A Dinner at the Lake

A Dinner at the Lake House

The blacktop met the gravel right under my shoes. Left, right -nothing. I stretched my neck out a little farther. Left again, right again- still nothing. No cars, no people, no sounds. I flung my hands up in the air and shouted, “Is there anyone- anything alive out there?”
A black walnut fell from the tree across the street and rolled onto the pavement. Silence then reassumed its throne over the road and surrounding woodlands. I had been waiting for a very long twenty minutes. It had rained that morning so the gravel was sinking into the drying mud and it forced me to stand. The rain clouds had cleared by noon and the July day heated right up. Three-thirty I guessed was the time she would arrive at and the sun beating down on me reminded me that I had guessed wrong.
Looking up and squinting, I shook my fist at the sun. I cursed it for burning my head. Then, looking across the street, I pointed a finger and cursed the walnut tree for not growing on my side of the road. It was wasting its shade on little weeds growing in a drainage ditch. A young pine tree was dying near by. Black walnut trees have roots that poison the soil, causing everything but a few strong weeds to die.
Silence broke. A car came speeding from the right. “Finally,” I shouted but the car passed by me, creating a gust of wind that for a second cooled my face. It had been at least forty minutes and the sun was bringing freckles out all over my arms.
I sat down on the wooden staircase that led to the cottage. Time moved swiftly as I daydreamed about how I could be down on the dock where it is cooler. Maybe fishing, maybe collecting ‘lake glass’, maybe just sitting with my feet dangling in the cool water while passing boats created little waves that would wet my thighs.
A car rumbled in the distance and I stood up just in time to see the white Volvo crush the black walnut that had escaped the previous car. The car parked, the engine shut off, and a woman emerged from the drivers seat. She looked down at the muddy gravel and walked on her toes so as not to ruin her heels. The woman was elegant and I hoped to grow up to look like her. I was already her height and had her small frame but I was fourteen and looked much younger yet. I was clumsy in my sneakers while she glided on her tiptoes towards me. We embraced.
“I am really glad you’re here. We have all been excited all day”. She showed no emotion to my response but instead her eyes darted around as she took in and criticized her surroundings. She had dressed up for this dinner, even though no one else had. I could see from her white dress covered in blue flowers that she was trying to look pulled together- trying to look happy.
The woman followed me down to the house with her heels clicking the whole way. I opened the screen door for her and once inside, slipped off my dirty sneakers. Her shiny, black high heels stayed on her small feet. Once in the door, she paused for a moment and looked around. At that moment, my father appeared in the kitchen doorway. Before he could utter a word, my mother commented on the house.
“Where did you get this dinning room set, Peter?”
“I found it at a antique shop in Brookdale. Its neat, isn’t?”
“Neat in a seventies, tacky sort-of-way,” she said and without a hint of kindness in her voice, she followed her statement up with, “I never liked your sense of style, Peter- you know I would never put something like that in my house”. Her house. Her house was a large, redbrick home that was in the city about forty minutes away from the lake house. It had only been her house for a little over month and before that it was our house- my father’s house.
My father looked unphased by my mother’s comments- he had probably grown accustomed to her remarks after ten years of marriage. He invited her into the kitchen for a drink before dinner and once in the kitchen, we heard footsteps coming down the stairs.
A four-year old girl with hair so blonde it appeared white stood at the bottom of the stairs. She wore purple socks with strappy sandals over them. A little, wrinkled, red dress hung loosely from her small shoulders.
“Mommy!” she cried with arms outstretch and legs running towards my mother. My high-heeled mother picked up the little girl in her arms and after enjoying my sister’s excitement for her, she turned to my father who stood chopping tomatoes at the counter.
“Peter, have you seen what Jessica is dressed like today? Oh, I hope to God no one has seen her like this!” She had a knack for exaggerating and continued on. “Her clothes are a mess and look dirty. And her hair!” My father examined my sister’s hair- little blonde tuffs stuck out from over a dozen multi-colored hair ties. He smiled at my sister’s creativity and how it annoyed my mother.
“I apologize, Anita- the girls stayed home today and don’t worry- I am sure no one knows about the clown we stole from the circus and have been holding hostage in our house!” My sister giggled and I smiled, trying not to laugh because it would only anger my mom.
“Ha.” The sarcastic laugh from her light red lipsticked mouth took the smile off my face. “It really is not funny, Peter. These children are a mess and I don’t find it humorous”.
“Neither do I, Anita, but I really do not feel like talking about it now. Let’s both try and enjoy our dinner with our kids, okay?” For her, arguing was the hardest thing not to do and especially with my father. My father always put up with my mother and despite the way she argued with him all the time, it was she who left him.
The four of us were silent and the only noise was the knife slicing easily through the tomato and hitting the wooden cutting board. Even my little sister could sense the uncomfortable silence so she pulled on my mother’s arm.
“Come up and see my room.” She agreed and her heels could be heard cautiously following my sister’s excited stomping up the stairs. I watched my father place one red tomato on the deep, blue place. Then he placed a round slice of cheese on the tomato, followed by another slice of tomato and he continued this pattern until the salad sat in a circle around the edge of the plate. In the middle, he placed the left-over ingredients which he had chopped, diced, mixed, and covered in dressing. I watched this from my perch on the white stone counter knocking my feet into the wooden cupboards below.
“Did you not want mom for dinner, tonight?” I chose my words carefully, not wanting to offend my father, “Did you invite her because of us?” He placed the blue plate on the kitchen table then moved to tend the chicken on the stove while answering me.
“I would have no need to see mom- Anita anymore without you and your sisters.” The correction of her name created tension in the kitchen. He added, “It’s not that I didn’t want her to come but of course, I did it for you and your sisters.” He moved across the linoleum that he swore every day he hated to the window above the table. He pushed it open to let in a breeze and maybe hoping to let the unseen tension slip through the screen and into the garden.
Upstairs, I heard a knock on a wooden door and I pictured my mother knocking my older sister’s new bedroom door. Faintly, we could hear them; my father turned down the little A.M. radio on the counter. Maybe it was a subconscious gesture or maybe it wasn’t, but it went unspoken between us as we listened in the kitchen.
“Samantha,” we heard my mother say from upstairs, “are you going to be eating dinner with me and the rest of your family?”
“No- I already ate so I’m not hungry,” a pause and then a typical to the speaker response, “I wouldn’t have eaten if I had known you were really gonna show up.”
“Oh, Samantha,” said a voice full of anger and annoyance rather than hurt, “I came all the way here and my oldest daughter doesn’t even have the decency to eat dinner with me!”
“Stop getting so annoyed. We will all be at your house next week and we can eat together then. You only came down to see the house- to see if Dad’s doing any better than you are.” Sam’s calm, unemotional voice made my mother even angrier. I could see Sam, my sister who was two years older and probably my best friend, standing there with her pretty brown eyes looking glazed at my mother’s face. My mother was probably fidgeting with a ring she had placed over the white line that ran across her finger and looking anywhere but back at my sisters’ eyes.
My father evidently was sick of their conversation because their voices where replaced by running water. A moment later, little tufts of blonde hair could be seen behind the railing and then Jessica was there, standing at the bottom of the stairs. We stood in silence while the chicken on the stove started to sizzle, erasing any trace we could hear of the argument upstairs.
The chicken, now fully prepared, joined the tomato salad on the table. It rested on a light green plate that matched the plates at each of our seats. I hopped off the counter and on to the hated linoleum. My father handed me another green bowl full of green salad and a little pot containing rice and I set them on the table before assuming my usual seat. The tufts of hair followed my lead and sat down as well, swinging it’s feet under the white chair. My mother clicked down the stairs to join us- the smell of the chicken must have been her silent alert that dinner was ready. Sam did not follow but I hadn’t really expected her to and no one mentioned it.
My father joined us, picked up the tomato salad, and after serving my sister and I, asked my mother if she would like some as well. After quickly inspecting the salad with her eyes, she nodded her head.
“Thank you, Peter,” she said. A moment like this caused me to put my fork down while I followed the exchange with my head; right to my father as he asked and left to my mother as she replied. These moments of anger-free remarks untraced by bitterness were rare for this family and we savored it. At least I did- Jessica must have not realized the immense value of this moment to me and with five words she shattered it.
“Mom,” she whined as I re-picked up my fork, “I need new shoes.” I wanted to pick up the table and turn it over- breaking the dishes, ruining the food and then stomping through it all to my little sister who now sat across from me. I wanted to pick her up and yell at her. Yell at her because she didn’t understand- she didn’t know how to try and avoid conflict that in this family could start over five simple words like the ones that had just escaped her mouth.
“Peter, why don’t you buy Jessica new shoes?” The words like a hook speared the bait my sister had made available but oh, she wasn’t done yet. This was not a fish hook with just a writhing worm attached- no, she wanted to make one of those fancy minnow shaped hooks you could buy at Malone’s Gas Station down the road. She wanted one of those hooks that was guaranteed to get a good catch. “You know I would buy them…if I could but Peter, I don’t think I could afford shoes for her.” As she spoke, I imagined that baited line being cast from her mouth, across the table, and just bobbing in the air above my father’s head.
“Anita,” he said trying to prove wrong the hook’s guarantee, “can we not bring this up at dinner? Please?” His effort to resist is pointless.
“Well, Peter, do you want her walking around barefoot?”
“Anita, I didn’t say that. I just don’t-” He just doesn’t want to talk about it at dinner but my mother interrupted him as she reeled in the fish she knew she had caught.
“Peter, why can’t you just buy your daughter a new pair of shoes? Is it really so much to ask?” Her voice is rising and her fork clinks down hard against the green plate. “Just buy her something she needs for once. Just stop being so selfish for once. Think about the kids!”
With that, I threw down my fork, still speared with a tomato and pushed the wooden chair against that cursed, hated floor. I pushed open the screen door in the kitchen and ran down the sidewalk. I ran up the stairs that lead to the roadside- skipping every other step. My father once said that he wished he had a nickel for every stair at this house he climbed- I wondered now, did I still get a nickel for every stair if I took them two at a time?
I reached the top platform by the road and stood again where the gravel met the blacktop. My head bent down so that when a tear fell, it hit the black top. I watched it fall then moved my head a little back- now a tear fell into the gravel. After several more tears, I had aligned my head perfectly so the tears hit on the border of the two textures.
The screen door slammed below but to my surprise, I heard clicks. I thought my father would be the one to come up to get me, to calm me down, to tell me that my mother just likes problems and confusion. She came up instead and I turned to face her, noticing how shiny and black her shoes were- blacker than the blacktop, which had been faded and cracked from many hard winters.
Silence stood between us as our eyes met and a noise from the wood that usually went unheard was noticed by both of us- a black walnut falling to the forest floor and being welcome by nature’s dead; last fall’s leaves, fellow walnuts that had dried and cracked, and a few weeds that had died from lack of sunlight. I felt older and stronger all of a sudden. I felt brave enough to stand up to this woman- to stand up to Anita. I looked her right in the center of her blue eyes and asked her five little words:
“Am I being selfish, too?”