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This was new. “Uh…I guess. If you have anything left after I finish with you all today.”
He looked eager. “I’ll keep up. Don’t worry.”
This made her remember things that had happened two years ago. How she would foist herself upon Eric when he tried to lead runs in Mexico. She would bother him and show off and flirt outrageously. God, had she really done that?
She was still thinking about this as she and Eric walked to the dining hall for lunch a couple of hours later.
He noticed she was quiet, but he didn’t bug her.
Joe Warshaw intercepted them at the front of the room. “Just the two I need,” he said, pulling them off to the side. He sort of winked at Bridget as if to say, “See, your partner’s not so bad, is he?”
Bridget looked down at her toes.
“We’ve planned a rafting trip this weekend,” Joe explained. “It’s an overnight down the Schuylkill. It’s an easy stretch, one portage. We’ve got eight kids signed up. Esmer was supposed to do it, but he has to take off this weekend, and you two are both on. Do you mind?”
“Does it matter if we mind?” Eric asked. He knew the way of Joe.
Joe smiled brightly. “No, actually.”
“Well, then,” Eric said.
“I’ll tell the kitchen guys to get all the tents and stuff packed into the van. I’ll make it easy for you, how’s that?”
Eric and Joe talked logistics while Bridget’s mind raced around the place. She was going on an overnight camping trip with Eric. Oh, God. She trusted herself to stick to the friendly banter during meals and even lake duty. She had mastered that subtle art. But sleeping close to him in a sleeping bag under the stars? She wasn’t sure she trusted herself to be able to do that.
Hey, girlies,
41 days!!!! Do you know where your bikinis are?
Bee
It came to her in a dream. It really did.
Lena was dreaming about Valia and her mother and Effie and all kinds of incongruent bits and pieces. And in her dream she went into the dining room—or a place that she knew was the dining room even though it looked kind of different. And instead of her family members sitting in the chairs, there were drawings of them—big wide sheets of paper with charcoal drawings propped on the chairs. Lena not only liked these drawings, in her dream, but she knew that she had made them.
And when she woke up, she knew what her portfolio project was going to be. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to draw a series of portraits of her family. It was that she knew it was the right thing to do.
She decided to start with her mother, the source of all things. Besides, she knew she could make her mother agree to it. After dinner, she scouted the house for the right place to pose her.
“Sit there.” Lena pointed to the living room couch, green velvet, with pillows carefully arranged. She studied her mother. No. She didn’t really repose in the living room very often.
“Let’s try the kitchen,” Lena said, and her mother followed her there. She sat Ari down at the kitchen table. Better. But her mother was never really sitting down.
“Stand, okay?” Lena said. She let her mother gravitate to her own spot at the counter. That made sense. Without thinking, her mother put her chin in her hands, her elbows resting on the granite counter, waiting for Lena to pick.
“Don’t move,” Lena said. “That’s good.” She brought a stool opposite her mother and propped her drawing board on her lap. Lena made herself look for a long time before she started. She wanted to see all that was real and also what was there. She didn’t want to let herself shy away.
She started. She liked the softness of her mother’s skin contrasting with the gleaming granite countertop, the way the skin of her elbows puddled a bit upon it. Her mother eschewed softness, longed for hardness, but softness was what she had.
Lena wanted to capture her mother’s worn, slightly bagging knuckles with the hard permanence of her wedding ring pressing as it now did into her mother’s cheek. She considered her mother’s severely glinting diamond studs, a twentieth anniversary gift from Lena’s father, sitting in her soft, tired earlobes.
Drawing wasn’t a passive exercise, Annik liked to say. You had to find the information; you had to go in after it.
Lena pushed herself to look deeper into the tentative set of her mother’s eyes, the lines burrowing toward her lips, made more pronounced by the careful, deliberate way she held them.
Ari wanted to support Lena in some way. She would sit for this drawing until every one of her limbs went to sleep. But she needed to stay allied with her husband, too. She’d made too many compromises already this year to pull out. She was an appeaser, maybe, but by now she was accountable herself.
Lena saw these conflicts fighting in each quadrant of her mother’s face. She saw the tiny fault lines betraying the feelings that pulled her mother apart. Ari was so placid in some ways, her smooth hair, her plucked brows, her elegant clothes in every soft shade of beige. And in other ways, Lena could see she was waging an internal war.
Lena imagined herself a field marshal, overseeing the hostilities between her mother’s eyebrows. Then she imagined herself a cartographer, mapping out each curve and concavity between Ari’s cheekbone and her jaw. She imagined herself a blind person, feeling her way around her mother’s neck and collarbone with her charcoal. She pictured herself the size of a mite, crawling over the canyonlike hollows of her mother’s shoulders.
When Lena brought the drawing in to Annik the next day, Annik was plainly excited. She was near speechless.
“Do you think I got the chair?” Lena asked timidly.
Annik hugged her, knocking Lena’s legs into her wheels. “I really do.”
Should we have stayed home and thought of here?
—Elizabeth Bishop
“Hey, Naughty.”
Bridget hadn’t told Naughton exactly the time of her run that evening, but he was there nonetheless. She wondered how long he’d been waiting by the road at the foot of the hill. Eric, this evening, had not come.
They ran in silence for quite some time. The air was so heavy you could practically feel the water squishing around in it. Bridget had to hand it to Naughty. The uphill stretch was fairly brutal—she liked to start a run tough—and he kept right with her even when he looked like he was going to die.
He was fourteen. He seemed infinitely younger than she, but she realized with some mortification that he was no more distant from her age than she was from Eric’s.
He kept turning his head to look at her. He was nervous.
She paused briefly at the top of the mountain to enjoy the view. It was part of her ritual. The silence was punctuated by Naughton, who was breathing so hard she was afraid he might blow out a lung.
She waited until they were headed downhill to get conversational. “How’s it going?” she asked him.
“G-g-ood.” He worked hard for the word.
He waited until they had finished the four-mile loop and begun walking to unburden his heart. “Um, Bridget?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you like Bridget or Bee?”
“Either. Both.”
“Okay, uh, Bee?”
“Yeah?”
“I wanted to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
Silence.
“Uh…never mind.” Sweat made his whole face shine.
“Okay.”
He couldn’t bear to leave it at that. “I, uh, think you’re…pretty amazing.”
“I like you, too, Naughty.”
He cleared his throat. “I think I’m talking about a different kind of like.”
“Like a girlfriend?” She cut to the chase. This could take all night.
He was surprised. “Yes.”
“I’m your coach, Naughty. You know I can’t be your girlfriend.” That hadn’t been good enough for her, back in Baja, had it? Why did she think it was good enough for him?
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
This would have been an easy out, but she didn’t feel like lying. “No. Not really.”
“Maybe after camp?” he proposed. “I could wait.”
He was so much sweeter and more rational than she had been. Why seal off all hope? “Maybe someday. Who knows what will happen?”
A few hours later, she was sitting next to Eric on the dock. The sun was setting behind the trees and she was feeling thoughtful.
“Can I apologize to you for something?” she asked him, kicking her bare feet back and forth in the warm air.
“What do you have to apologize for?” he asked lazily. His hair was messed up from drying with the lake water in it. His face was stubbly and relaxed in a way it had never been with her that first summer.
“Two summers ago.”
He winced a little, but he let her go on.
