Big Blue Lake
“What should I do with the towels?”
I’m standing in the candle-lit smoky bathhouse, tentative, naked, on a lake in New Hampshire, a September night, the water and air cooling, the day hot; we had been skinny dipping for the first time; we burned a book, a Leon Uris, a hardcover, in the stone fireplace — there was no wood — and now, about to get dressed and to leave, what should I do with the towels?
She is in a corner — she has narrow hips and big breasts, such a different body from the one I had been used to and no longer missed – shrugging a blue dress over her head and shaking her short hair.
She marches over, takes the towels, one in each hand, bunched up, damp, raises them to shoulder level, and dashes them to the floor in a heap, looking at me the whole long second.
“How did you get that scar?” she says.
“Which one?” I ask, looking at the towels — my mouth must have been hanging open — I must have looked like a blameless fool — naked.
She could see all the scars and the two marks that looked like puckered quarters that will overlap in your vision if you squint your eyes when you spot me, and she squints at my chest and pokes one. “This.”
When I turn and grab my pants and t-shirt, she slaps me on the ass and I smile.
“Mind the goose poop when you step out,” she says. I shuffle over the braided rug, slip on my sandals. “Where did you park?” she shouts behind her, walking into the dark.
My new car is still becoming used to me; it is so sanitary, so unlike anything I have been driving this past year; such a gift. It stinks of plastic and I think someone must have smoked in it during its short 365-mile life.
I stuck it under a big rhododendron near the boathouse and as we walk there over a pine-nettled trail I see fireflies, I thought they’d all be dead by now; she slips a hand into one of mine; we drive back to the motel restaurant and order eggs and a steak.
It comes with horseradish on the side of the dish. “And this day shall become a memorial for you,” she intones.
I have my elbows wide on the Formica table-top. I know you’re not supposed to put your elbows on the table, and you’re not supposed to throw towels on the floor, and you’re supposed to answer questions politely, and when with a beautiful naked woman, you’re supposed to have sex, probably, and you’re not supposed to be happy, necessarily.
But I was happy. I was happy because each table had its own little jukebox and I had a pocketful of quarters and I had just been swimming naked with a woman I barely knew and we hadn’t had sex and she hadn’t minded when I didn’t answer her questions and it had made me indescribably happy to watch her drop the towels. It’s not much, but it’s something.
