Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

All three girls are in their twenties now, and for all their evolution and ostensible liberation, they have no interest in a story that is not about a handsome, famous man. Still, I am their mother, and they understand that they will have to endure me in order to get to him. I take back my place on the sofa and begin again, knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them.

I put on my nightgown and crawl in beside him, covering the hand that covers his heart. Live forever, I say to myself.

Fear and laughter: the two worst reactions in the absence of logic.

It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days.

I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her. No one sees us but the swallows looping overhead. She puts her arms around my waist and we stand there, just like that, casting a single shadow across the grass.

Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands.

“Yes.” I’d been too young to understand it then. He smelled like the cherry orchard.

Home

The parking lot where Sebastian left his car was nowhere near the tennis courts and so he carried me, past the path that went down to the lake and past the path that would have taken us back to the theater. He carried me all the way to the company housing. Would Duke have carried me under different circumstances? No, Duke would have gone and gotten the car. That was the difference: One brother would take the girl to the car while the other would bring the car to the girl.

Joe nods. “I can believe it. Our entire relationship was like that back in the day.” “Two cars passing in the late afternoon,” I say.

Fate

Oh, Joe, working all day on the farm and then driving down to play the Stage Manager and then coming to the hospital to sit in a vinyl chair and watch me sleep. And I had missed him.

My heart hurts reading this

There is no scenario in which one of our girls would be in a hospital without us. We would find a way to get there and they know this. But I was the girl who’d left college for Hollywood, who’d lived alone in a furnished apartment in L.A., who’d offered to sleep with the wrong person in her efforts to get a part in a play, who came to Michigan with two suitcases. It never occurred to me to call my parents and tell them what had happened.

I hope sofia always tells us

I hadn’t wondered when things were going to change. I had wondered when things were going to stop changing.

“Lucky for me my brother fell in love with someone small,” he said. Love, he said. It was the single mention of that word during my relationship with Duke.

summer passion not summer love

Sebastian kissed my forehead with kindness, the same way my brothers had kissed me as a child. He would get me a wheelchair. He would make sure someone took me to the play. I think I was asleep before he was out the door, and then I was awake again and Duke was kissing me, the startling taste of tequila filling my mouth. He must have come straight from the lake and into my bed. He covered me with his pervasive dampness. “You’ve been gone forever,” he said, pushing off his espadrilles.

Love the comparison here

“Sure I did. All my friends were in that play. I had to be there for them.” I can’t remember if this is true, if this is the person I was at the time or the person I became later.

Who we are vs who we wish we were. Doesn't seem like she's a reliable narrator.

I ate cherries all the way to the theater.

The curtain was up and Joe was sitting on the stage reading a book.

My heart

I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without. The hardest one had nothing to do with Duke or plans or love. It was realizing that I wasn’t Emily anymore.

Emily showed us that, all those moments in life we had missed and would never get back again.

All year long we stare out this window—the tissue-thin blossoms, the birds, the cherries and the apples, the bright-red autumn, the sweep of snow, the resulting mud, and then the blossoms again. French Impressionism has nothing on our view.

“She says, ‘You’re so lucky. You get to date lots of people. You get to go out and have experiences and all I’ll ever have is Benny.’”

We are still on summer stock time, after all, four performances of Our Town left when I came back from the hospital, Fool for Love opened four nights after Our Town closed. I would say within the first five minutes of Fool for Love I knew they’d already had sex and were planning on having sex again as soon as the curtain came down. I knew it, Sebastian knew it, the audience knew it. When she tipped the bottle of tequila back, I could see it going down her throat. When he threw her to the floor and covered her with his body, I could hear people gasp. Sebastian and I gasped.

Did it happen before Fool for Love? Did it happen while I was in the hospital? Would it have happened if my ankle hadn’t swollen and I had stayed only one night instead of two? Two nights was one night more than Duke could sleep alone. They don’t even keep you one night now. It’s outpatient surgery. These were the things I used to think about, how with a slight shift in circumstances the outcome might have gone another way. Then I realized it would have gone that way eventually. Then I stopped thinking about it.

I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.

As a mom i understand

I had believed that Tom Lake was more enlightened than the average small town in Michigan, but the longer I stayed, the more I could see how it operated like the rest of the world.

I found the work extremely satisfying, as I imagine Rumpelstiltskin must have gotten a kick out of spinning all that straw into gold.

Pallace came to see me but found the floor of the cottage to be blistering hot. Try as she might, she couldn’t stand on it for more than a minute. She arrived with a bottle of Orangina from the cafeteria, a bag of pretzels: small offerings to lay on her altar of guilt. Clearly, she was tortured, and I was foolish enough to think she felt bad about taking my part—two parts! A low fog of tequila settled around her.

altar of guilt!

we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

“That’s why she told me not to come up for a while,” he said. “She told you not to come?” “I understood. She didn’t have the time. I mean, when you think about her schedule there wasn’t one minute. I wanted to see her in everything. I can tell you that. I really wanted to see her in Our Town again, even if it meant driving up and turning around to drive back after the show, I would have done it but she said it was too much.”

When Eddie and May started kissing, Sebastian covered my wrist with his hand and kept it there for the rest of the performance, his eyes straight ahead. Duke was gone and Pallace was gone and all we could do was sit there and wait for the show to be over. But while we waited we watched them. We understood that there had never really been a world in which Pallace would have stayed with a tennis coach from East Detroit, never any world in which Duke would stay with anyone at all.

The cocktail of grief and humiliation and longing battered my heart with such violence I was sure I could feel the muscle tear.

I shake my head. “Cat would never have asked me to sew their costumes. She knew what was going on. Everybody knew what was going on.

Ugh

“So when did you see Duke?” Maisie asks. I shake my head. “I didn’t see him.” “Meaning what?” Nell says, looking like a mad little Frenchwoman. “He ghosted you?” “We didn’t have the terminology but yes, that’s the general idea.” Maisie covers her eyes with her hands. “Son-of-a-bitch.

It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

I hadn’t said goodbye to Duke, who hadn’t said goodbye to me. Goodbye, theater. Goodbye, cherry trees and cigarettes and vodka. Goodbye, lake.

When we got to the turnoff for Traverse City, I started to think I might call Joe Nelson from the airport to say goodbye. I would tell Joe how I’d lost them, Duke and Sebastian and Pallace, all in one shot.

We did all the things we should have done while she was still alive.

We felt like we were picking up something that had started a long time ago. But we hadn’t started, had we?

Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.

oof

“It was such a good day,” he said. “The day I was here. Someone told me years ago that I should always have a place in my mind where I could imagine myself happy, so that when I wasn’t so happy I could go there. Anyway, this is the place I go.” “Me, too,” I said. “It’s funny, I’d forgotten you were with us.” “Understandable,” I said.

Every sentence that came into my head began with the phrase, Do you remember? but clearly, he did not.

I stood with my back to the sink, to the mirror. There was no condom dispenser in the bathroom. I’d bet there never are in these places. For this event I relied on the birth control favored by all women in such circumstances: luck. It works maybe half the time.

You think the thing that hurt you is going to hurt you forever but it doesn’t.”

The flame of that little candle sat between us for the rest of the night but through some holy kindness we felt for one another, we let it burn out.

We had chosen not to make a hard thing harder, which made it slightly easier when I counted up the days six weeks later and realized that my luck had run out.

I try to think if it matters at all. It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It was always about the farm, and how he thought he knew what it would be like to stay here based on just that single day.

Joe, the greatest good fortune of my life, these three daughters, this farm, I see it all and hold it for as long as I can, my hand on Nell’s head.

Like Uncle Wallace, Duke had three wives, and like Uncle Wallace, he wasn’t married to any of them in the end.