The Dark Lake

1

The ghastly moon hung over the lake, reflecting through the trees in fractured, smoky ripples like it had that night when the air was warm and thick.
No, of course that couldn't be. The lake was frozen that night, and it was the dead of winter.
Of course it was, of course it was.
How could I think it was midsummer? Midsummer, when the air is warm in the evening and you can walk about the lake sleeveless. Summer is what I remember. Not the bleak winter—
when I dream about it.

I've been trying to call her for the past couple of weeks now, ever since I saw the hand rolling up the window, trying to keep the water from coming in. I've called and left messages but Krishna has not returned them. Maybe she's out of town. Paris or Rome, or wherever it is she goes
—India? But I've tried, I've definitely tried and I'll keep trying because that's the right thing to do and I always do the right thing.

She would want to know.

I walked along the edge of the lake. I might have walked all the way around it by now, I wasn't sure. I should get back home; they would be worried, although I was certainly old enough by now. The thought made me laugh out loud. How many times had they told me I was old enough, old enough to be on my own, old enough to wander by the lake all night if I wanted to?

I felt bad about it. Who wouldn't? Who wants to still be living at home, as if time were frozen? Who wants that? But as I'd explained to them time and again, there were reasons I couldn't quite get on my feet. There were the drugs for a long time
, but even more than that there were reasons. I guess you'd have to go back a long ways to figure out what they were.

Not just back to the night of the party. Back a lot further than that is what I kept telling them
: and my therapist too. Back to that first night, when I first met those Transistor boys. It must have been at that first party, that fraternity party in some unknown basement.

It wasn't the first night I'd ever been drunk, it just seemed like it. What I
remember most is the color red. I’m not sure though, if the room was really red. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what color the room was because the colors began to swirl and the music, wow, the music, it was like the first music I'd ever heard. They were very loud. That’s what I remember most, the loud, insistent driving rhythm of those Transistor boys up there on some stage that first night, the night the laughter echoed down the halls. It echoed into the corridors and bounced off the brick walls. It pinged on hollow, tin pipes. It mixed with the scent of beer and smoke and smiling faces and drunken singing till you smelled songs and heard cigarette butts on the floor. So it all started with them, with … what do I call them?

What do I call them, the ones whose voices still call me from the bottom of the dark lake?

It looked so dark. Was there a color as dark a black as that water looked in midsummer? Maybe obsidian—maybe that was the color—like black, volcanic glass. I finally did find my way back home without hearing any of those voices, not a single one. Not from the lake, anyway.

They were sound asleep, my parents, when I walked in: both of them. But the next day, when I had slept such a long time, my mother finally came in and woke me up, observing how long I'd been out the night before.

What difference does it make? I don't have a job to go to anymore, I told her.

Why did I still argue with her—being well past that age?

“You better take those sheets off the bed and give them to me to wash
; I'll need to wash them if you aren't ever going to,” she said.

I asked her what difference it made.

"When was the last time you spoke with your therapist?" she asked.

"I have an appointment with her for later this afternoon. Thanks for helping me with the sheets
; I don’t know why I don’t remember things like this," I said. "I need to make a phone call."

"Don't make
any more long distance, they are killing us financially."

If only I had a job
—see, then I wouldn’t have to have conversations like these.

I didn't want to talk to her anymore
; I just thought it best to take a long shower and go down early for my appointment—maybe read a book or something in my therapist’s waiting room. Hanging around this house was starting to depress me.

My therapist was the only black woman in the whole town, and she was very black too. She had taken to warning people on the phone about her dark color before they showed up for first appointments. I laughed when I heard her do this on the phone during one of our sessions, remembering the shock that must have played on my own
face the first time I met her.

She wanted to know if I'd followed up on trying to contact anyone to discuss the dre
ams I'd been having about them.

"Yea
h, I'll call. I haven't had time this week. I've been trying to find work. I've been calling want ads."

"Have you contacted Krishna?"

"Tried but no answer. I don't even know for sure if I have an updated phone number."

"We can check right now
." She picked up the phone. “What’s her number?”

"No, that's ok
ay. I know it's her phone. I got her answering machine."

"Then why did you tell me you didn't know?"

"Because I can't get hold of her."

Miriam leaned back in her swivel chair, steadied her gaze
, and fixed it on me like a bright flashlight.

"Have you left a message?"

I shifted around in my seat, knowing I was giving her clues about my feelings, and unable to stop doing so.

"I don't want to face it when she doesn't call me back."

"Facing reality is what I'm here to help you do." She leaned forward.

"Good point."

"And it's important for you to come to terms with some of these memories." Miriam took off her glasses, like she always did when she wanted to talk about reality. Why did she always want to talk about reality?

“Hey, what’s so great about reality?”

“It’s time to wake up, Jane. It’s time to look at reality…”

"Just give me a minute
; I think I can hear their voices now. I can be there if I close my eyes. I can be back with them.”

“Jane, stay here in the present.”

***

"How do I look?" Swinging my hips around, admiring myself in the mirror. I knew though. I had always known how damn hot I looked. But still, I h
ad to hear it from all of them.

"You look like an alley cat, and I know you are going to pounce on some poor
, unsuspecting mouse." Giggling, Krishna flashes her eyes. In her reflection, if we were animals, she would see a lynx. She would see jet-black hair and eyes. If she were smiling, she would see only one dimple, and it would be on her left side.

The music pounds on the stereo
; the smell of incense and pot and cigarettes and coffee is thick in the air. Krishna lights another cigarette and changes the record. I pose and swing my hips some more, watching my reflection.

"Think you've seen enough of that ass yet?" Gay, dressed
like a boy as usual and lying on Krishna’s bed, mocks me from the dark corner of Krishna's room—the corner that recedes into the wall and tucks itself away from the light of Krishna’s red, jewel-covered lamps.

"Who could?" I ask.

"Yeah, I can't see quite enough of it; you think you could yank those cut-offs a little higher up your crotch?" Gay snaps back at me, her eyes giving me a smart-mouthed once-over.

"You should've been in the car today with us
!" Krishna starts laughing and tells her, "She took her bra off and threw it out the window while we were driving down Bowen Street."

"I know. She does that every time we drive anywhere."

"It's just so uncomfortable," I complain.

"Yea
h, I know what you mean," Gay says. "My ass was uncomfortable the other day so I pulled down my pants and stuck my naked butt out the car window."

***

"But what you said was true; you were uncomfortable? Not a hussy, like she implies." Miriam's eyes were intense, like she'd caught me with something I wasn't supposed to have.

"What do you mean?" I asked, pulled sharply back from the deep past, startled.

"You weren't really a wild girl. It was a persona, wasn't it?"

"What do you mean persona? I don't even know what that word means."

"A mask you wore. Not your true self."

"No, that's not true. It was my true self. Why do you say that?"

"You just said that yourself?"

"How so?" I squirmed around in my seat, suddenly uncomfortable. "Can you dim the blinds
? The sun is hurting my eyes."

I had a headache now. I would have it for the rest of the day. It always happened like that. Whenever she pestered me like that I would get a headache and have it for the rest of the day. On the drive home I stopped by the Open Pantry (
Open Panties
,
we all called it back then
) and overspent for a one-time ibuprofen, unable to wait the five blocks for home.

Every time I spent money now I got nervous
–all these little purchases added up–a dollar here for a coffee, a dollar there for a candy bar. I never felt like I was overspending and then I would max out my dad's credit card again. He even threatened to take it away one time in a fit of rage, but then his face softened and he said, "No, I can't leave you without money to spend. I won't do that," and he hasn't mentioned it since. Still, it left me with an uneasy feeling every time I spent money now, especially since I wasn't working.

But that was bound to change. I'd been looking for a few weeks now. No interviews yet. The problem, as I always said, was that I never finished high school. I kept trying to go back, but still couldn't put up with the teachers telling me what to do in that bossy way they had. They thought they knew everything. I was so much smarter than they were and they knew it. That was probably why they harassed me so much. Jealous. Every time I mentioned going back to high school, my
mom said it was just too late now. When you’re in your 30s it’s a bit late to go back to high school, she would always say.

But try finding a job without a
high-school diploma.

"They expected me to put my head over a hot frying bucket of grease when I felt sick to my stomach. Do you want me to throw up on the fries
?” I asked them. But that bitch didn't seem to care. “I can't believe you expect me to stay there and put up with that kind of abuse," I told my mom.

She
shrugged and looked disgusted.

"Fat lot you'd understand! What have you ever done in your life besides be married to my
dad?”

But I didn't argue like that with her lately. Things had gotten a whole lot better since I'd gotten off drugs and
had been going to meetings. I didn't yell at her like that, and I even tried to control my spending.

I pulled into the driveway. The lawn had been freshly mowed. The midday summer humidity and bird songs thickened the air.

"When are you going to get air conditioning around here?" I asked, slamming the door behind me.

"We can get along fine
without it. I've lived without it for sixty years now," Mom answered, her soapy arms up to her elbows in dishwater because a dishwasher was another thing she refused to buy.

"You could suffer bad for that now. You could get
heatstroke, and now that you're sixty you might not survive something like that,” I tossed my purse on the rippled, glass table and the car keys made a clinking sound as they skidded across the it.