Tom Lake(49)

Hazel runs out of the woods and right away starts frantically digging a hole in the sand next to Emily. She digs and digs, then sticks her head in the hole she’s made to see if it fits, then takes it out and digs some more.

“Here we are.” Nell throws herself down beside us. “Our day off.”

“Let me try to ruin it for you.” Emily wipes her face with a towel.

“What’s your dog looking for?” I ask Maisie. When Hazel stops digging long enough to look up, the sand--colored dog is covered in sand.

“Treasure,” Maisie says.

“If we’re going to be miserable and cry, let’s do it in the lake.” Nell stands up to pull off her T--shirt and shorts. The girls had taken the time to put their swimsuits on under their clothes. I take mine out of my bag, glancing up and down the beach.

“We can hold up our towels,” Maisie offers. “Make you a towel tent.”

But I decline, taking my clothes off where I stand and then struggling into my one--piece. They have seen me and I have seen them, even if they’ve forgotten. They follow me into the water, screaming at the cold.

“You said the lake was getting warmer,” Maisie yells. “If all hope is lost we should at least get a decent swim out of it.”

The four of us go out straight and strong. We don’t have a swim platform, we don’t have any destination at all; with a little orienteering we could swim to Wisconsin. I drop beneath the surface and open my eyes. It’s as if someone bought up all the diamonds at Tiffany’s and crushed them into dust, then spread that dust across the water so that it sifts down evenly, filtering through the shards of light that cut into the depth. We are swimming through eternity, my daughters’ bright mermaid legs kicking out towards deeper water. I stay beneath the surface and marvel for as long as my lungs can hold.

“Swimming is the reset button,” Pallace used to say.

“Swimming starts the day again.”

We swim and we swim and we swim, and when we’ve exhausted ourselves we turn and head back to shore. Duchess the German shepherd is there now, having bunched one of our towels into an unsatisfying bed while Hazel keeps an eye on the cheese and mustard sandwiches Maisie made. We shake out the remaining towels and crowd together.

“Tell us the happiest day of your life,” Nell says.

“You and you and you,” I say, looking at each of them, their dripping swimsuits and wet, tangled hair.

“No, seriously,” Emily says. “You have to keep it in the context of the story. What was the happiest day of your life at Tom Lake?”

“The happiest day of that summer wasn’t at Tom Lake.”

They deem this to be an acceptable variant, as long as it’s the happiest day within that limited period of time. They stretch out on their towels in the sun to listen and dry.

“There’s a small setup before we get to the day itself,” I say.

“Certain scenes require setups.” Nell covers her face with her hat.

Duchess emits a sigh of unspeakable boredom then gets up to leave.

“Really?” Maisie says to the dog.

Duchess goes and stands in the lake, gulping at the water before turning to cross the narrow beach. We call for her to come back, come back, but she doesn’t listen to us. She follows the path into the woods and is gone.



After opening night the director’s work was done, which had not been the case in the community theater, nor the case in college. But Tom Lake was professional theater, which meant that Nelson would take a bow after the first performance and be off to his next job in the morning. All of us wondered what that next job would be but as far as I knew, none of us had asked him. That was why I stuck around at lunch break one day shortly before we opened, when everyone else ran off to the lake to swim. I wanted to find out where Nelson was going. He was younger than many of the actors in the play but he had never been one of us. He never came to the lake. He was the adult and we were the children rushing off to swim.

“Traverse City,” he said when I asked. “Have you been?”

“I flew into the airport there,” I said.

“Airports don’t count. Traverse City is very pretty, not that that’s saying much. It’s very pretty everywhere around here.” He was sitting alone in the front row of the theater with his notebook and a bag lunch. He offered me half his tuna sandwich, which was incredibly generous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten lunch.

The blossoms were off the trees and the fruit hadn’t fully come in and the boxes of bees had been taken away to their next job and still, everything was beautiful. “What are you directing in Traverse City?”

“Nothing.” He opened a large bottle of seltzer then looked around as if hoping to see a glass. “There isn’t a glass,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“Do you mind sharing?” he asked. When I shook my head he took a drink from the bottle and handed it to me. “I have an aunt and uncle who live there and I promised to come up and be helpful. I’ve been saying I’d do it for a couple of years now but I keep getting diverted.”

“By plays?”

“Things too good to pass on kept coming along, and then I’d be on the wrong side of the country. So when Tom Lake asked me to do this, I thought, that solves the problem. I’ll finally be in exactly the right place. That’s a long answer to a short question: