An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [22]
I mistook bodies for persons, and admired Oma above all for her freckles. Also, she could float. She could float on her back in Lake Erie, she said, and read a book. Sadly, I never saw her perform this feat, for she was not so much of a reader that she felt the need of reading while bathing, but I often saw her float for long periods. Her vast tight abdomen rose in the air; her fingers joined over it. She could easily have held a book. Her small round head in its white rubber cap lay half submerged. From the shore I could see an expression of benignity or complacency on her features, features which had been rather bunched together, centered around her nose, by the tight bathing cap and its strap. She rocked over the little waves, calm as a plank. She wore white tennis shoes into the water, for our part of Lake Erie was bumpy with glacial stones. When she floated, her tennis shoes stuck straight up.
From the bathhouse we climbed two flights of stairs to the house proper, a mid-twenties white frame house with five bedrooms and three bathrooms upstairs, and more on the third floor, where Henry Watson lived.
Now Henry was pushing a mower over the back lawn. Politely he asked us how the water was; he didn’t like the water.
Henry rarely wore his full uniform at the Lake; he wore only the heavy black pants, a white shirt, and suspenders. When he drove, he put on his cap. Famously, Henry loved summers at the Lake. He took pride in the cool lawns with their bluish, cylindrical grass. Mornings he cleared the horsetail beside the long path from the bathhouse. He washed the glass porch walls. He stood in the driveway up to his ankles in foam, a ridged black garden hose in his hand, washing the car. Vapor rose low from the hot asphalt driveway; it was warm in the nostrils, sweet, smelling of soft soap. Henry’s gold-rimmed glasses flashed.
In Pittsburgh, during the rest of the year, Henry went home every night to the Homewood section. By day he waited at curbs while my grandmother tried on shoes. He served dinner, nightly, in his white uniform jacket. Here at the Lake he had one friend, another chauffeur, named Cicero. He slept on the third floor. On a kitchen counter was his drinking glass.
Inside, Oma and Amy and I found Mary Burinda standing on the back of a flower-print couch. She held against a living-room window a curtain rod from which depended heavy, flower-print curtains. “Here, Mrs. Doak? Or lower?” Our grandfather was watching the Cleveland Indians on television in the same room. Henry would join him when he finished mowing.
“No, higher, I should think. But not now.”
Mary climbed from the couch. She was thin, sallow-skinned, full of love, quick to laugh. She always wore her white uniform. By choice, she rarely came to the beach. I asked her how long it would be until dinner. She looked at her black watch. Two hours, she said. You kids. How was the water?
Mary was forty-five, to Oma’s sixty-five. She had lived with them twenty-four years. Almost all of her family, she told me, had died one day during the 1918 flu epidemic; her parents and most of her brothers and sisters had died one after the other in the house. Both at the Lake and in Pittsburgh she had a room and a private bath; over the bed hung a crucifix, the most bizarre object I had ever seen. Of Mary’s Catholicism, Oma used to say, with a tinge of admiration, “She’s stubborn.”
Mary and Henry ate in the kitchen. We ate on the enclosed porch. From the porch we could see the tall fir trunks on the back lawn, and the lake below and far down the cliff, and the lake beating in waves over the stones and up onto the sand, and blurring offshore with the sky.
Oma settled in for a phone call. She combed her wet hair and shaped its waves with a freckled forefinger. She sat to her Florentine leather desk, by the tall living-room windows. I joined my grandfather at the Cleveland Indians game; Amy rolled around bored on the floor. I could hear Oma. She placed the call with the operator