Surface Tension Read online

  Even though there's not that much water, I feel happy just being here. I look up at the gorge walls, where the shale is crumbling. Now the gorge is over a hundred feet tall, but the waterfall is always cutting through it at the top, so it's probably only forty feet. I always wonder what else is up there.

  There's a few burned logs and a bunch of beer cans next to us in the woods. Somebody must have camped here recently. I want to do that. Mom opens up the backpack and pulls out a bunch of snacks for us.

  I sit down on the ledge, right before the drop-off where the pool at the base of the waterfall gets super deep, and lean back against the rock. It's not comfortable, but I'm not moving either. Under the water, my toes look bigger than they do in real life.

  Mom brings me over another rectangle of chocolate and a can of soda. A bunch of minnows are swimming around my feet. One swims between my toes and nibbles. It tickles, but I don't move, and now the minnows are swarming around my toes taking little bites and then swimming away.

  They're tickling my feet so much I start laughing. Mom takes pictures of me and the waterfall and my feet and the minnows. This is the best.

  We're all sitting at the picnic table finishing our breakfast. Dad made pancakes, and it's just the best thing to be sitting out here and looking out at the lake, eating pancakes. Mom says, “It's so serene.”

  Dad says, “Serene. Serene.”

  I don't say anything. Mr. Richardson comes over in his Sunday church clothes and asks if we'd mind if he started mowing the lawn. Dad says it's okay, and Mr. Richardson thanks him and says, “Got my kids coming down today to help get this cottage in order. Can't have it looking so rundown.” He gestures over his shoulder at the cottage, which is perfect in every way.

  He goes inside, takes off his church suit, puts on his sweatpants and a T-shirt, and starts mowing his whole lawn.

  He mows it every Sunday after church. He's like sixty or something. He does it the same way every time. He starts in the corner near the woodpile and mows diagonally across the lawn. He mows around the trees and under the clothesline all the way up to the edge of our property, then pushes the lawn mower all the way back to the edge of his house. It's a big lawn, and if I were him and I owned a big house like he does and my own business, I'd pay someone to mow my lawn. I don't know if he likes doing it or if he's just a cheapskate, but he does it himself every Sunday.

  We finish our pancakes and bring everything back inside. Mom washes the dishes in one half of the sink while Dad rinses them and I dry them and put them away. There's only three of us, so we don't really have too many dishes and it doesn't take long. I sit at the kitchen table with my copy of Animal Farm and look out the side window.

  Mr. Richardson gets finished with the mowing and rolls the lawn mower back into the garage. Mike, the oldest, drives in first. He drives a black pickup with a V-8 engine. He's also got a sweet-ass purple speedboat with a 200-horsepower outboard motor and a girlfriend named Eliza with blond hair, but he doesn't have them with him today.

  Mrs. Richardson comes out and gives Mike a hug and then goes back inside. Mr. Richardson shakes Mike's hand like they're business partners, and Mike goes into the garage and gets out the grass collector. The lawn mower doesn't have a bag on it, so the cut grass gets spread across the lawn. Mike rolls over Mr. Richardson's diagonal lines with the grass collector and then empties the grass into a huge pile on the edge of the creek.

  Joe shows up next. The middle one. He's just got a little hatchback with nothing special about it and a girlfriend named Danielle, who's short with black hair and wears glasses. Joe's cool because he plays guitar in a band, but he's much quieter than Mike. He's usually either reading or practicing guitar, but today is a workday, so he gets the ladder out of the garage and pushes it up against the house and starts cleaning out the gutters. Our gutters have little trees growing in them.

  Mary, the daughter, shows up last in her little red Volkswagen Beetle. She's got blond hair and blue eyes, but no boyfriend that I've ever seen. She gets a bucket of paint out of the garage and touches up some of the trim around the house.

  They take a break for lunch and go inside, and I grab my book and go down to the beach to see if I can hear anything. They're all sitting on the screened-in porch talking and laughing. I can't see them because it's dark in there and sunny out here. Mike and Joe are making fun of Mary.

  I just sit and listen to them from over on our little part of the beach. I sit in a folding lawn chair and pretend to read about the pigs.

  After a while, the men come outside and I can hear the sound of metal clanging against metal. I guess they got enough work done for today, because Mike and Joe are playing horseshoes and drinking beer. I get up out of my chair and go up behind the woodpile so I can see them better.

  There's two railroad spikes in little pits about forty feet apart, and Mike and Joe stand on either side of the one that's farther away from me and throw the horseshoes toward the one that I'm hiding close to. I guess you're supposed to throw the horseshoe and get it around the spike. I think you get a point for getting it close too. You must, because why else would they say “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades”?

  Both guys are pretty good. They hit the spike on both of their throws. They walk down toward me and count up their points. They measure the distance between the horseshoes and the spike with another horseshoe. Mike says, “These are dead,” and Joe nods.

  I don't know how the scoring works, but I like watching them play. They throw a few more rounds, and I get bored, so I go back to my chair and just listen to the metal bang against metal.

  When the boys finish their game, the whole family except Mary goes out to the dock to swim. Mr. Richardson has so much hair on his back he looks like one of those old silverback gorillas. Mike is going bald already, but Joe still has all his hair. They both have almost the same body. Big shoulders, huge abs, and Adam's apples. I wonder if I'm ever going to have one of those. I feel my throat. I don't think I'm going to, because my dad doesn't have one.

  Joe stands up on one of the dock's posts and raises his arms and one leg like the Karate Kid, then jumps off in a perfect swan dive that he folds in at the last second, disappearing under the water. He comes up thirty feet away and shakes out his hair.

  Mr. Richardson has jumped in too and brought a bar of soap with him. He's going to take a bath in the lake, I guess. Now everybody is doing it. Lathering up their faces and armpits and then passing the soap to the next person. That's pretty weird. I don't know why they don't just take showers. They pull some shampoo from somewhere and take a big family bath with their swimsuits on.

  After the bath, they take a boat out and water-ski. They go two at a time, first Mr. and Mrs. Richardson, with Mike driving the boat. Then Mike and Joe. They're like a water show out there. They cross the wake and go under each other's lines. They hold the handle between their knees and drop a ski whenever they want. I wonder where Mary is. I haven't seen her for a while.

  I get up and head back to our cottage. I walk the property line and look over to see if I can get a glimpse of Mary. Nothing. Her car is still here, though, so she must be somewhere. I get back to the cottage and Dad is inspecting the canoe and Mom is getting some chicken ready for dinner.

  I don't want to do anything with my family. I want to be out on the boat with the Richardsons. I'd give anything to be a part of their family instead of mine.

  Dad and his buddies Roger and Norm are off golfing. I didn't want to go with them because I hate golf. I'd rather just hang out and swim and do whatever. I mean, that's the whole point of having this cottage in the first place, isn't it? It just seems stupid to own this little cottage that's barely even a shack compared to the Richardsons' and then spend half your time out drinking in the sun on some golf course.

  My parents still have a few really good friends around here from when we lived here, and they come out and spend the day with us. We bought this place when I was six. I remember how it was driving
in here for the first time. I'd fallen asleep in the back, so the drive didn't seem to take too long, and when I woke up, everything was perfect. I remember everything glowing gold in the sunlight, and walking down the hallway to my bedroom. My bed was covered with stuffed animals. I remember that. It felt like home right away.

  I remember fishing and running around like crazy and doing whatever I wanted that first summer. Of course, that was when we lived in town and it was only a half an hour's drive to get here. But then we moved because of Dad's job and sold our house in town. Dad wanted to sell this place too, but Mom wouldn't let him because she and I loved it so much.

  The idea was we would spend our summers here, like the Richardsons do, and Dad would commute to work. But now we live so far away Dad can only afford to take two weeks off every summer. I wish we could live here year-round like the Vizquels. That would be awesome. Maybe when I get older, I can live here full-time.

  I wonder what it's like in the winter.

  The golfers' wives are here hanging out with Mom. I like to hang around when the women are here sometimes. I like to hear what they talk about when they're alone and they don't know anyone is listening. There are two of them here today: Kay and Bonnie, the wives of Roger and Norm. They're all sitting around in their bathing suits, drinking wine coolers. I'm skipping rocks, perfecting my form for the world rock-skipping championships, which don't exist.

  Mom is talking about the new restaurant that's going to start up right next to O'Malley's. Kay says something about the owner being a drunk. Bonnie says she doesn't think it's a great idea to open a new restaurant right next to one of the best restaurants on the lake. Mom says she thinks O'Malley's is going downhill.

  They'll just sit there and talk all day long. All three of them are elementary school teachers, so they all have that teacherly kind of voice, really clear and a little too loud so you can hear it in the back of the room. I sort of feel like I'm back in third grade, except my teacher is drunk on wine coolers and wearing a bathing suit.

  Bonnie asks Kay about her new school, because I guess she doesn't like it. Kay says, “As soon as we started the ELA, all my time has been taken up with the standardized testing.”

  With my dad and his friends, they're always doing something when they hang out, like golf or poker or watching a football game. They would never just sit around in the sun and talk. I can't even imagine what they'd say.

  I'm half listening to the women while I'm trying to get the exact right rotation on my rocks so they'll skip more times. The rotation of the stone matters as much as the speed, but the angle that the stone hits the water is really the key. It has to be somewhere between parallel and slightly tilted up.

  The conversation the women are having has stopped making sense to me. Something about a church, a minister, and the Bells' cottage.

  I stop skipping rocks for a second and try to hear exactly what they're saying, but Mom notices me eavesdropping and stops the conversation.

  There's a long pause where no one is saying anything. Then Mom says, “Want to see if you can go find a puzzle in the cottage?”

  I could do that, except all the puzzles have missing pieces, but I guess I'll do something else anyway. This is getting boring.

  Kay and Roger brought their daughter, Claire, out to the lake with them. She's my age, but she acts like she's about a hundred years old. We've never really gotten along. She's just so boring. Maybe girls are just different, I don't know.

  When we were kids and I would do something stupid or funny, no matter what it was—even if it was just smashing up broken old bottles in the creek or trying to kill minnows by throwing pebbles as hard as I could into the shallow water— whenever I would do something like that, she would go straight back to her house and tell on me to her parents.

  Not even like running back and crying to them. She'd kind of calmly walk back to her house, so I wouldn't even know there was a problem until the parents came back and said, “Stop killing minnows” or “Stop breaking bottles.”

  I could never figure out why she hung around at all. She was just this mini-parent who would follow me around and wait for me to do something that crossed the line and then go tell on me. She once told on me for saying “Shut up” in her yard. And another time she told on me for crossing the street without permission. What the hell? What business was it of hers?

  She always knew where the line was, but I never did. I never knew where it was or what it looked like. I just did whatever I did until I got in trouble.

  She's inside the cottage. I guess I'll just go annoy her for a while.

  She's lying on the green couch reading a book for school. I sit across from her in the old black leather chair, also known as the Bad Chair. It's the chair I used to have to sit in after Claire told on me, because my parents didn't believe in spanking.

  “Hi, Claire.”

  “Hello, Luke.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Summer reading for school.”

  “You have summer reading?”

  “You don't?”

  “I do, but I don't actually read it.”

  “That's smart.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “You want to do something?”

  She looks at me sideways, like she's suspicious. “Like what?”

  “I don't know. Something bad.”

  She laughs, but not because she thinks it's funny, because she thinks I'm stupid. “No thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “I'm not interested in doing something bad.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “What's the point?”

  “The point is, you do something bad, and then you get in trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Um, because it's fun.”

  “How is it fun to get in trouble?”

  “Have you ever gotten in trouble?”

  “Sure.”

  “No you haven't. You've never gotten in trouble. Oh my God, that is hilarious.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No, seriously. Have you ever gotten in trouble?”

  “I don't see the point of this conversation.”

  “Oh my God, you are such a goody-goody.”

  “Screw you.”

  “Oh, the goody-goody said ‘Screw you.' I should go and tell your parents so you can sit over here in the Bad Chair.”

  She doesn't say anything. She just goes back to reading her book and ignoring me. Whatever, I'm going to go rummage through the closets and see if I can find anything cool.

  Our cottage has lots of weird stuff in it from the seventies. We have a box full of hippie music that's fun to listen to because it's so freaking bad. We have a lot of Bee Gees music, and this lame bald guy who is famous for playing a cornet, which is like a high-pitched trumpet. It's so bad.

  There are only two tapes that are any good. One is Woodstock and has Jimi Hendrix on it, but that one broke because I played it too much. Now the only good one is the Beach Boys' Endless Summer. I love to listen to it because it reminds me of when I was little and I didn't have anything to worry about. That's what we always used to listen to when we were driving up here in the summer.

  I also like that it's called Endless Summer. I just like the idea of that. I wish there were such a thing as an endless summer. Sometimes it felt like it when I was little. I wish it still felt like that.

  The little Vizquel boy is watching me from his lawn. I don't know why. He's always watching me, and sometimes he tries to wave to me, but I just pretend like I don't see him and I'm doing something else. I feel kind of bad, because I can tell he doesn't really have any friends, but I don't want to be stuck playing with an eight-year-old all summer.

  Why doesn't he just play with his big sister or something? I don't know what it is that he thinks he's going to do with me.

  He's coming over. I didn't think I made eye contact, but maybe I did.

  He's so little. Why would I want to play with a little kid like him?

  He sa
ys, “Do you want to play hide-and-seek?”

  I say, “Not really.”

  “Do you want to play freeze tag?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Do you want to play Time?”

  “I don't know how to play that.”

  “I could teach you.”

  “Uh, that's okay. I don't really want to play Time anyway.”

  “Okay. I can play with you sometimes, if you want. I just have to ask my parents.”

  “Okay, I'll let you know if I want to play with you sometime.”

  He turns around and walks away. I don't want to be mean to him, but it's just, what if one of the Richardsons comes over all of a sudden and needs help with their boat? I can't be playing with a little kid when that happens.

  The little kid's big sister walks out of her house and goes down toward the lake. She's my age, and she's wearing a bathing suit. She's got a body like a stick.

  She walks the property line right past me. She's only about fifteen feet away, but she never looks up at me. Maybe she's mad because I wouldn't play with her brother, or maybe she doesn't even see me.

  I watch her go all the way down to the beach. Her feet must be tough, because she just drops her towel, walks right into the water up to her knees, and then dives in.

  Mr. Richardson is outside crawling around the property line. He hates our walnut tree. It's this old tree that is right next to our house, but some of the branches reach over the Richardsons' yard, and they drop these nasty green walnuts onto his lawn.

  Mr. Richardson has complained to my dad about it a lot over the years, but Dad says he's not going to do anything about it. I think it's kind of funny. I mean, not exactly funny, but entertaining in a weird way. Every time the wind blows, Mr. Richardson comes out of his house and walks through his yard picking up all the little twigs and small branches that fell out of the trees. Then he comes over to the property line and starts looking through the grass on his hands and knees for the little green walnuts. When he finds one, he lobs it back over onto our property like a little hand grenade.