Grandma Lake

Hunger might be the word for it. Maybe hunger made me pop open sticky drawers in the kitchen and poke my head into cupboards nearly glued shut by the dust of time. Hunger, maybe, is why I searched those empty places again and again as a child, though I knew full well there were only ever mouse droppings rolling on the wood, and two dried end pieces of bread, hard as tree bark, in the long drawer beneath the toaster.

I was in high school when I biked to Grandma Lake. It was a particularly hungry time. Days prior I’d woken up on the couch to Mom’s sobs bleeding through the concrete wall to her room. As always, I lifted myself from the couch, all arms, no legs, to make no creaks, and I pressed my ear to her seldom-closed door. She just cried, loud, round sobs. I wracked my memory, revisited the usual culprits of her misery. Dad was home. In fact, Dad was always home that fall, his leg shattered. He’d broken it at Camp, playing with his friends’ kids. He’d jumped to dodge a water balloon, and it exploded on the grassy hill beneath him. He came back down to the wet Earth, and his ankle, which had hurt him since middle school, folded.

He’d been out of work all summer. Mom slurred on the phone with every company that knew our house—phones went dark, the internet’s modem blinked red, the lights blinked off, and all the while Mom begged representatives to at least let us see at night. Dad gathered all the work he could. He tinkered with neighbors’ broken engines while sitting on a bucket outside, his leg propped on a log. Nicky and I emptied our pockets. We were all holding hands up to the sun and trying to shade the ground. The mortgage company’s truck prowled up and down the road. A camera poked from its window. If I was outside, I stared deep into that lens. I felt sick with anger. I imagined doing horrible things.

That morning of Mom crying, Dad left, driving despite every warning not to, to some lonely forest road, where he picked blueberries. That’s what he’d been up to, that and itching beneath his cast, looking distant and scared in a way that left me nauseous, that left Haley pacing, unable to even sniff at her favorite person. That morning, a truck pulled into the driveway, and I shot to the window to look. It was the rust-bitten silver Chevy of my grandpa.

Grandpa sat at the dining room table with me and Mom, who was sober for now. Grandpa seemed tired, but for the first time, not upset. He was a stern man, as grandpas tend to be. He grew up poor and stayed that way most of his life, only finding his feet after retiring a couple years prior to all this, having bounced from his mechanic and bartending days in Kenosha to glasswork and then manual labor for the Forest Service once he made the exodus north. There, he was a thirty-niner, as he’d say, the kind of guy they’d work every hour but the last so they’d never have to give out benefits. That’s how life was, Grandpa reckoned, always stuffing a stringer through your gills, bleeding you just short of death, and if things seemed peaceful it was only because the powers that be were taking their time tying the next knot. On the occasions we’d visit him and Grandma, he’d start the evening one way and end it another, sitting before a bonfire with his face all flickering shadows. Formalities gave way to criticism, to cutting questions about how Dad would afford this, or if I was working enough that summer, or what was wrong with Mom. Grandpa always felt like an electric fence, like if all the negativity that quietly wired through me, and through Dad, was sparking, hot, blitzing out at every little thing that surrounded his tall, crooked form.

But that day, Grandpa equipped a smile. Strangely, he reminded me of Grandma. Grandma, who was easier to understand. Grandma was happy. No matter what, nor when, nor why, Grandma laughed; her laugh was famous through town, an incredible cackle that blasted across the lake or rocked the bottles on the bar, that belied the sheer mirth in her short frame. Grandma played Go Fish with us until our voices were hoarse from screaming it—she made us Grandma’s special sandwich cookies. By the time I’d grown up, by the time it struck me that Grandma drank even more than Mom, that she blazed through cigarettes so fast and frequently they could’ve been some mutant firefly, fat orange sparks hovering then dancing to the wet grass, I knew that those sandwich cookies were just plain graham crackers, smushing a dollop of Dollar Store vanilla icing. But that day, I’d have died for a plate of those, crammed somewhere between piles of fingerprint-smudged cards, ashtrays, and plastic cups of vodka.

“Bob,” Mom said, wiping old mascara down her puffy face. “It’s never been this bad.”

“I know,” Grandpa said, still trying to smile.

“We’re really gonna lose it,” Mom gulped, sniffled, then wailed—“We’re really gonna  lose the house, Bob,” she said, sinking face-first into the table and crying.

“Well,” Grandpa said, clearing his throat, “We’ve got all that scrap metal in the back you know, was meaning to bring that all in anyway.”

Mom sat up. She looked at Grandpa with bleary eyes, face so puffed it was hardly recognizable. She nodded, and so did he.

“Looks like we gotta sell the scrap for groceries these days!” he said, standing up, smacking hands on knees. His eyes told me that he wished it was just a matter of groceries.

Grandpa spent that day throwing twisted exhaust systems from cars past or half-welded aluminum scraps from patch jobs on the roof of his barn into a trailer. I watched the old swing set fly through the air, as if swinging itself. Me and Nick and Steve spent the earliest years of our life on that old structure, which sat resolute in the middle of our yard for decades before us. Savanah and I pushed each other back and forth. Grandpa and I dug it up when its rust got so bad that flakes of it shed like leaves and hid amidst the dandelions and phlox, cutting at our feet and our arms when we’d fall. Now, that staple of my young life rattled to the junkyard.

* * *

For the moment, the house was saved. We scrapped and begged. Dad’s leg was still a hot, swollen mess, stitched up the whole length of his tibia, but he went back to work late in the fall. Still, we starved. There was so much to catch up on, so much emptiness to fill. I learned the value of distraction. It was one of those dull, stomach-aching days, in a haze of boredom and pain, and the need to fill something within me that could actually be filled that I decided to undertake the adventure that would fill my mind. I wanted to explore; I wanted a new lake, and I wanted to fish it.

My old bike was wrapped in raspberry bushes behind Grandpa’s barn. Some scrounged WD-40 and the tire pump Dad left stationed next to his truck revived it. I lifted the rusty bike upright, saddled it shakily. It fit me better than it used to, adult-sized in the first place, a dump-off gift from a family friend who was moving. I used to spin it circles around our circular driveway. Now, I pointed toward the woods. Grandma Lake had been on my mind for some time. In those nights where I stared hard at Google Maps as it chugged under our dial-up, rendering the landscape to life, I had found Grandma Lake, a small, oblong, bluish dot, just four miles from my home. I’d never heard anybody speak of it, and that intrigued me. Dad always had at least a quip for every lake in the area—an old story, a quick review of what might bite. But he had nothing for Grandma Lake—just the knowledge it was out there, somewhere. I had to go.

Dad always had at least a quip for every lake in the area—an old story, a quick review of what might bite. But he had nothing for Grandma Lake—just the knowledge it was out there, somewhere. I had to go.

When I walked out the door, Mom, with her eyelids drooped, back to drinking in earnest now that she had a house to drink in, said in her slow-motion voice,

“Maybe you’ll catch some dinner.”

* * *

The wind sang through the taut line of my fishing pole as my bike flew down the rolling hills, and I swerved the potholes, the puddles, and the slicks of wet maple leaves going gold for the fall. I thought of how Mom said that line every time I went fishing, from the days she would let me toddle to the outlet down the street and even now. She said it with the inflection of a joke. Maybe, I would catch dinner. My temples throbbed; I shook my head. It infuriated me, the pressure to provide, the rerouting of my trip from an excursion to a mission.

I’d passed by Grandma Bonnie’s house on the way to the lake. It was a Savanah-less time. With no internet or phone, and with her at her dad’s lately, I only saw her in passing at school, where maybe she’d smile at me or maybe not—I couldn’t know. I still felt like something was wrong. I knew she was still going to Green Bay. I hated that I couldn’t think more of it, couldn’t find the words to ask her what was happening. My eyes were stuck to the floor, my empty stomach panged, rocked my whole body. Life went by in stereoscope, fuzzy, most of my vision black.

It wasn’t any different when I passed Bonnie, where on top of everything my heart panged at the memory of Bonnie standing outside in her garden and waving at me on this very same bike, when I first learned to ride it. Now I saw her pondering a pile of firewood stacked against her garage, how she’d get it moved. There were times she’d pluck me from the road and it’d be my job, and times like this, where I was a buzzing noise zipping past her. She came and went with Savanah, a grandmother to me sometimes, a neighbor others. Right then, I was sure she was upset with me, dragging my feet as I was in working on her “park” in the back. Since Dad’s fall, I was less inspired than ever, working all day, grabbing twenty bucks from Bonnie’s hands, walking across the field, and putting it on our dining table.

My stomach gurgled. I zipped around a corner in a haze. Grandma Lake was getting close. Mottled slices of sun flitted over me as I approached where I thought it was.

It was nebulous to me, the idea of a grandma. Savanah and my classmates talked about their grandmas all the time—grandmas and their homes in sunny states, grandmas and their Christmas presents, grandmas and their famous pies, sweet and hot in fresh tins, or their casseroles, salty and steaming and filling to the brim sets of glassware so big the heat could be felt coming from it like a woodstove. I’d been lucky to have flashes of these ideal grandmas pass over me—Bonnie and Grandma Terry and those fuzzy old evenings, fishing on Terry’s shore or sleeping on Bonnie’s couch, and eating so well. But now I was a ghost to Bonnie, and I knew Terry sat at home, drunk, on the south end of the lake, laughing at just anything.

I nearly swerved into the faded sign for Grandma Lake. It sat, moss-covered, peaking just above some ferns in a ditch. I leaned my bike against it.

The lake shone through the woods. It was a couple hundred feet off the road, perfect, still, though no path led to it. I exhaled, took my pole into my hand. This was the first, new lake I’d gone to myself. My first solo exploration—this must have been what Dad felt like, finding Lake 17, or any of the lakes in these woods. This was the start of a journey that would define my whole life.

I took a step into the woods, and my foot plunged into freezing water. I looked closely at the ground, and I saw that around the base of the trees was a marsh, where spring water welled under tufts of tangled cordgrass and cattails. I held my fishing pole like a tightrope walker and balanced on these plants, but, lightheaded, I slipped every other step, plunging into the water. Tiny lily pads clung to my legs as I trudged to the lake, but over and over I fell into the empty spots between the foliage. Though I was cold, my face grew hot, until finally both my feet slipped, and as if the Earth had been taken from me, I dunked into the freezing water, sank to my aching stomach in the marsh. I threw my pole into the water, which splashed back onto my face. There among the trees, I screamed just to scream.

It was just before me, Grandma Lake, shining and unattainable. I shivered before it, waded in its springs. I stumbled out from the weeds, fell to my knees back on dry ground. This was how it went with me and grandmas, I thought. Mom’s mom died just after I was born, just before her husband—stomach cancer. Mom told me she was kind; she used to stay up late building ham sandwiches for her husband’s fishing trips out on Lake Michigan; she put out pickled herring on Christmas Eve to grant good luck for the rest of the year, a Polish tradition. I remember Mom once said, on a hot, boring, summer afternoon,

“On a day like this, she would bring us out somewhere—she would’ve spoiled you kids.”

I picked up my bike and got back on. I thought of Terry too, and who came before her. My dad’s mother was named Katherine. She was schizophrenic, a drug addict. She and Grandpa Bob never got along, got married when they were teenagers, were divorced a few years after. Dad talked about those days like a distant, troubling dream, the kind he shook his head at, as if unsure it ever happened, for how bad he didn’t want it to. Katherine died at forty-four, when I was a child. A heart attack. I remembered being sick one day, little, with a rag plastered to my forehead, and Dad sitting next to me, looking off through the window, saying,

“She would be over here, taking care of you.”

Back on my bike, I pedaled home, churning up the hills I had sped down before. A cool evening breeze leveled me out. I thought of how Grandma Lake was a lake in the same way my mom’s quip about catching dinner was a joke to her. The pieces were there—a kid responsible for dinner, shining water, ripples of life—but without a way to get there, without actually bringing home a pile of fish to fry, there was nothing to laugh at. Not my empty stomach, not the genuine lilt of hope in my mom’s drunken voice that followed me out the door.

By the time the wind had mostly dried me off, I saw a stirring in the leaves on one side of the road. I squeezed my old brakes, came to a screechy stop. The undergrowth rustled, and I had the feeling that I should wait; that though I was tired, I should breathe lightly.

All at once, five baby racoons toddled from the woods. I froze, felt strangely as though I was lifted into the air, just an inch off of reality. The raccoons walked, bandit-masked and clumsy, right up to me. They swarmed around my bike. They chirped and cooed and stood on two legs to touch their noses to my bike tires, my damp shoes. They looked at me with doleful eyes, and though I knew not to, I reached down and pet them with my fingertips, tracing lines in their fur. They were so soft. There they were, out in the woods, alone, and they were still so soft. They circled me a while, I followed them with my eyes. Eventually, they toddled back into the woods.

They had to be hungry. Or something like it.

* * *

The next morning, I pedaled back down Grandma Lake Road. I thought of another joke my mom liked to make. I thought of it, maybe, because that morning I found her passed out on the couch, upright, hair draped like marsh grass around her face. And it reminded me of the really early days, the fuzziest ones, when I would sleep the same way, and she’d gently shake me awake for school.

But that morning, there was nothing to wake up for, and so I let her be. Instead, I thought of another joke she liked to tell, the thing she said any time I talked to Savanah on the phone:

“When am I gonna be a grandma?”

I probably thought of that joke because, try as I might, I couldn’t remember the exact spot where the little, probably motherless, raccoons had been. I felt like a grandma could have found them. But I could only crumble up the hard end pieces of bread we had and scatter them where I thought they might be. How I wished I could give them a big, hot plate of food. It would be so good to fill the emptiness.