't play with her brother, or maybe she doesn't even see me.

I watch her go all the way down to the beach. Her feet must be tough, because she just drops her towel, walks right into the water up to her knees, and then dives in.

Mr. Richardson is outside crawling around the property line. He hates our walnut tree. It's this old tree that is right next to our house, but some of the branches reach over the
Richardsons' yard, and they drop these nasty green walnuts onto his lawn.

Mr. Richardson has complained to my dad about it a lot over the years, but Dad says he's not going to do anything about it. I think it's kind of funny. I mean, not exactly funny, but entertaining in a weird way. Every time the wind blows, Mr. Richardson comes out of his house and walks through his yard picking up all the little twigs and small branches that fell out of the trees. Then he comes over to the property line and starts looking through the grass on his hands and knees for the little green walnuts. When he finds one, he lobs it back over onto our property like a little hand grenade.

I understand why he does it, because there's nothing like the sound of a lawn mower running over a walnut, but I also think it's kind of funny to kick one or two back over onto his property as I walk by later.

Mom and Dad went to the farmers' market and I'm going fishing in the pond up at the dairy farm. But first I have to find my fishing pole, which is why I'm standing in the garage getting pissed off because I can't find it in all this crap.

For one thing, there's hardly any light at all in here. You'd think that the easiest thing to find would be a fishing pole, because it's long and skinny, but it's actually a lot harder. There's just so much crap. I wish Mom and Dad would clean all this up.

It could be under the collection of flat inner tubes or with all the bent Wiffle ball bats. It could even be up in the loft with all the old mattresses. I think it used to lean up against the refrigerator that's been unplugged since we bought this place, either there or behind the oil tank, but not
near the half-empty paint cans or with the bamboo and the sticks from when I tried to make a bow and arrow.

I climb over the spare pieces of wood and start going through the toy section of the garage, with the boccie ball set and the chemistry set. I remember when we got this chemistry set. Mom got it at a yard sale somewhere. It was so cool. You open up the case and there are all these little containers of powdery chemicals. And all you do is just mix them up in various combinations to do different things. I used to play with this all the time, trying to get things to explode, but they never did. I wonder if it was because the chemicals were old or because I didn't have any idea of what I was doing.

Here it is. It was lying flat underneath the canoe, with the paddles. I grab it and carry the tackle box in my other hand as I walk up Richardsons' Lane, past the farmhouse and the grain silo and the cow barn with the three hippie symbols painted on it. A flower, a peace sign, and a yin-yang. That place smells a lot because the cows just have to stand there with the suction cups hooked onto their nipples. I used to come up here with Mom and Dad when I was little just to hang out and watch them milk the cows. I don't know why, but it sort of smells good to me up here. It smells like cow crap, but it also smells good. An old smell, like mothballs or rain in August. Smells like being a kid.

One time, one of the guys let me drink some of the milk they make here. It came out of this big silver tank, and it still had all the cream in it, and it tasted so good. It made all the milk I'd ever tasted in my life taste like water. It was sweeter and thicker than normal milk, and a little bit sour too, like all the tastes that are supposed to be in there were still there. Then they pasteurize it and homogenize it and take all the
good parts out. I'd never tasted anything like that. It made me wish we lived on a farm.

I keep going up the hill to the split-rail fence. I slip through and cut across the pasture toward the pond. This is practically the only time I wear shoes during the summer, because of all the cow pies everywhere.

The pond is just past the huge oak tree, near the old stone wall. Actually, there are two ponds. One has a ton of fish in it, and the other is covered with a thick layer of green algae.

I pick up a rock and chuck it into the green one. It kerplunks and a hole opens up in the algae, then it closes back down again. I grab a handful of pebbles and whip them through the air. They land like buckshot, and then the holes disappear again. I could do this a hundred times and the algae would just keep on coming back. I wonder what it would be like to swim in there. Maybe the algae would close over me and I'd never be seen again. I would go swimming in the pond with the fish in it, but I think it has snapping turtles too, and I don't want to get my toes bitten off.

I have a special lure that I got at the fishing store. I take it out of its box and tie it onto the line. I cast as far as I can into the pond, and as soon as it touches the water, a fish hits it. They stock this pond with smallmouth bass, so it's probably the easiest place in the world to catch one.