French Braid(8)
They set out on a Saturday morning, after stopping at the kennel first to drop their dog, Cap, off for boarding. Alice was the one who drove. She’d had her license only a while and she was always begging to drive, although generally her father said no because she was too “headlong,” as he put it. Today, though, he allowed it. He sat beside her in the front seat, pointing out stop signs and curves and oncoming cars that she could see perfectly well for herself, thank you very much. In back were Mercy, David, and Lily—David in the middle, because he was still small enough not to mind the hump in the floorboard.
They were a family of blonds, but Mercy and David were golden-haired blonds, pink-and-white-skinned and vivid (such a waste, in David’s case), while Robin and the girls were slightly darker. All of them had blue eyes, and all of them were shortish, even Robin. Alice knew this bothered him, because sometimes when he was dealing with taller men at the store she saw him draw his shoulders up and hold his head higher than usual. He would practically stand on tiptoe. This always made her sad, although she supposed he didn’t realize he was doing it.
It was a half day’s trip through mostly rural areas, once they’d left the city. David could still be entertained by glimpses of horses and cows and their young ones, and he and his mother made a game of spotting tractors, but Lily was in a sulk and slouched silently in her seat, glaring straight ahead of her. As they drew nearer to the lake, they began to see signs reading tourists in front of some of the private homes, and tarpaper shacks selling bait, and gravel lots full of motorboats with their prices chalked on their windshields. Scattered cafés no bigger than sheds offered fried chicken and meatloaf and dollar lunches. The Garretts had packed a lunch to eat once they arrived, but they did stop at a roadside stand for produce, and then again at a cinderblock cube beneath a two-story-tall electric sign reading fat harry’s groceries. Lily didn’t go into Fat Harry’s with them; she stayed in the car, with her arms folded stubbornly across her chest. “The more fool you,” Alice told her when they all returned. “Mom let us get ice cream and we chose butter brickle.” Lily hated butter brickle; she always said the chips felt like something that shouldn’t be in there. But she didn’t even bother reacting, just went on staring straight ahead.
What with all the produce they’d bought and now the groceries, it was a fairly uncomfortable ride for the final five miles of the trip. Their trunk was stuffed with suitcases and linens and Mercy’s painting supplies, so their purchases had to be crowded around them inside the car—Fat Harry’s grocery bags all but hiding Mercy and Lily from view, and a giant watermelon resting on David’s lap. Paper sacks from the farm stand covered the floor in front of Robin, leaving barely enough room for him to set his feet.
They had to locate their cabin from a mimeographed sheet of instructions that had been mailed to them by the owner. “Take a right on Buck Smith Road,” Robin read aloud. “Continue two and one quarter miles. Take a left at the sign for Sleepy Woods.” Sleepy Woods turned out to be six log cabins lining the highway, a couple with boats jacked up on trailers in their side yards. The Garretts’ cabin was number 4. It was small but efficiently organized, all on one floor, with a bedroom for the girls and another for their parents, this one with a foldout cot set up for David. The combination kitchen and living area smelled of wood smoke from the fireplace, but the bedrooms smelled like mildew and so Mercy opened the windows. Outside, the smell was all pine and sunshine. Pine trees towered overhead and the ground was slippery-smooth with brown needles. Alice could see why the place was named Sleepy Woods. She thought she could sleep very well here.
First they ate their lunch at the wooden table in the kitchen, because all of them were starving. They had tuna-salad sandwiches and carrot sticks, with peaches from the farm stand for dessert. Then Robin started unloading the things in the trunk, and Mercy sent the girls to make up the beds while she put away the groceries. David was the only one without a task, so he went out back to let Bobby Shafto climb trees. He shimmied him up various trunks and set him astride low branches, in the meantime singing, “He’ll come back and marry me-ee…”
Once the trunk was emptied, Robin and David changed clothes and walked down to the lake to try it out—Robin in baggy red trunks and a T-shirt and regular black work shoes with black socks, David in a short white terry-cloth robe bought especially for this trip and his little brown fisherman sandals. The path to the lake was a kind of logging trail through the woods, two sandy ruts with a grassy strip in the middle. For several minutes after they left they could be seen flickering in and out of patches of sunlight, Robin with their towels draped around his neck and David swinging his beach bucket so that the shovel inside made a clanking sound they could hear even from the cabin.
Alice tried to chitchat with Lily while they were making up the beds—“I call dibs on the one by the window” and “I sure hope this cot is more comfortable than it looks”—but Lily didn’t answer and kept her same grumpy expression. When they’d finished, Alice unpacked her things and put them in the bureau (“I call the top two drawers”), and Lily took a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen from her suitcase and settled against the propped pillow on her bed and started writing. To Jump, presumably, not that she bothered explaining that.
Alice gave up on her. She put on her swimsuit and a big shirt and collected her camera—a Brownie Starflash she’d been given for her last birthday—and went back out to the kitchen, where she found Mercy hunting a pitcher for the tea she’d just brewed. “I’ll look for one while you go change,” Alice told her, and Mercy said, “Oh, thanks, honey,” and disappeared into her bedroom. She emerged a few minutes later in a shirred latex swimsuit such as Esther Williams might wear, and a peach kimono fluttering open at the front and cork-soled sandals with giant pompoms on the toes. “Where’s Lily?” she asked, and Alice made a face and said, “Writing a letter.” Mercy just gave an airy little laugh. She seemed to view Lily as some belle from Gone with the Wind, with boys galore lining up to “dance attendance,” as she called it.