“A swimmer, yes, but not in lakes.”
“Swim out farther. You’ll get to a point where it’s deeper and the weeds aren’t so high.”
He started out toward me, his arms working in the diffuse dawn light. He had a strong stroke.
“They cut the weeds in the official swimming area, out by the kids’ cabins, so it’s not as icky getting in over there,” I said as he began treading water a few feet from me. “If you’re getting in here, it’s better to jump off the dock than to wade in from the shore.
“Just a tip,” I added. Though I wasn’t sure why I was giving him tips. I didn’twanthim to make a habit of crashing my morning swims, did I?
No. What I wanted was to get a look at his tattoos, but now that he was close enough, he was submerged up to his neck.
He rotated in a slow circle, treading. “I gotta say, this is worth the icky entrance.”
It was. A person could get complacent about lakes, living in Minnesota, the land of ten thousand of them, but this one, especially at this time of day, was objectively gorgeous. The sunwas just coming up over the treed shoreline. “Look,” I said, pointing. “You can still see the moon. I love when you can see the sun and the moon at the same time.”
“I don’t think I ever have before.”
“Really?” That surprised me.
He’d been turned toward the moon, and when he looked back at me, assessing, he added, “I grew up dirt poor in New York, so there were no trips to the Hamptons or views from penthouse terraces where you could see the whole sky.”
That surprised me even more. Though I didn’t know why. I knew as well as anyone that people could transcend their humble upbringings. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it, though, so I kept my response light. “They should probably call it something other than ‘dirt poor’ when you’re in a city. Pavement poor?”
“I wonder if the phrase comes from the notion that you have dirt roads or dirt floors rather than pavement, so pavement is the fancy option in that sense? But yeah, no dirt roads in New York.”
“Hmm. I grew up dirt poor—well, cyclically dirt poor—in the suburbs. We lived in a trailer that I was embarrassed by, so I never had friends over. It wasn’t a well-to-do suburb, and most people lived in modest houses, but they were, you know,houses. So I guess I grew up trailer-trash poor.”
If he was surprised by that admission, he didn’t show it. “I suppose if you grow up poor in Minnesota, you still get to see the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time.”
“Yeah. Open spaces abound. Lakes, too. Lakes are more democratic here, I guess because there are so many of them. Even our trailer park had a ‘lake’ that was really a glorified pond in the middle of it. But this one is spectacular.”
“Yeah.” He sighed—a good sigh, like he was sinking into hisbody, making an overdue surrender. “What does it mean to be cyclically poor?”
I probably shouldn’t have said that. But hell, he’d started this whole confessions-while-treading-water thing. And the dim, slanted orange light of the sunrise gave the scene an air of unreality, like a stage set. Like if I told him secrets, it would only be an actress playing the role of Gretchen doing the telling.
“My dad would have these phases when he worked, and things would be relatively OK. We were still poor, but we could…” I assessed him. I’d never really told anyone the details of my childhood. Even Rory only knew the CliffsNotes version. So I had no idea why I was suddenly telling Teddy. And I was not an actress playing me; I was me. “We could still eat, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said gruffly, and somehow that one word telegraphed that hedidknow.
So I kept going. “He would have these periods where he would have ‘normal’ jobs. Low-wage ones working retail, or being on a landscaping crew, or whatever. Things would still be tight—my mom was a waitress—but money was coming in. But my dad…” I tried to think how to explain Len Miller. “He always had this idea of himself as bigger than he was. Like he’d found himself living the wrong life. So he’d do stuff like quit to write a novel—and then not write the novel. Or he’d get roped into pyramid schemes and we’d have a shed full of unsellable herbal supplements but no money for lunch at school.”
Teddy made a noise of understanding. A noise of understanding that was totally neutral: it contained no judgment, or pity.
He said, “I used to pretend I wasn’t a breakfast person to get around the fact that there was never any breakfast in my house.”
“But you were a breakfast person,” I said, because I recognized this strategy.
“Yep. Always used to wake up starving. But for a while I made ‘not a breakfast person’ into an identity. I started drinking coffee at thirteen because it was cheap and suppressed my appetite. It got me through to lunchtime. I got free lunch at school—when I was going.”
“You weren’t keen on school?”
“It was more that my mom wasn’t keen on it. She was… arty. She thought of herself as arty, anyway. We lived in a run-down building that had been colonized by artists—I was never clear on if everyone was there legally. And I guess my momwasarty in that she had a lot of natural talent, both musically and in terms of visual art. But she never did anything with it—nothing practical, anyway. She was always taking my sister and me out of school in service of her various whims—one week we’d be busking in Central Park, the next she’d have my sister on modeling casting calls. Iwasn’treally keen on school—I was never that smart—but at least it was predictable.” He paused. “At least it came with lunch.”
“Do you find…” I thought about how to phrase this. I’d never imagined asking anyone this question. “Do you have any hang-ups about food as an adult that you think probably date back to childhood? Like, I do this thing where I hate to share food, even though I’m completely financially comfortable nowadays. It’s OK if I can plan for it, like I’m having a party and I’m feeding my guests. But if you want to share fries at a restaurant? I hate that. It gives me a genuinely bad feeling. I can’t shake the notion that I might not get as much as I want if I let someone else start eating my food before I’m done with it.” I huffed a self-deprecating laugh, slightly appalled that I had shared so much so easily. “I’m superfun on dates.”
“So maybe your dating problems were partly your fault.”
“Maybe they were.”
