VACATIONLAND

This is a mostly true story about a day in Maine. It's not finished at all but I thought I'd go ahead and post so if you want you can tell me what you like and don't. I changed names and other details. It's long, don't feel like you have to finish.

VACATIONLAND

Yesterday’s activity was going on a bike ride. Daniel wanted to go. I didn’t think I’d make it. I was feeling morose, I told him. A thick laziness had set in around me this morning with the island fog and showed no signs of lifting. “Drink some water. You don’t drink enough water.” “I want a coffee. I want a nap.” “You are like a bratty teenager.” I have to laugh when he says this kind of thing to me, with those cruel-kind eyes of his. Being a bratty teenager on this island is actually a fond memory of mine. Summering teenagers know nothing about empathy, and no one even cares.

By his count Daniel has had exactly zero hangovers in his life, but we’d both been at the local bar the night before, enjoying generous pours from bartenders who didn’t believe a cocktail half this size cost $14 in New York. You've paid that? Many times! Disbelief. We made a bet and won “fancy schmancy martinis” thanks to a receipt I’d materialized from my bag. Daniel woke up this morning and went on a run. I’d emptied the dishwasher, one cup at a time. I had already evaded a kayak trip (I have blisters on my hands), a grocery store trip (we might run into someone from the bar), and as Daniel’ voice was becoming shrill, I was starting to feel for him. “You owe it to me,” he said, going on about the bike-ride. He meant: he chose to spend his only vacation days of the summer alone with me on my family’s island, where I have memories, relatives, and childhood boyfriends to supplement the peaceful scenery. He has only me, the peaceful scenery, a bike. He had a point. He has a job. Have I ever imagined what that might be like? Occasionally, and it always sounded so blissfully easy. To wake up with somewhere to go, go there, and go home and deserve this fatigue.

I rallied off the couch, but I chose not to dress properly in case I could plead cold if I needed to turn around. When I emerged onto the porch, Daniel was already poised to mount the worse of the two bikes. The day before, he’d made me ride the worse one, while he claimed the bike with gears: “Tough luck. Get ready faster next time.” Today’s choice was a sign he was thinking ahead, thwarting my chance to turn around before he was ready. “God it’s bright.” “It’s fine.” Without waiting for me to change my mind, he pedaled away down the hill, looking attractive with somewhere to go. Already I trailed behind and before long his figure was lost around a bend. I was alone on the road with the pine trees, heading away from the shore and away from the fog, feeling a little invigorated, I had to admit, as I pedaled fast and adjusted my gears to the perfect resistance. I chanted my own name to myself in time with the movement of my legs. Leafy shadows seemed to dance to my rhythm on the pavement. The trouble is Daniel is a doer, an actor, living in real time. I imagined him ahead of me, coasting down the hill with no hands, beginning to feel alive again.  I’m not an actor, but more like a character, I thought. One in an indie movie. But she was so pathetic! My parents might say about me if I were the star of a movie. She’s a graduate student, is what they say as the faultless loving parents they are in life.

The road was more bustling than I remembered. Now that I was enjoying myself, I worried about my choice of skirt. On the island drivers have a tradition of waving as they pass one another. Bikes count as vehicles about fifty percent of the time and I practiced the wave on flats, but ignored drivers on the hills either up or down. One of the passing cars carried a teenage summer love of mine, looking older. Mushroom cut in tact. With Daniel so far ahead by now, he’d never know we were together. Maybe it didn’t occur to him that someone as apparently mature as Daniel could be the boyfriend of a bratty teenager. My own haircut was woefully similar to the one I’d had at fifteen. I cursed my skirt and pretended to be distracted with my bike chain. Rumor had it my teenage love, now giving me half an eye in the rear-view mirror, had went on to drop out of music college with a slew of addictions. What happens at music college to make someone drop out with a mushroom hairdo? He couldn’t cut it. A large bird swept overhead and I pulled over to watch and adjust my clothing. It was only a seagull. I pedaled faster to make up for lost time, past the houses with ocean views, away from the fishing boats and further along a winding road where the lawns get increasingly cluttered with furniture, and the porches increasingly collapsed.

Soon the figure of Daniel was zipping back toward me down the center of the road. “Let’s head to the swimming hole.” “Okay” I said, aware of my shortness of breath. It’s called the quarry, by the way, not the swimming hole. I prayed once there he wouldn’t want to go swimming. He biked in circles around me. “Please stop” I said. “I’m going to crash.” I tried to sound lighthearted. He laughed and stood up on his pedals, taking on the sharp incline ahead with astonishing speed.

My legs were tired again and as I was resisting the urge to walk, a red Mustang I recognized revved around the corner. I wanted to topple over to hide in the overgrown grass on the side of the road, but the red Mustang was distinctly slowing down. A sharp headache arose in my temples from the deceptive chill in the air. Behind the tinted windows, I could see the driver lifting an undersized hand to a slow wave. Mercifully, he didn’t stop the car. I waved back, cheerfully I hoped, while fashioning a posture of direction and great hurry.

The previous night at the bar, I’d found myself immersed in a conversation marked by drunken sincerity with the driver of the red Mustang. Meanwhile, Daniel had been immersed in a much more appropriately sincere drunken conversation with the bartender, about baseball, of all things. Where does he pick these things up? He’s never watched sports in my presence. He favors the real estate section in the newspaper whenever we’ve divided one up together on a train. Just from being alive and active in the world, I suppose he might say. I’ll have to ask him what that’s like sometime. Where was Daniel now? Probably at the quarry already. Hopefully not swimming. I would risk looking like no fun when I would have to refuse to join him.

I remembered the details the driver of the red Mustang, Frank, no Jack, told me last night. He has a close friend. A best friend, really. No, did he say they were brothers? They were like brothers, Jack and this close friend who had recently been in a car accident. Hit a tree on this very road and he wasn’t found for four hours. The friend was currently laid up on the mainland on life support. He’d told me that, since the accident, he’d taken to driving in circles around the island just to be alone. He drove endlessly, shamelessly. It was true, when I thought about it. We’d seen Jack's car more than any other single sight on the island. I don’t think we’d made a single outing without passing the red Mustang, with a stampede of multicolored horses painted in a zip down the middle. The first day we arrived, we had biked to a secluded section of the island and stopped at a fork in the road, deciding which of two dirt paths to brave. Jack pulled up noisily beside us and rolled down his window to offer directions in case we were lost. “So, where ya from?” “New York,” we’d said. “We’re partyin at that house there down the way tonight.” He’d pointed down the left dirt road to a dilapidated shack. “Thanks for the invitation,” we’d said, not knowing if it was an invitation, and pedalled down the dirt road to the right.

Last night Jack told me about his consuming guilt. What he wanted was to leave the island for good, but all he could think to do was drive around it. He wanted to enroll in college. After graduating with a degree in business, he wanted to open a bar, like one from the good old days, where everyone knows your name. His words. I expressed the opposite of doubt that he would soon be opening a bar. You should do it in Portland, I offered. He looked at me with genuine surprise. How had I known? He had real estate picked out in historic downtown Portland and had a plan for how to fund it. I noticed his blue eyes were surrounded by thick curling eyelashes. “You should do it now. This year. But forget about enrolling in college. Take it from me, school is pointless,” I said. Fishing on the island is very lucrative and he’d had his own boat since he was fourteen. “Open the bar. Do it this summer. You’ve saved how much?” He named a number somewhere between a thousand and a million. The number sounded large to my ears at the time. “What are you still doing here?” I gave it until the end of the year for his bar to be up and running, the heart of made for TV friendships between tourists and local fisherman.

“How old is your friend? Tommy.” “He’s twenty, like me. Don’t tell,” because we were in a bar. “I’m twenty-four” I said. “I’m immature though.” At the other end of the bar I could make out that Daniel and the bartender had moved on to the topic of great classic rock guitarists. If Tommy lives, it will almost certainly be with brain damage. I think I cried for him, or tried to. The story and the drinks made me dizzy and I concentrated too hard on holding eye contact. Chris suggested that if tourists hadn’t prevented the installment of cell towers for nostalgic reasons, Tommy would have been able to call for help. Absolutely. It’s crazy and just typical they'd veto something that was actually useful. Injustice raged. I counted on his drunkenness to couch each of my responses, which sounded helplessly insincere to me even then. Daniel looked over at our conversation several times, with what I assumed at the time were pangs of jealousy at the intimacy I’d formed with a local pretty boy. The kid in the mustang today looked like he couldn’t be a day older than sixteen. They’d probably been looks of utter confusion.

Finally I reached the quarry, where I saw Daniel’s bike resting against a tree. The quarry is an expansive ex-granite mine that hit spring water and filled up and is where tourists now swim. Jagged rock walls surround a dark pool that steams in the rain and glistens in the sun. They’re said to be two hundred feet deep. Daniel was already relaxing on the water’s ledge, staring out at the rocks. I noticed little beads of sweat on his forehead. Apparently, he’d felt compelled to take the ride at a sprint. I’d pent him up in the house against his nature. Lethargy, along with gossip and social anxiety, were realms in which Daniel would never relate to me. I tried to assume an alert and sporty pose beside him, but fatigue set in almost immediately.

Even though it was getting late in the day, a few people were still splashing in the water, kids on the near side, old people on the far side, like always. Usually the local teenagers would be diving off the cliffs, where we sat now. As a teenager it was here that I’d envied the bodies of older girls and prayed for boys to try to push me in. Without them, I was hopelessly bored by the cliffs. They’re never as high as you remember them. At the beginning of my relationship with Daniel, I’d managed to seem the type who was up for anything. He knew the truth now. Blah, blah, blah, I said loudly to myself. It was a habit I’d adopted to drown out negative thoughts about myself. He couldn't want to go swimming. My exercise high was rapidly fading now that I was on the ground and the air was suddenly cold and sunless.

A jeep and a pickup truck filled with arms and legs of our age and build came hurtling down the dirt road. They yelled whoops and party cries out the windows at us, unmistakably not to us. “We’ll see you over there,” I fake called-out. Daniel gave me a winning smile. Luckily, he only wanted to hike around. “Okay” I said. “let’s walk to the ocean.” “No. Let’s walk through the woods,” he said. “Okay” I said, even though I knew that there were no trails, and that the dense woods led into backyards within ten yards. Up for anything. A fairly impenetrable thicket of pines surrounds the water so we were limited to walking carefully around the quarry’s perimeter, with Daniel in the lead.

We passed the old people section of the pool, with a shallow entry where they can easily descend. A woman in her stretched out suit was folding a towel, while her friend called to her from the water. “Hold on! I’m coming to ya,” the swimming women said, then ducked her head in for the crawl. We moved past them until we were directly across from where we started and Daniel decided to sit down on a particularly smooth ledge. I crouched beside him.

“Fishing” I said, and pointed to a partially hidden alcove among the rocks. A man was holding a rod and his two small sons stood beside him wearing identical sweatshirts and baby jeans with elastic waist-bands. “I hope no ones swimming over there” I said. I mimed a hook penetrating the inside of my cheek, stretching it beyond what was comfortable. Daniel continued his stare down of the rocks, like a big lithe cat. We watched the fishing family and listened to the women in the elderly section, their clear voices carrying more than they probably knew. We heard one of the old women describe the water as “indescribably beautiful” and then climb out. The water was empty of swimmers now, and just as the ladies’ car drove off, the fishing line we’d been watching tensed. The larger of the two small boys started jumping up and down and pumping his fists when he noticed.

The father said “quiet” and lowered himself carefully nearer to the water, ledge by ledge, climbing down the rocks until he balanced on a very narrow ledge at the water. The man was a smoker slim with a sparse reddish beard and over-sized feet. A piece of duck-tape covered a hole in his unfaded jeans. Locals. “Oh Lord, it’s a big one!” the larger little kid yelled. “This is awesome!” said the little one. The father didn’t say anything, and he seemed more serious than he could have been, given the enthusiasm of his kids, both of whom were now jumping up and down in time, pumping their fists.

The larger kid jumped down by the water to join his father, who said  “hand me the towel.” The boy scrambled back up the rocks without losing his footing, not that the father seemed to care. “Bring me that towel.” The kid threw a blue cloth down at his father with great purpose as his father was reeling in the line. After about of minute of reeling from the father, we saw a black form break the surface. The kid gasped, “it’s an eel. Holy, holy.” “Awesome!” the little one, who was really very little, squealed. He looked more like an elf than a kid, too tiny to be jumping up and down with such control over his limbs. The older one held out the cloth for his dad who drew and continued to draw a long snake from the water inch by inch. “Oh. My God. Will it never end?” “Holy shit, it really is an eel” Daniel said. “I told you there were eels in the quarry.” It was a rumor that scared me as a kid and that I had been continually reassured was apocryphal over the years.  

“It’s so slimy” the kid said. “It’s really slimy” the little brother said, too. It didn’t look much slimier than a regular fish from where we sat, but very naked, its long body desperately twitching for a rock to hide behind. The man tightened the blue rag against it and wrestled the eel off of the hook and into his hand. He seemed almost to be shielding his prize purposely from our view and the view of his kids. He turned one shoulder and worked the eel with his back to us, doing steady actions that between the leafy backdrop and blackening water, looked vaguely cultish and pagen. He started breaking off smallish tree branches from a spindly maple.The older kid asked, “Are we going to set it free?” “We’re going to eat it,” the father said. I couldn’t see it hanging, I assumed the eel was tacked up to dry on the branch-cleared tree. I imagined their prize growing limp and faded, like a ribbon on a bulletin board.

Part of me had always known that eels really did lurk behind rocks in the quarry. A lifetime suspicion confirmed, I declared the excursion a success and hoped this would sate Daniel’ need to feel something accomplished today. The shadows were creating pleasing cuts all across the horizontal slabs of rock. It was a beautiful place, and I was glad I’d come. On cue, Daniel mounted his bike and suggested the long way home. I would have to protest. The eel sighting had held my attention and I had to go home before my mind loosened again.  My head was dully pounding. “What if this is the day I wake up with a hangover, and it never ends? Like the hiccups.” “You’re hungover?” It was a fear of mine. Maybe this was the day it would finally happen. “I was just kidding. I think I might be getting sick.” A revving noise swallowed my excuse. It made its way up the hill and turned down the dirt road that led to the quarry. I saw the front of the red mustang dip into the road, coming toward us. “Let’s go swimming,” I said. “It will do me good.” It was getting dark now, and the water was green and ominous. But it was nothing I hadn’t done a million times as a kid. “We didn’t bring towels.” “It’s okay. I want to jump in.” I pulled off my shoes and socks. Daniel didn’t move, but stared at me in what I decided to take as bemused admiration at this burst of joie de vivre on my part.

I looked at Daniel in the foreground, and behind him at the red Mustang stopped mid-hum, the driver, Jack, manually rolling down a creaky window to stick out his round, youthful face with lovely eye lashes. And in the background behind them, the darkening trees that seemed to go on forever, but really became backyards within a few feet. Taken together, the picture was classic American realism, pulsing with that certain active quality that never seemed to posses me. Walking deliberately to the ledge I tried a cheerful skip for their sakes, and jumped into a flash of shockingly cold, disturbingly dark water. It tasted fresh and pondy. I surfaced to see Daniel conversing with the driver of the Mustang who had stopped and rolled down his window. Maybe the subject would turn to baseball. Both waved and called to me, and I dipped once again to be under water with the eels. The eels and I shivered and when I surfaced I cleared my throat to affect a clear, actorly tone with the appropriate note of play. “Cowards,” I said. “Crazy” Daniel called back, and I heard the driver of the mustang laugh. The threat of discovery had overcome the eels and I, and I felt too tired now to imagine the idea of coming out by my own will.