19
ing the woods—it was like reading another text, another score, unassuming and secret and life-giving, barely known and not interested in making converts—that was the wilderness, that was where she should be spending her free time. And then she slapped herself on the thigh. Or you could try it. Just try AA sometime. It’s there for you. You could just try it. 19 In August of 1969 Alex came home for the ‹rst time in a year and a half. She pulled out of her suitcase a huge pink bucket of Almond Roca candy, a frozen chunk of smoked salmon thickly wrapped in newspaper and bread bags, and three birthday presents for her youngest sister—a Clancy Brothers album, a re‹llable Rapidograph pen, and a used hardback copy of To the Lighthouse which she had found in the dark recesses of the Bookworm on University Avenue in Seattle. Melina loved the way words and pictures ›owed out of that pen. Alex made a heavenly creamy sauce with the salmon which they poured over wide, curly noodles. “First-rate,” said Sean, home for the summer from Ann Arbor. But within days Alex was thinking to herself, something is wrong. Something is very wrong around here. For starters the Pinestead lawn was all crabgrass and dandelions, though Sean kept it trimmed to the ground with Mr. Wilgosch’s little tractor mower. Other people had deep green lawns, like you were supposed to have. Your bare feet wanted to sink into other people’s lawns. At Pinestead it hurt to cross that prickly dead stuff. And the ‹ve cabins were so plain, so shabby. The cupboards still had those battered cheap pots and percolators, and the bedsheets were so worn people ripped them with their toenails. Who would stay in these pathetic shacks but long-time renters and oddball ‹shermen who liked Mom’s prices? The main house was worse, grimy and dusty. Wallpaper peeling off the bow wall in her old bedroom, the carpets worn thin, black holes in front of the ‹replace from ›ying sparks, scum on the stove hood so thick you could write messages in it. The same old dinner plates were 181 yellow from decades of hard water. Old Yukon, their gentler dog, had died, and Mel had put a cross over his grave near the end of the driveway ; Alex didn’t say anything, but a tip-tilted cross on a dog’s grave seemed a poor way to welcome guests to a summer resort. As for Mel. You could not say from one day to another what that girl would be doing, what kind of mood she’d be in, what kind of progress she’d be making on her own future. She was going to be a senior in high school, but she was always walking around in a fog. Everything was doodled on, even the margins of the phone book! Her pale green eyes, one half brown, startled you, the way she stared into space. She played “Camptown Races” and “Shady Grove” and “Oh! Susanna” and a couple of protest anthems over and over again on that banjo, just because she could play them so fast, but she didn’t learn new songs. She hadn’t kept up with her lessons. One afternoon she smelled like cigarette smoke, and Alex did not know what to say. Sean was working all day around the place, at this or that—he single -handedly replaced two rotted beams in the garage—and he was working up at Wilgosch’s, and he refused to sit and discuss things. He acted like he was working too hard to afford the luxury of looking for problems. It made him angry when Alex pointed things out, as though her alarm was a criticism of him. Sharon was up in Alaska saving money to marry a seismologist next summer, and Becky was working at a summer camp, and Mom was just not paying attention. Mom was like a kid: she wanted to spend every minute doing something fun— canoeing, berry picking, sometimes consulting with Sean about a few things he might want from the new Ace Hardware out on the highway . She let the renters fend for themselves! If Melina slept in till noon, Mom let her be. Entropy was no joke. Was there something else wrong? Alex couldn’t put her ‹nger on it, but it was there—the three of them, Mom and Mel and...
OR
