Against this busy backdrop my childhood lassitude stood in dark contrast, particularly during my fifteenth summer, my last gasp of pure, uncomplicated leisure. I’d somehow been able to put off getting a summer job until it was too late. My mom, perhaps aware that my life as I knew it would soon be changing, let it slide.
As we did every spring on the first weekend of warm weather, we moved to our cabin on nearby Long Lake. It was just a fifteen-minute drive from our house in town, close enough to commute to during the last month of school. That summer I finally indulged my reading habit to its limit. What began in early childhood as a way to tune out my parents, to unplug my auditory sense from the familial white noise, had become a full-blown fetish. Atypical in my family, the open book in front of my face was not only obsessive but, admittedly, also somewhat anti-family. Worst of all, even though it wasn’t technically lazy, it looked lazy.
And so I read like a sloth during the day, when I wasn’t swimming. I read books in bed late into the night, sometimes all night long, desensitizing myself to my hysterical fear of bugs until the thrumming of June bugs against the window screen no longer spooked me. I lazily brushed off the tiny gnats that keeled over on my pages, exhausted from their inability to penetrate my hot, glorious lightbulb.
One day my dad, watching me read in a chair, not moving for hours, threw me a book, one of the few I’d ever seen him read. “Iacocca. A good American story. You should read this.” I promptly sucked it up and its follow-up, Talking Straight, and forever after absorbed the commitment to Buy American. “We’ve really got to buy local, Dad!” I said, freshly convinced that his injunction that we buy everything in town—so that people in town would buy cars from him—was the only way to live. “The girl’s got it!” he shouted, admiring his budding young capitalist. “And remember,” he said, “every price is negotiable!” (Having watched him haggle unsuccessfully with a salesperson over the price of a sport coat, I knew it wasn’t always true.)
I was obsessed with books, but indiscriminate. Having little guidance in that department, my literary inhalation was akin to setting up a shop vac in the woods: the lightest materials flew in first. At eight or nine, I started plowing through my mom’s downstairs paperback library, which was chock-full of fat James Micheners and historical fiction series. By the time I was fourteen I’d moved on to a shelf of books that was similar but more sinful. Then I found some truly saucy books, like Scruples by Judith Krantz and everything by the chaste-covered LaVyrle Spencer (who changed my view of turn-of-the-century one-room-school teachers forever: Sluts, every one of them!) as well as the slim flight-attendant classic: Coffee, Tea or Me? I skipped the few real classics she had, like Anna Karenina.
Somehow I knew there had to be more. I went to the town library, where I checked out novels by Erica Jong and other feminists from the 1980s, whose fierce energy I liked, though I didn’t understand yet what they were fighting.
I checked out Gone with the Wind and read it in a single sixteen-hour jag, turning pages steadily throughout the day, then the night, then the cool hours of the dawn. I fell asleep around 7 o’clock in the morning, missing The Price Is Right at 10:30, my main reason for waking up before noon that summer, and then slept for fourteen hours straight. I called my friend Chelsey to brag about my binge. As we talked I weighed myself in the bathroom, reporting that I had lost two pounds in two days. We were just beginning to weigh ourselves. Books were good for everything.
Like we did, Chelsey and her family moved to their lake cabin on nearby Big Sand for the summer, and our buddy Sarah (Aaron’s sister) lived year-round on Fish Hook. Together with our friend Cara, who grew up on a Christmas tree farm east of town, we cycled among cabins, taking turns lying on air mattresses in different lakes. As we floated in mine, our feet brushing the soft tops of the weeds, Chelsey and I reminisced about summers past when we would pack up picnic lunches and take them into the Norway pine plantation. Wearing canteens on our hips, we’d walk until we found the perfect portal in which to enter the fairy-tale forest, the entrance that took us from the bright sunshine into deep faux-night. The Norways had been planted in tight, unnaturally even rows, and their high canopy blocked out the daylight. They had friendly, long needles, much softer than the mean quills of the spruce. After we found the patch of forest bottom we were looking for—so perfectly carpeted with fallen needles that it looked like clean barn bedding—we’d unfurl our cheese sandwiches and black plums wrapped in paper towels. The single butterscotch crispie bar we’d brought to split crumbled a bit under the weight of its thick chocolate-bark top as we passed it back and forth, bite for bite.
We talked about going on a picnic in the plantation again, but we never did. I remember realizing that my powers of pretend were fading. We were gearing up for our junior year in high school and would have to bring real details and real experiences to the fight. Otherworldly was momentarily out.
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Built in the 1940s, and bought by my mom and dad in the 1980s, the cabin was resolutely my mom’s place. No matter that the relationship between her and my dad had been crumbling all winter at the house in town, at the cabin she spun for us the myth of the perfect family. There we lived out an idyll: days on the boat, nights by the fire, sunsets and dinner bells ringing from the trees, and pink flamingos. Lots of pink flamingos. Flamingo toothbrush holders, clocks, letter openers. She stuck an entire flock of them in the yard, as if declaring it the entrance to Margaritaville. Out on Long Lake, Mom’s fantasies were central.
The centerpiece inside our cabin was a fieldstone fireplace with a rangy deer head above it. Out back sat a dusty screened-in fish-cleaning house in which my cousins and I gutted and filleted and flicked fish eyeballs at one another from our fish-scaling forks. On the lake side, mature white pines pocked the gentle slope down to the water, where an old-fashioned boathouse with an attached deck loomed out over the shore. From that deck, my brothers and cousins and I fished for suckers in the spring, our hooks baited with chunks of fatty leftover steak. If it was dark and still enough, if the air wasn’t raking the water, we could see the blimplike suckers clearly in the shallows, swift black demons swooping in for the meat.