I’m using him. I’m deeply, harrowingly aware of that, but I push it from my mind. I don’t respond. It would look strange if I texted back immediately after failing to pick up the phone. Let him think I’m driving. I have just sent him off to squander his evening on what will most likely turn out to be a waste of time.
Irritated, I review my options. Really, I want nothing more than to put Zelda and her shenanigans out of my mind. To do something relaxing, unrelated. But she’s the only reason I’m here, and her antics have me thoroughly occupied. It seems unthinkable that I might drive to Ithaca to have a massage, get in touch with old friends, and meet for a drink somewhere in town. I should work on my dissertation, but that seems inconceivable. I’m like a live wire, incapable of quieting the electrical thrum that pulses in me. I feel like screaming. Frantically, I strip off yesterday’s clothes and retrieve the bathing suit from the floor. I fling it on, knot a sarong around my midriff, and dash downstairs. Opal and Marlon look up at the noise, but I don’t pause to explain.
I snatch up a pristine pair of white Keds, Nadine’s. I’ve seen her wear them only once; they seemed outrageously sporty for her, though they somehow suited her elegant party dress. It was for someone’s birthday, though I can’t remember whose. Whose birthday? Why can’t I remember? After fumbling with the laces, I nearly fall out the glass doors onto the patio.
I run down the grassy slope of the lawn, toward the trail to the water, cinching the sarong tightly around my breasts. Small as they are, they still bounce uncomfortably, unsupported by the slender strings noosed about my neck, and I try to more or less strap them down with the sarong. Limited success. I am moving so fast down the hill that I’m in danger of face-planting, tripping over a stray root and causing serious injury, but I don’t care in the slightest. The momentum is the best part, and I feel blissfully out of control as I let my body take over, my feet slamming the dirt one ahead of the other. Heading down.
I make it to the water’s edge without tumbling over my own feet. I barely even slow my pace to shuck off the sneakers and fling my sarong aside. I’m still running when I hit the water, and the cold slaps against my thighs and sprays up my belly. My nipples immediately harden. I dive under the water as soon as I am waist-deep and let the chill of Seneca Lake close over my head in relief.
—
I swim for nearly an hour, doing laps up and down the beach, then swimming out and swimming back, going nowhere. Finally, exhausted and barely able to flail another stroke, I beach myself, crawling up onto the stones, not yet warmed by the sun. I lie on my back just feet from the water, shivering and blue-tinged. My arms are quaking, and I can feel ripples and spasms in my glutes. I’m reminded of how horses look when they’ve been run hard, the muscles of their hindquarters glistening with sweat and twitching. I drip into the stones.
When the sun has dried me off, I sit up and reach for my sarong, which I tug around my shoulders. Staring out at the water, I have no idea what to do. I rock back and forth on my haunches, mumbling to Zelda. I get up eventually, and walk toward the rickety dock. I step out onto it, and it creaks menacingly below me. I can feel it sway. It used to be a pirate ship, sailing off into the sunset with Zelda at the helm, me the navigator in the back. Sometimes it was an island, and we would hang off it, scooping up rocks and seaweed and tiny fish in a bid for survival. Sometimes it was an Olympic diving board, and we were world-class athletes competing for a double gold. Now it is rotting, unsteady. Unsafe. I bounce, feeling the architecture again shift below me, and spring off it anxiously, back onto solid ground. One big storm and it will float off into the lake.
I prowl up and down the beach, thinking of the lazy days we spent down here. I kick at the rowboat, which lolls on its side. This, too, has seen better days; it now looks fragile and unseaworthy. I’m tempted to hop in it and row to Watkins Glen, but my arms cringe at the thought. It would sink before I got anywhere. I notice that the boards look chewed on. Termites, I imagine. I give the rowboat a parting kick and head uphill, back to the house, which looms oppressively above me. I can just barely see my parents and grandmother on the balcony from here.
The walk uphill is harder than my headlong rush down it, and I’m panting and sweaty by the time I make it to the lawn. The chill of the lake water is gone, and I feel flushed and damp. I flop down onto the lawn in exhaustion, burying my nose in the grass. The scent of smoke seems to have settled on the soft blades. Beneath it, I can smell the ground, the soil that has been my family’s livelihood. It doesn’t seem to have registered the recent conflagration anywhere in its aromatic makeup.
“Ava!” Marlon calls from the deck. “C’mon up here!” He sounds just like he did when we were little: confident authority tinged with the promise of more fun. Do as I tell you, and we’re going to have a ball!
I curl up on the grass and don’t look at him. I want to stay here, on the lawn, until it gets dark, until dew turns everything damp and cold. I have a sudden memory of throwing up on this lawn, in right about this spot, after Zelda and I graduated high school. I wonder if my J?ger-soaked vomit fueled an army of drunken worms, which burrowed beneath the opaque lawn and secreted this exact handful of pasteurized soil. I’m part of this lawn! I think giddily. The lining of my stomach is here in this leaf of grass. It is a nice thought. I am comforted. I sit up groggily, my wet hair clinging to my back.
Stumbling inside, I notice that I am famished. The long swim in the cold water has awakened a terrifying hunger; it is not the gently gnawing peckishness of lunchtime but something frantic. I lurch to the fridge and fall upon some potato salad. Opal mainly makes “salads.” She is a mayonnaise-based cook. Tuna salad, pasta salad, potato salad, egg salad. I know that in her fridge at home, there is a bulk-sized jar of Hellmann’s that will never have the opportunity to go bad. The mayonnaise in our fridge was always tinged with blue mold; Nadine refused to use it on anything, because it was “pure calories.” I never really questioned this assessment, though I should have wondered what separated it from other foods.