Tiff Holland

Summit Lake

By Tiff Holland

She made me stay with her that summer. That sounds ridiculous—my mother made

me, a grown woman, stay with her that summer, but she did. She’d signed me out of

the psych ward just in time to finish my final papers, graduate magna cum laude

among the cherry blossoms. Dad flew in from California and offered, wanted me,

even, but we both knew his dark efficiency would finish the job I had started. So, I

went with Mom, her name on the forms in-case-of-emergency, next-of-kin and,

finally, under-supervision of.

 

She gave me the bigger room, the queen sized bed that filled it, sideways, facing the

lake. She took the brass daybed in the other room, the only piece of furniture she

owned from before. We shared a bathroom with two doors, that might have been

called a Jack-n-Jill in a ranch house or a split level like the Brady’s but in that house

in that neighborhood that had started as cottages and shacks, weekend places back

when the lake was the center of a low-end amusement park that burned, every stick

of it, to the ground, it screamed “plumbing added post-construction.”

 

I didn’t want to be there, of course, but I didn’t want to be anywhere.

 

One of Mom’s customers sold her the house for twenty thousand even, including all

the furniture and appliances, dishes and linens, the manual lawnmower stored in

the shed in back, the size of an outhouse with a scythe hanging from a nail.

 

The lady was moving to a nursing home. She would never need any of those things

again, and she loved Mom in a way many of her customers, the Beauty Shop Ladies,

did. All those weekends in Mom’s chair, I guess, her teasing their hair, listening,

bringing them only slightly stale donuts and coffee in bone china cups that used to

be part of her special-occasion only collection before Dad left and she sold The

I was in the hospital when Mom asked me whether or not to do it, move from her

post-divorce apartment to Summit Lake, like I was in any shape to give advice.

 

I said, “Where else are you going to find a house for twenty grand?” Reminded her of

the young man’s voice overheard from her apartment screaming: help me, help me,

please, God, help me! Just the week before.

 

So she closed. There were no closets in the bedrooms. Mom kept her outfits on a

clothesline in the abnormally damp basement. I kept underwear in a plastic bin

under the bed, my folded jeans and t-shirts on the bookshelves on the sunporch

downstairs among my philosophy texts: Kant and Kierkegaard, Hume, Nietzche and

Heidegger. Mom wanted to throw them away.

 

“These books. These books are what did this to you,” she said more than once,

although she had other opinions, too, what was wrong with me, molestation, vitamin

deficiencies, the time she, oh my god, dropped me on my head, forceps, genetics from

my father’s side of course, opinions she had shared with me almost nightly by

telephone before my admission.

 

When she was at work I would open my books, which smelled like me, me before,

the pot mom didn’t know about, my brand of laundry soap, crumbs from my peanut

butter sandwiches. I’d scour my own high-lighting for clues to how my brain

functioned before the lithium. When my eyes got tired, I sat on the old-lady furniture

and watched the console television. I ate cold leftovers from original-model pieces of

Tupperware, with no burp left, and took long baths. Some days, I sat on the bed in

my temporary room and watched the lake through the windows. Once or twice I

saw someone pull himself up on a surfboard, yank at a rope attached to a sail before

taking a jumping fall into the water.

 

I left the bathroom doors open when I bathed. While Mom was at work I walked

downstairs in my underwear to get clean clothes. I was a ghost, no one could see me

behind the screens and draperies, the windows never-cleaned. Even if I shut a door,

Mom always came in, without knocking or calling out. She went through my room to

the bathroom, saying it was faster, although each had a door and the rooms were the

same size long-ways. She thought nothing of opening the bathroom door, sitting

down on what, to my disdain, she called “the pot,” and starting up a conversation

while I soaked, as if I were the hairdresser and the toilet were the styling chair, as if

Once, she walked in just as I was getting out. I’d taken the towel off the bar but not

yet pressed it to my body. She stopped in the doorway.

 

“You have such a beautiful body,” she said, really looking at me for the first time in

years, before hitching down her hose and underwear. “You should be happy.”

 

“Thanks,” I said, slipping back into the water, as if it were murky or full of bubbles,

some place I could hide.