The Dark Lake (6 page)

Ziggy rides along beside us on a ten-speed bike
, fully clothed in his famous, tattered jeans and long-sleeved, white, button-down, Oxford shirt. He is on summer break, home from his Ivy League college.

"Nice tits
, Gay!"

"What the hell does he mean by that?” she yells, ready to fight.

Gay wears boy shirts and button-down, bowling shirts, and dresses like a boy all the time and hell, we thought she was a boy. Perhaps we had all been in denial and refused to see them. We had just been humoring her. We clearly see now what she’s been hiding all along.

She’s no boy. All of us
stare at them. All of us including pudgy, freckle-face Lisa, who has pulled up in her car and popped her eyes open says, “What the hell are you doing?”

We all had obviously forgotten what we were doing
, because all three of us stand there puzzled as to why Lisa seems so shocked.

"Well … you're naked!” she exclaims.

Ziggy had ridden a block ahead of us, hiding fits of laughter.

We stand there confused, and then look down at ourselves. Krishna doesn’t
, though. She ambles over to a phone pole and is leaning against it, still somehow managing to be smoking that mandatory clove cig. How was she still carrying her purse, or one of her fancy cases? Perhaps it mysteriously floats beside her. She stumbles and steps off the curb and bends over laughing, and falls into the grass and lies there holding her dark-skinned, naked sides, complaining, "My stomach hurts, I can't breathe, I can't stop laughing." Then she eventually gets up, sometime after we had left her there, and hovers alongside us like a wayward bee, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes fallen again, giggling on some stranger’s terrace.

Meanwhile, Gay and I walk with purpose. Eyes set straight ahead, bound and determined to get our quarters. The night grew
quiet and peaceful, punctuated only with crickets and, “What the hell's wrong with my tits?"

***

"No, I'm going back in. I just came out here to smoke a cigarette."

"What
, there's no smoking in there?” I asked, looking inside at the smoke that was so thick you could barely see customers.

"No
, there is. You going in?"

I walked into the void of smoke, colored lights, blaring music
, and intoxication. I could see no faces. Oh wait, yes I could. One or two bleary-eyed stares out of the darkness.

I sat on a stool at the bar. I could think of nothing else to do.

The bartender came over and stared expectantly, annoyed.

"Um
…” I knew I had to order something. A soft drink would just annoy him further. "Vodka gimlet?” That’s Krishna's favorite drink.

I would just sit and fondle it with my forefingers, slide them around the rim suggestively. That way I would have somewhere to belong, somewhere I could sit and fit in and be part of. I hadn't done that in so long. I could sit at the edge of the bar like the edge of a pool. Feet in, but I don't have to swim.

"You gonna drink that thing or just sit and stare at it?” I looked over. It was one of those guys you have to talk to because they insist on talking to you and staring.

"Mm
.” I laughed. "I suppose so."

I took one sip to show I would. There. You happy now, asshole?

But instead I smiled and looked coy.

How I ended up on the water with him—me holding sandy oars in tight hands and feeling the cold, gritty metal against my butt under the wet, dirty cutoffs, feeling the hard, cold ridges of the side of the boat—is anybody's guess. But I did.

The stupid sap across from me looked ready to vomit into the lake. His
dirty-blond mustache made me sick. He looked … ordinary.

What I had let him do on the island out in the middle of the dark lake was a dim
, forgettable memory already: the mosquito bites on my ass and the sand and dirt up my back the only evidence. I wished he would just jump in the water and drown, but I think it was his boat.

At least he wasn't talking to me anymore. He looked ready to pass out. He was rowing, but I don't think we were rowing in the right direction. I don't even think we were rowing in unison. After a while we both gave up
; he, lost in his silent stupor, sitting far enough across from me that I didn't have to look at him. I was free to just stare into the water.

It was right around here
, I think.

Never trust that the ice will hold, hadn'
t we heard that a million times?

It wasn't such a big deal, really. Every year there were at least two drownings in the summer
, and even more in the winter from idiots driving on the ice.

"Did you see that thing in the paper?" I shouted across the boat to him.

"Wha-?" He stared at me with that passed-out, drunken look of confusion.

"Never mind."

I stared into the water.

***

We take turns playing songs. For every charming Beatles love song I play, she plays a randy Rolling Stones sex song. It is the mistake I made, when I let her trick me into going first.

I remember going back and forth to the kitchen for Krishna's brother's Long Island Ice
d teas, again and again—after seven I lose count.

Krishna grabs the microphone and screams,
"I was drowned; I was washed up and left for dead!”

She stands up and screams in my face along to the loud, insistent, driving, rhythm of “Jumping Jack Flash.”

"Some challenge on the drums—Charlie Watts could just sleep through it," Ziggy'd once said, mocking the simplistic beat of his favorite song.

I remember something had happened that da
y. For some reason I was upset.

I know it wasn’t just the fact that she kept winning the contest. Yet, I certainly did feel the rage building when
, after every lighthearted love song, she played something jaded. I hadn’t expected this. I should have. After the innocent “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” she played “Let's Spend The Night Together.” After “Let It Be,” she snickered and played “Let It Bleed.” She had the whole damn room laughing hysterically.

I was laughing too
, of course; it was all fun and games, though for some reason this is when things began to change inside my mind and body. I was becoming unreasonably angry. And, coincidentally, it was also long after I'd lost track of how many Long Island Iced teas I'd had.

But then there was a moment when I got so angry and grabbed the keys. But something else happened at that same time. Somebody else was angry
—somebody who hadn’t been there at the party. It was all jumbled together.

"Oh, she can't drive…”

"I'm sick. I'm really sick. I'm throwing up all over the place. You want me to come in to work like that?”

I barely even hold the phone to my ear.

There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone and then a resigned, "Okay. You need to call and find a replacement, then, from your list."

"You've got to be kidding
.” I dropped the phone over the cradle but it didn't hang up; it just sort of sat there on top of it, and after a while it began to make that ugly, loud, beeping noise that sounded like such a dire emergency when in reality all it meant was that the phone was off the hook. It barely even caused me to open my eyes.

I had the dry heaves every fifteen minutes. Hugging the porcelain was comforting. It felt cool and soothing against my wretchedness, li
ke something holy and merciful.

"I think I'm going to die,” I said to the 911 operator.

"Ma'am, what you have is a really bad hangover."

"I can't stop throwing up."

"You're not going to die."

"Maybe I have alcohol poisoning though
.” I breathed heavy into the phone. I thought I might throw up into it. Then maybe they'd believe me.

"Don't drink any water
; you'll just throw that up. Chew some ice cubes."

I was still talking when they hung up.

I was unconscious for the rest of the day. I missed my therapy appointment, and was unable to even take the call from Miriam wondering where I was.

My mom poured ice water on me at one point
, and all I did was give her a glazed stare. She huffed out of the room and slammed the door, saying something about to hell with me. Miriam called again later that evening, and this time I was able to take the call.

We scheduled an emergency appointment for 7:00 that evening. I showered, just sat on the tub floor and let the hot water run on my back, and then I'd tilt up my face and let it run o
n my forehead. It was soothing.

I kept drinking glass after glass of tomato juice. I had begged and begged my mom to go and get me some
, and when she refused, I threatened to quit my job. That made her go.

Oh don't look at me like that. I was sick as a dog and it was the least she could do. Something anybody would do for another person
, and she just hated me.

My dad would have done it for me no problem
, but he wasn't home.

I sat across from her at the rippled
, glass table and clanked my glass down hard at one point. I had asked her to sit there or you can be sure she wouldn't have. I wanted to talk to somebody, and it had to be her. But she gave me the same cold, indifferent stare, and looked as if she were afraid to move.

"It's one day. I'm sick. People do get sick you know."

She sat, hands folded in lap.

"What are you so angry about?" I asked her.

She pursed her lips in the face she usually saved for angry vacuuming. If vacuums had been invented two hundred years before, that's what witches would have been stereotyped with, and I understood the broom connection better.

Once when she had been vacuuming with that particular angry face on, Krishna and Gay were passed out on my living-room floor. I can't remember where I fell, but wherever it was, I remained there till I heard the loud, angry whirring. When I opened my eyes, I saw her actually trying to vacuum up my friends. She just kept banging into one of them till they got up and hightailed it into my bedroom, which sectioned off to the side. Gay ran laughing, junk flying toward her, including an old-fashioned film projector that barely missed her head. It was an old thing my dad had let us use the night before to watch silent Bela Lugosi movies.

The vacuum had then continued banging into the door
: bang, bang, bang. I guess she had a problem with us, and our party.

"Well if it makes you feel any better, I feel terrible about myself,” I finally said.

"No, that doesn't make me feel better," my mom said.

"Look, I just don't want to make a big deal about this. I know you think I'm going to … I don't know what … look I'm trying to …” I faltered. "I have a therapy appointment later today."

"Ok
ay, well that's good,” she said, with an upturn on the word good making it sound vaguely like a question.

"Did you see the newspaper?” I asked her.

She shrugged. "What about it?"

"Nothing."

"What time is your therapy tonight?"

"It's in about two hours."

I stared at the wrought-iron clock on the wall. My mom hung it there years ago as part of her Cajun decoration scheme. I think our trip to New Orleans inspired her to do it.

There weren’t many black people the town of Oshkosh. I seemed to know the few who did live there. One was living in an
all-white family. The girl was so unhappy she had attempted suicide three times by the age of eighteen. I had always imagined it was due to the difficulty of living in the all-white town of Oshkosh.

Another was a
world-famous anthropologist who taught at our university. Whenever we would see him on the street, wearing his long, beige trench coat, my mom would say, "That's Dr. so and so, he's a brilliant black man."

Then there was Miriam.

"What do you suppose got into you?” Miriam asked, leaning back, taking off her glasses and stopping her
note-taking for a moment. “This is a major setback for you. You had a few years of sobriety time built up, Jane.”

"I don't know how it happened, I swear. It's like I … another part of me took over and did that. I didn't even want a drink
.” I put my head in my hands, tears began to flow. "I lost my sobriety again."

"You don't have to do it again
, though; you can get right back on the wagon."

"I hate that expression. They never say that stupid saying at meetings, but they say it everywhere else. Why do you suppose that is?"

"But you didn't listen to what they said at the meetings."

"Yes I did. They said I was powerless over alcohol."

"That's not what they mean."