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The last summer my mother and I spent at my grandmother, Goldie’s house on Lake Winnebago, my main concern was to avoid the long, terrifying strands of algae that would curl around and brush against my thick, girlish leg as I swam by. The sensation of it was a sudden tickle, and caused me to quiver whenever it struck as though the ethereal spiny green ribbons were the tentacles of some unseen nefarious sea monster.
Oppressive humidity, the smells of the lake breeze blowing through rooms of musty wallpaper, Goldie’s thick perfume from its exquisite amber bottles, and the scent of her breath, bearing the aromas of Virginia Slims and brandy- this is backdrop to my childhood consciousness tenderly emerging; tiny green tendrils of an adult awareness beginning to curl into roots.
One of those countless afternoons spent at the lakehouse, I was standing on the dock looking down at the patterns and rivers the water made by clinging to the golden hair on my never-yet-shaved legs as the water turned to drips, hitting the tops of a faded red pair of my grandmother’s Keds that, though much to big, I wore as water shoes to protect from nemesis number two of the lake: leeches.
Goldie, nicknamed after her once straw-colored tresses, never came outside unless coaxed, and even then only to smoke. Her hair was cobwebs now – white and wispy, teased, sprayed and spun into a crusty globe. She went to get her hair done once a week, and would have a dent revealing her veiny skull from when she slept the very next day. I can’t place her in most of my lakehouse memories – I was always outdoors and she was always indoors.
I do remember Goldie would always order drinks at restaurants and hardly ever order food. My mom would order the same drink and say virgin, but switch glasses when Goldie wasn’t looking, and discreetly sip the minimum amount of the alcoholic drink maintain credibility to her mother. This was my first encounter with the word virgin. It had no sexual connotations; it was simply a way to order a Bloody Mary. Goldie sometimes blurred her words together, or would walk in a lilting shuffle, especially later in the afternoons and evenings –the only time I was inside because the lake flies were beginning to hatch, and would rise to the surface of the lake. I naively attributed her behavior to her age. She never even noticed my mother seamlessly absconding her drinks.
This afternoon, my mom was sitting outside, like always, to watch me while I stayed in the lake for hours. Her slick thighs were smothered with tanning oil, and her hair smelled lemony from the astringent scent of Sun-In. Despite the products, her thighs always just turned pink, and her dark hair faded to dirty orange from the combined ravages of a perm and the peroxide lightener.
I sat down next to her in a lawn chair, my bulky blue and green one-piece swimsuit clinging to my sturdy body, and picked off tiny bits of loose algae from my increasingly freckled arms. Thumbing through a People magazine, my mother stopped at a photo of a tall, blonde girl prancing out of the ocean, the softly rolling waves creating a perfect playground. Wow. Paris Hilton doesn’t have an ounce of fat on her body, does she? Mom observed. At nine, it didn’t occur to me to analyze and compare her body to mine, so I mindlessly agreed with my mother.
I sure don’t look like that in my swimsuit. As she said this, I saw her lips,
how thin and delicate they were; how her frosty pink lipstick detailed every line of her mouth. I knew that my lips were already bigger than hers, but I lacked the utilities to call them full or plump. Goldie’s feathery lips left wistful ruby imprints on the filters of her slender cigarettes. I looked at my mother, wearing her bikini top and loose shorts. My mom’s arms did kind of look like the celebrity’s in the photo: strong, lean, her muscles softly angular, carved into her flesh from hours of exercise. She also looked like the photo in this place on her chest, along her breastbone, where her ribs created thin ripples in her minimal cleavage. In Beverly Cleary books this place on a mother was soft and comforting, but when I leaned to press my ear against this place on my mother, it never quite fit together, her breastbone uncomfortably caused the cartilage in my ear to bend or fold. I judged her for this lack of motherliness, for not being a character in a Ramona Quimby book. Look at how her thighs don’t touch, Mom said. I examined the picture again, but was too distracted by Hilton’s playful scamper out of the water. I wondered if she was having such a great time because there weren’t any of those awful long algae strands or leeches in the ocean. If that was the case, I concluded, the only thing I could see to envy in the photo was Hilton’s uninhibited water play.
I stood and shuffled in the oversized red Ked’s back to the lakeshore, the water in the saturated soles of the shoes was pushed out and absorbed again as I put my weight into each step. Maybe we all had our battles that last summer at the lake house- Goldie in the house with her cigarettes and tumbler of tawny fluid, my mother and the image of a twenty-something starlet, and I, in the lake to single-handedly battle the inescapable sea creature with all the valor and courage possessed by a girl unencumbered.