Afloat (21 page)

There are hooting noises outside followed by a crash and then laughter.

‘Give me back the tomatoes,' someone says.

We are lucky we are here, where none of the difficult things seem real. The family things. I blow my nose into my hand and wipe it on the bed sheets.

It is only alcohol, this one evening, and maybe he won't remember his words. If I make an effort to forget them as well, this entire day will evaporate into island air.

Still – as I hear his bike crunch slowly up the gravel path, as I hear Brenna's voice calling out, his rebuttal, and the drunken banging on my window, I almost wonder – filled with this much alcohol, where else can he go but down? Sinking, blood vessels bursting, attached to his own self-made anchor. What would it be like, to be alone now? But he is so beautiful. We all make exceptions.

They call it breast reconstruction, as if my body were a building.

Something explodes outside, a transformer. I hear the crackling sound of a fire beginning.

As if there's a secret medical blueprint with angles marked and measured and locations indicated for electrical outlets and suggested federal standards for earthquake proofing. As if all the muscle and flaps of skin and pulled apart fat will become production materials, efficient, put to proper use.

I could make them bigger if I wanted.

But I didn't trust the meat of my body anymore. I didn't want anything there waiting, heavy with the possibilities of an irregular reading.

So I came out of the hospital with nothing, and went home feeling lighter.

I didn't leave the house for eight weeks.

Russ gave me six months leave after the operation, a formal gesture. In practice I never left. He couldn't swim without me, and I needed to know that his life continued and depended upon my memory for all those trivial things, from birthdays to political scandals. For each woman, the cancer books told me, it was different. There were support groups, fitness classes, vacations, religion. My salvation was simple, the city saved me – I read the
Pioneer Press
, checked my eight daily blogs, and talked to Russ and Patty on the phone – suggesting restaurants, reminding him of his son's birthday,
giving opinions about the new governor of Wisconsin's moustache. All of this I could do in my decades-old college of St. Catherine's sweatshirt, stretched over my knees and gray so it never needed washing. I wondered why I ever bothered going into the office, but I suppose thirty phone calls a day might become draining after an extended period of time.

‘Bell. It's Russ Gerhardt.'

‘I know, Russ. What do you need?'

‘Are you crying? Bell, you were fine ten minutes ago, are you crying?'

I could hear Patty in the background, ‘Russ, why is she crying?' and then whispering, ‘Did it come back, you know, is
it
back?
You
know?'

‘
Quiet
, Patty, this is a business call. Where's my latte? Goddamn it, Bell, we need you here. Just
take
the money and get my latte. Wait, use my city hall Amex.
Whipped cream
.'

He returns to the phone.

‘Bell, what's wrong?'

‘I have no breasts, Russ, otherwise I'm fine.'

If I'd been able to feel anything it would have hurt to say this, but I was empty.

There are sirens now, military sirens not civilian ones. There are no helicopters yet, this means the roads are still clear. It's windy and I worry I won't hear the doorbell.

Patty handed me a box when I returned to the office. The box was pink, the ribbon too. Inside were two knitted breasts trimmed with faux-fur and red buttons for nipples.

‘They're expensive, but I thought what the hell. They're
Tit-Bits
! Knitted tits, aren't they a hoot?'

‘Is this fur?'

I turned them over in my hand, both of them even, weighted down with tiny beads.

‘If they're not the right size I have the receipt,' she said quickly. ‘I just thought, you know, might as well get the big ones.'

I promised her I'd try them as soon as the scars healed, my chest still weeping fluid beneath my clothes.

In the first few weeks after they'd taken my breasts, I would lie in our expensive sleigh bed, the white down comforter protecting me from winter and the unexpected – waiting for the thought of something that required leaving my bed. Some days I'd wonder if I'd received any letters. Some days Alan brought home Roma's pizza for lunch. Some days I smoked Anna's leftover pot. Or I just wondered what I looked like, how I'd changed from the night before. In front of our bedroom mirror with the
Russ for Congress
stickers on it, one hovering just above my right temple, I'd stand the way they teach you to when being photographed so as to emphasize the narrowness of your waist. I'd place my hand way up on my ribcage to make me look slimmer, and I'd look at the leftovers. Not enough of a body to make a whole anymore. And I'd squint. Sometimes I'd wear sunglasses so the pink scars were dark and tanned.

I had hips all out of proportion in a way I never really noticed until the top part of me was gone, the part which kept my figure looking like it was supposed to. Over the years I had acquired large thighs from somewhere, and it's odd because your calves don't change much – above the knees age sneaks up on you.

I had nice feet.

The day I smashed the mirror I used the corner of our
pewter snow globe/picture frame that Russ had given us for our fifteenth anniversary. He'd bought us his standard bottle of Dewar's as well, and he'd thought the snow globe was particularly funny. Celebrating St. Paul's Bicentennial, it said. It smashed the mirror in an unsatisfying way. The shards were supposed to explode outwards, cutting me, giving me gashes that would need stitches. But instead, after a few dull swings, my reflection just kind of cracked, and then fell apart.

Cleaning up, I got a sliver of glass in my foot. I wanted to think something romantic and meaningful about how all glass used to be sand and how in each grain of sand there is a universe, but it was too exhausting, so I just sat on the cream sheets of our unmade bed with my heel awkwardly in my hand, letting the too small shard of glass work its way out in a wet ooze of blood.

During a break from work Trainer and I get ice-cream cones and sit in Marquette Park. He has heavenly hash, I choose chocolate mint, and our tongues are working quickly because of the heat.

We talk about how Tom never brews more coffee after he has used the last of it, and how Brenna wears so much mascara that clumps of it fall into the food she serves, and then we talk about Cedar Point, the massive amusement park in his hometown.

‘That's where all my hats are from,' he tells me. ‘Assholes would lose their hats on the upside-down rollercoasters – like at ninety miles an hour it's going to stay on your head? Brand new baseball caps. I must have at least thirteen that I still wear.'

I nod, using my tongue to mash the ice cream further into its cone.

‘I was there four summers,' he says.

‘Where'd you stay?'

‘Cedar dorms,' he says nostalgically. ‘All male.'

He changes the subject.

‘Did I tell you about the fucking woman at lunch today that ordered her Merlot straight up?'

‘Like a Martini?'

He thinks some people should not be allowed to drink wine.

‘And that's twice in two days, yesterday a woman asked me for her Zinfandel on the rocks.'

I try and match him. ‘I had a guest on the patio ask me if there were any sharks in the ocean.'

‘Well,
I
had some dick point at a seagull and ask me what sort of bird it was.'

He pauses. ‘A fucking seagull.'

We sit in silence.

‘You've got to lick faster than that, darling.'

My chocolate mint is running down my wrist.

From where we are sitting we can see a massive freighter making its way through the straits. This happens maybe once a week. I've heard they are filled with iron ore going up through the Sault locks to Canada, or coming down and around to Wisconsin or Minnesota or Detroit. Appearing at least half a mile long, the boats slide through the water quickly, even in deep fog, their horns low and strange to the ear. There has never been a collision in these straits, although locals still talk about that one close call: two steamers lumbering towards each other blaring their horns, both moving too quickly to stop. The spectators had gathered at the shoreline, watching the watery game of chicken to see who won. That they missed each other by a quarter of a mile is told with a hint of regret. Something spectacular had been so close at hand.

Trainer reads out the name of the steamer as it slides past, an intrusion among the ferries and holiday yachts.

‘I wonder where it's going?' I ask.

‘Pittsburgh.'

I look at Trainer and he shrugs. ‘You can tell by the number of funnels,' he says.

We look back out at the steamer negotiating the narrow straits and numerous yachts.

‘You're lying,' I venture.

‘Of course.'

There is just one famous ship that sank in these Great Lakes. Broke in two, like a heart, and was lost. Living near the straits, it is hard to imagine how there is enough open water nearby to
swallow anything. There is land everywhere, two lighthouses, and each port awaits ships patiently. I suppose some ships are too far from safety and have to weather the storms on their own. I guess it's the water that always wins.

HOMES
, is how I remember all the lakes. It is how we were all taught in school: Huron Ontario Michigan Erie Superior. The last, the deepest.

Trainer thinks it's funny that he lives on Lake Erie, Rummy lives on Lake Ontario and now we are all here in the straits between two others.

‘Get it?' Trainer asks me. ‘Without Superior, we're
HOME
.'

He waits, looking at me.

‘You've been hanging around Rummy too much,' I say.

At four forty-five we cross Main Street to start our shifts at the Tippecanoe. There is talk that Velvet will fire Trainer.

She's called him into her office. I think she's heard about his water bottles at work. Everyone agrees that he is fucked. Staff have been fired for much less. One unsuspecting kid showed up for work at the beginning of the summer with dreadlocks, his lip pierced, and a T-shirt that read, ‘How did our oil get under their sand?' Velvet had told him that there'd been a mistake, and in fact she'd meant to contact him sooner, but there was no longer a place for him at the restaurant. He had to catch the next ferry home, taking his canvas duffel bags with him.

Trainer has been in her office for about ten minutes when he emerges, then leaves the restaurant with his bag containing his work clothes. I am sick. The pattern we have woven together here is too intricate to become unraveled now. We work the entire evening shift, each of us speculating on what has happened. There is nothing else to talk about.

Taking a tray of lobster in a
beurre blanc
sauce out to the
dining room, someone comments, ‘I just can't believe she fired him.'

Bringing dirty plates back to the dish pit someone else wonders, ‘Will he stay for tonight to say goodbye?'

‘Keep your mind on your work, shitheads,' Chef Walter tells us absently. ‘You're not in Kansas anymore.'

Bryce finds me alone near the broom closet, as I search for a dustpan to sweep up the wine glasses I've dropped. Loud and hard, they had smashed on the hardwood floor, scattering shards under tables, making the woman next to me pull her daughter's chair closer, as if worried I'd leap up and slash her with a leftover wine stem.

‘He's not fired, I promise,' Bryce says. ‘She doesn't fire people that she likes.'

He takes the broom and dustpan from me and heads off towards my accident, and in the face of such logic I have to believe him.

At the Cockpit Club that evening Trainer is absolutely bombed, and gives us the thumbs up as we all walk in.

‘She gave me the night off!' he yells at us.

Then lower, and with a wink, ‘She's a bit of a drinker herself, you know.'

‘Alcoholism is like a club,' he tells me later, after a few beers. ‘We all look out for our own.' He tells me that once he was in Velvet's office she'd offered him a glass tumbler full of water, poured from a carafe on her desk. He had declined, too nervous, too uncertain for such pleasantries. She'd set the glass before him anyway, and as she talked he'd taken a sip.

‘Belvedere,' he says. ‘The good stuff.'

‘Fuck off!' I say.

He nods.

‘She's a fucking drunk, and it takes a drunk to know a drunk.
The night I dropped three trays in a row, she wondered what the hell was wrong with me.'

It doesn't take too much to figure it out, I guess. Not on this island. The night he dropped the trays is one that I remember. Trainer had gone to the bar after his morning shift ended and left just before his evening shift began, several shots of vodka and several pints of beer heavier.

‘I didn't even need my water bottle that night,' he remembers. ‘But,' he adds, with just a hint of embarrassment, ‘that lady was pissed about her jacket. Daiquiris are hard to get out of suede.'

I can't wait to tell Bryce about Velvet, though when I tell him he will no doubt nod as if he suspected all along. When Bryce arrives, he claps Trainer on the back and buys him a beer saying,

‘I knew you'd pull through.'

He stands behind me, wrapping both arms around my neck and licking my eyebrow. In my ear he says, ‘Your mole is delicious.'

We chat for a bit and then he challenges Dickweed to a late-night game of volleyball, leaving Trainer and me to drink ourselves into oblivion. When he leaves he gives a salute, and Trainer turns to me and asks: