Fiction: At This Point In Our Lives

Maria stands at the edge of the lake with Michael, watching Peter bound down the dock.

“Ta-da!” Peter calls when he reaches the end. He spreads his arms wide in a gesture of showmanship: a child in a man’s body.

Maria and Michael walk toward him, wobbling with the movement of the wood on water. Michael cups her elbow for balance. Behind them, Sarah – Michael’s cousin, Peter’s wife – follows quietly.

“It’s beautiful,” Maria says to their hosts. Peter nods vigorously in agreement. Sarah avoids Maria’s eyes, looks down at a clump of bird poop, brushes at it with the toe of her shoe.

“That’s where they film all the movies,” Peter says. He points to the mountains on the other side of the water. In the June afternoon light, they glow green. “You wouldn’t believe all the stuff they shoot out here!”

“Yes,” Sarah says. “We see several film crews a year.”

They are taking a tour of Peter and Sarah’s property, a 30-acre estate on Big Bear Lake in California. The lake was once called Baldwin, Peter told them as he led them from the main house to the shore. “’Til they damned it up and flooded out the trees and plants and all the little squirrelies to make the masterpiece you’re lookin’ at now! You believe that?”

Now, they listen as Peter lists movies filmed in the region, patting his forehead to call up forgotten titles like bubbles in a carbonated can. Maria can picture him committing the Wikipedia page to memory: a sweet image. Behind them, Sarah looks worriedly toward the house, which she left half-clean so Peter could give the tour before sunset, and Michael leans to jostle her shoulder, a gesture that seems almost required of their relationship: oldest boy and youngest girl in a family of fourteen cousins. Sarah smiles at him with the reluctance of one being cheered up. In the hour she has known Sarah, Maria has gathered that Sarah is a person who both requires and resists this sort of cheering.

“I got it,” Peter says. “Parent Trap! With the guy and the gal – shot right here!” He holds out his arms in disbelief. In the hour she has known Peter, Maria has gathered that there is not much he can believe – the movies, the landscape, his own home.

Sarah says “Yes ­– that one” and turns back toward the shore.

The home and property are, Maria agrees, unbelievable. The driveway is long, lined by a wood fence through which flowers peek like nosy neighbors, though the closest neighbors are half a mile away. The main house sits on a gentle rise in the land, floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides of a large living room making the lake visible from the driveway. When Maria and Michael arrived mid-afternoon, a picked-over brunch sat on the dining table, and Peter said it was too bad they’d let him eat all of Sarah’s famous buckwheat pancakes alone. Sarah offered a tight smile in response, and Maria didn’t know if that was how she always smiled or if something had upset her. If she was bothered by the fact that Maria and Michael had arrived later than they’d said, having stopped twice on the way – once to have sex in the backseat, again to have sex in a rest stop bathroom – or if she was bothered by Maria in general – a divorcée from New York whom Michael met at a conference, a woman she knows nothing about. Maria can tell there are house rules she is expected to follow but can’t yet decipher what they are. She takes the tour quietly and politely, as if in penance.

Across the property, small structures stand at even distances like stops on a board game: a cabana swaddled in gauzy curtains, a stand-alone hot tub, sheds of various sizes for various purposes. In the gear shed, Peter tells the story of a rip-roaring kayaking mishap and Sarah describes the life vest sorting system. Sarah points at another small cabin and identifies it as Peter’s office. He nudges her arm playfully in response.

“It’s called the Invention Lab,” he says. Inside, he twirls a disco ball with his pointer finger and shows off his bobblehead collection, plastic athletes and presidents nodding absently on the edge of his desk. He pats an a bean bag in the corner. “Great place for a little” ­– he winks at Michael ­– “bonding time.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Sarah says from the doorway. She looks at Maria. “It’s early.”

When she turns away, Peter winks again.

They end the tour at the guest cabin ­– a quaint log structure on the north side of the property, from which only the roof of the main house is visible. Peter flings open the door with a sing-song-y “The moment you’ve all been waiting for!” and as he does, Michael puts a hand on Maria’s back. She looks up to see that he is widening his eyes at her but can’t tell if he is impressed by the cabin or silently mocking Peter’s childlike antics. Sarah is right: it is early.

Even so, standing in the cabin, Maria can feel the pull of the bed on their bodies, the heat of Michael’s hand, a pulsing between her legs. She leans into his touch, tuning out Peter’s demonstration of the thermostat.

“It’s so nice of you guys to have us,” Michael says with finality.

“Well, you are family,” Sarah says at the same time that Peter cries, “I almost forgot!” and steps into the bathroom. Sarah reaches for his arm.

“I think they’ve got it,” she says, gripping his elbow. She looks at Michael and Maria. “You two freshen up and we’ll see you for dinner.”

They leave the door open when they go.

As Maria watches them walk back across the grass, she wonders whether Sarah’s invitation for dinner was meant to suggest their unwantedness until then or give them the gift of unquestioned alone time. She doesn’t know Sarah, or much about where she is, or, frankly, why. She hardly knows Michael.

What she does know about Michael is that he is 45 and never-married, but not in the way she’s learned in the six years since her divorce to expect. Most never-married men his age are over-greased and insecure, unsure how many buttons to undo on their shirts and, though there does not seem to be a right answer to this question, always somehow getting it wrong. The ones who’ve had wives and lost them, either to death or divorce, have a comfort about them – a patience in conversation, a subtlety in dress that suggests a closet curated by someone who’s known from a young age what a family man ought to look like. When she met Michael at a conference in Anaheim a month ago, she assumed from his soft voice and intent way of listening, his under-stated but expensive-looking watch, that he was one of the latter. But over dinner with a group of colleagues, he’d mentioned that he’d never married, didn’t have kids. Back home in New York, Maria had paced her apartment, culling her memory for details he might’ve let slip. A single mother, a twin sister. She had nothing.

But she knew enough that when he called a week later to invite her, on this of all weekends, to his cousin’s home in Big Bear, she’d said yes.

So now, she stands on the porch of a guest cabin on the property of two people she hardly knows in a state across the country from her own, her body hungry for his. She wonders again how she ended up here – how, in a philosophical sense, that is: in the course of her life, on the path of her existence – but soon he is pulling her to the bed and she lets him lead her and, for a moment, she stops wondering.

Peter is from Indiana and is 38 years old. In the nineties, he invented a battery-operated toy that kids dangled from keychains and that collectors now buy for thousands of dollars on the Internet. Six years ago, he met Sarah at a singles event in LA when she was thirty-six and he was thirty-two. They were married two years later and tried for kids the next two but couldn’t conceive. Sarah didn’t want to adopt or implant, so that was that. They bought the estate instead, with the money Peter made off his kids’ toy, a substitution Michael tells Maria he has always found both disturbing in a capitalistic sense, and also, in a strange way, sweetly symbolic.

“It does seem to be both,” Maria says.

Sarah hasn’t worked since they married, which she seems to have been waiting all her life to do. When she was young, she played at a never-ending game of house, serving her cousins plastic fruits and Velcro-able slices of cake, and, when she got older, marinated meats and soups from homemade stock. She never had boyfriends, at least not that the family knew of, until, on her thirty-eighth birthday, she stood up at the head of a table of family and said, “I’m getting married. His name is Peter, and he’ll be here in fifteen minutes.” Fifteen minutes later, in walked a man as goofy as Sarah was serious, and she kissed him on the cheek and told her siblings and cousins and all their spouses and kids to welcome their new addition.

Michael tells Maria all of this after they have sex in the guest cabin bed and shower in the guest cabin shower. He is standing in the middle of the room, rubbing his hair with a towel, another tied around his waist.

“I never knew if I could see it,” he says, smiling thoughtfully. “But you know what they say. Opposites attract.” His words are loving, unjudgmental, and Maria begins to understand that some part his softness comes from being in a large family that loves its members unquestioningly, quirks and all. She thinks of her own family – her apartment when she left that morning, her two sons’ empty bedrooms, her ex-husband and his kind, grey-haired wife calling from the car on their way to visit the older one for the weekend – and knows this is true for her family as well, though one might have to look harder to see it. She is, after all, in bed with a man she met at a conference, a universe away from home. “You still there?” Michael says, eyeing her expression. He tosses his towel at her playfully.

Maria lets the towel fall over her, smiles, nods. She is tucked in bed, still naked. She watches Michael dress in jeans and a black sweatshirt. His body looks from afar like it feels up close – core sturdy in a way that indicates both physical strength and metaphorical stability, overlain with the cozy flesh of one who has slept and dined and laughed well over many warm years.

She eyes her own body in the mirror across from the bed. The mirror is gold-framed and old-looking. On the tour, Peter told them it came from an antique shop in the town of Big Bear that had been run by Indians for centuries and centuries, ever since the first White people came here looking for gold.

“Now, the mirror itself is not real gold, but still,” he’d said, petting the frame. “We call it the Gold Rush mirror.” He’d pronounce mirror like mere, the Midwestern-ness of him at odds with the airy, neutral-colored cabin.

“You can just call it the mirror,” Sarah told Michael and Maria. Mere-or, she seemed to annunciate.

Michael sits on the bed now and looks at Maria in the reflection.

“What do you think?” he says, gesturing with his chin toward the gold frame.

Still, she does not know him well enough to know whether they are in cahoots, and, if so, over what. If the way Peter says mirror, the way he distributes information like the people who fling t-shirts at baseball games, the way Sarah blows by him, is as amusing to Michael as it is to her. If they are at the point in their relationship where she can make fun of his family or laugh at this strange, perhaps meaningless thing they are doing, at their age, at this time, in this cabin in California. If they should be doing meaningless things at their age, at this time, at all. She doesn’t know, but because it could all be meaningless anyway, she takes a chance.

“Peter sure knows his Gold Rush history,” she says, annunciating her sarcasm.

He smiles, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. “Who knew they even had meres back then.”

Sarah makes Greek chicken and a cucumber and tomato salad for dinner. They sit on the back patio, blue paisley napkins that match the cushions and a limb of driftwood stuffed with succulents as a centerpiece. Peter pours margaritas from a glass pitcher with a blue-tinted lip.

“These limes are grown right here in Cali-for-nigh-ay,” he says. He sets the pitcher down on the wood table and Sarah lifts it quickly, wipes the ring it left, and carries it to a side table.

“So, Maria,” she says when she is sitting again. “You’re in the aerospace industry, too?”

Maria nods, swallowing a bite. “I am,” she says. “Though I come at it from a different angle than Michael – I’m on the policy side. Public Affairs. And I’m new to the private sector – about a year in now.”

“Maria used to work at the State Department,” Michael says.

“Ah,” Sarah answers.

“It’s been a fascinating transition,” Maria says. “I get to be closer to all the actual space part of it – the things Michael works on.” She smiles at him.

Sarah slices a cucumber disc in half. “Bold move,”  she says. “So late in your career.”

“Isn’t that stuff just insane?” Peter interrupts, leaning his chair back and looking up at the sky. “Space! So wild.”

“Pretty wild,” Michael agrees.

“I mean, how do you even know where to start? Where do you even begin? Blows my mind.” He lets the front legs of his chair fall back to Earth dramatically. “To space!” he says, raising his glass, drinking, and taking this as a cue from himself to stand and retrieve the pitcher.

“Are your children scientific?” Sarah asks.

The question catches Maria off guard and again with a full mouth. “No,” she says when she’s swallowed. “But their father is. He’s a doctor.”

“Nice,” Peter winks at her, returning to the table. He tops off their glasses, which are still full. Hiking up his pants to sit, he sets the pitcher on the wood table again. “Michael may have told you we don’t have any kids lucky enough to inherit these genes.” He sweeps his hands down his body.

“Keep those beauties for yourself, man,” Michael jokes and as Peter laughs, Sarah lifts the pitcher, wipes under it, and returns it to the side table.

“We do, however,” she says on her way back, “have a wonderful nephew whom we love very much and who is actually stopping by tomorrow to help with a few things.”

“I forgot he’s coming tomorrow!” Peter says. “Great kid. Wizard with a toolbox.”

“How old is Jake now?” Michael says. He has an arm across the back of Maria’s chair.

“Sixteen.” Sarah drapes her napkin across her lap. “Seventeen in August.”

“Great kid,” Peter says. “Built the entire gear shed, you know that? Last summer. Only sixteen and built that whole thing with his own two hands.”

“He had several friends help him,” Sarah says. “As well as his new step-father.”

Maria nudges her chair back from the table.

“Oh, Maria, I’m sorry,” Sarah says, noticing. “That must be sensitive for you.”

Maria, standing, is surprised. “Sorry?”

Sarah sets down her fork contemplatively. “You know – step-parents.” She looks to Michael and back. “Divorce, custody, everything.”

Maria eyes her. She wonders why Sarah would think anything about her divorce or the custody of her children, which is joint, and why she would reach for that idea right now. She shakes her head. “Oh, no,” she says. “I just need the restroom.” She stands, turns, and heads inside the house.

As she walks away, she can hear Michael speaking to Sarah: “Easy now!” It’s the vocal equivalent of his jostling her shoulder, teasing, but with the slight twinge of reprimand that comes from being the oldest.

“What?” Sarah is saying as Maria closes the door behind her. “I’m getting to know my guest.”

Later, in bed, Michael props up on his elbow to face her. “I’m sorry about Sarah.” He brushes a lock of hair from her face. “She can be. . . blunt.”

Maria nods, conscious of her strong urge to be quiet. Earlier that day, they had lain in bed and spoken of many things – childhood, her divorce (amicable, a time-has-come kind of thing), their first jobs out of college. Now it seems the cabin has shrunk several sizes into something as small and flimsy as a tent and she could unzip it and step out in a matter of seconds. Leave Michael behind with the speed and immediacy of a scrap of litter dropped out a car window. But then he looks closely at her face and asks kindly, “You alright?” and she can think of nowhere better to go, nothing else she could do, so she smiles and says, “Yes.”

The next morning, Peter knocks on the door of the cabin while Maria and Michael are in the shower.

“Just – just a minute!” Michael stutters. He’s on his knees, his mouth on her. He wipes the water out of his eyes as she stifles a laugh.

“Ooh, alright! I gotcha!” Peter calls back, knowingly. “You two have fun! Breakfast when you’re ready!”

When they enter the kitchen half an hour later, Maria can tell immediately that Sarah knows. She is bent over the counter using her entire body to cut a cantaloupe.

“G’morning,” Michael says.

“More like a good morning for you!” Peter chirps from the stove where he is flipping pancakes.

“It smells great,” Maria says to Sarah, who looks up with a brief, stiff smile, and then reaches to lift a handful of melon slices into a white ceramic bowl.

They go into town after breakfast. Peter shows them around Main Street, pointing out fudge shops, outdoor stores, an art gallery featuring bears in a variety of media. The boardwalk is crowded with tourists, mothers applying sunscreen to soft-skinned children, fathers toting babies in backpacks. An old couple, hand-in-hand, squints at the listings pasted in the window of a real estate agency. While Peter and Michael meander through the outdoor store and Sarah runs to the pharmacy on an errand, Maria ducks in to a café to buy a bottle of water. She has forgotten about the Californian climate – dry, elevated – and it has begun to creep into her body, making her limbs feel stiff, stone-like. When she comes out, Sarah is waiting for her.

“You should get a reusable,” she says, holding up her own aluminum bottle.

“I should,” Maria agrees. She uncaps her plastic bottle and takes a gulp. “I forgot how dry it can be out here.”

“Here.” Sarah holds out one of two small purple canisters in her hands. Maria takes one. Its label is small and scripty: some kind of hand cream. “Don’t worry,” Sarah adds. “It’s unscented.”

“Thank you,” Maria offers. “That’s sweet.”

“Well.” Sarah is looking down the boardwalk, her eyes panning across landscaped pines and Lincoln-log style buildings. She looks certain, stern.

Maria follows her gaze. Her head feels foggy and a tingle like the need to pee has begun in her crotch. She wonders if the cream is an apology for last night’s comment or this morning’s coldness. Or if it’s a slight, a judgement of Maria’s inability to take care of herself. She wonders how she is supposed to feel toward this woman who will likely be a blip in her life, and yet, whom she has encountered here and now, on this boardwalk, on this day.

The men tumble out of the outdoor store.

“Aw, Maria, you gotta get a reusable!” Peter says when he sees Maria’s water. “You know in Denmark you’d be a criminal? They’ve outlawed those things! Trash!”

Michael puts his arm around her, kisses the top of her head. “Hey, lay off my New Yorker, would ya?”

They walk a bike path that outlines the lake. Maria’s crotch stings, and she realizes she’s forgotten to wear sunscreen. She pulls her bra straps out from under her tank top to cover as much bare skin as she can, wondering what Sarah will do if she notices the purposefully exposed underthing. Peter goes on about the quality of the water in the area – “Crystal clear as an alpine lake!” – and she grips Michael’s hand tightly to keep her mind off her discomfort.

In the car on the way back, she rests her head on Michael’s shoulder. She thinks now that she must have a UTI – a feeling that brings her back to her twenties, the health center at her suburban college, a friend driving her to Wegmans, telling her it’s normal, happens to everyone, cranberry juice does wonders, all women know that. She dozes and half-imagines, half-dreams that she is asking Sarah for cranberry juice, explaining to her that this occurrence is out of her ordinary, she doesn’t sleep around, Michael is an exception, but that things that are out of the ordinary, unpredictable, and horrific can happen to anyone at any time, and all women know that. Know that you can forget sunscreen and get a UTI, on this of all weekends. Know that you can be living your life and all the sudden, through what feels like none of your own volition, end up here.

The car stops abruptly and jostles her awake.

“Jakey boy!” Peter calls as he cuts the ignition. “Jakey boy, Jakey boy!”

There is a pick-up in the drive.

“Oh, good.” Sarah climbs out of the passenger seat.

Michael looks down at Maria on his shoulder. “Have a good nap?”

She looks up at him, suddenly sick to her stomach. Maybe they can make it back to the guest cabin before the nephew appears. Or she can go and he can talk to the kid. It’s his family; she doesn’t need to meet a random sixteen-year-old boy. But then Peter has reappeared and is yanking their door open and they are tumbling out, and Maria is facing a kid in a blue flannel and work pants, a paint smudge across his blotchy cheeks, electric blue gum in his mouth. She feels like she might cry.

“Jake,” Michael says, extending his hand. “Good to see you, buddy.”

“You too, sir,” the kid says.

“Look, you gotta see this,” Peter says and leads them at a jog toward the gear shed as he describes its building process.

Jake follows, smacking his gum, and Michael tags along, looking back at Maria as an invitation. She waves him on.

She is still standing alone in the yard five minutes later when Sarah appears in the side door and yells, “Lunch!”

Inside, the air conditioning is harsh on Maria’s reddened skin and her urethra burns. Michael pulls out a chair for her and gets her a glass of water. She is aware that she looks ill, is moving and breathing laboredly.

“You alright there, bud?” Peter teases.

She nods.

“How’s Jake?” Sarah asks from the table, where she is arranging a tray of deli meat and condiments.

“Good as ever.” Peter offers Michael a beer. “What a kid!” He gushes about the shed, in disbelief again.

“He’s a remarkable young man.” Sarah stands back to eye her table spread. Then she looks at Maria, as if she knows, and says, “My sister’s son.”

Maria, skin burning, crotch on fire, head swimming with images of Jake and his gum and his boy-red cheeks, takes a sip of water, swallows, looks at Sarah and says, “I lost a son.”

“Where?” Peter jokes before realizing it’s not funny.

Michael takes a deep breath. “What?” he says. “Oh, Maria. I’m so sorry.”

Sarah is silent for a long moment. Then she says, “I’m sorry to hear that.” She clasps her hands over her stomach. The sound of a saw starts up near the gear shed. “How?” she asks.

“Himself,” Maria says. She is shivering. “A year ago. A year ago today, actually.”

There is a moment of silence. Then Peter says, “Aw man,” and Sarah swallows visibly and Michael removes his sweatshirt and drapes the dark, sweaty thing around her shoulders.

When she wakes in the evening, the property is yellow. The grass and shrubs glow as if the sun has reached a hand into each blade to click on a lantern inside. Maria steps out onto the porch wearing a clean sweatshirt Michael left for her on the bed. She must have slept two hours, maybe three. She might have stayed asleep had her bladder not itched for relief.

When they’d gotten back to the guest cabin, she’d chugged a small bottle of cranberry juice that Sarah found in the pantry. She’d told them in the kitchen, after they had whispered their sympathies, that she needed to drink some cranberry juice, and the way Sarah had looked at her, understanding immediately the reason for this need, was a look she remembered giving her children more than once: not angry, just disappointed. “I’ll run out for more,” Sarah said after she had turned up a sole 12-ounce bottle from the pantry and set it on the counter.

Peter had watched the whole scene unblinking and, when the juice was set, broke from his reverie. He shook his head slowly, like the bobbleheads in his Invention Lab. On an exhale, he said, “Maria, I gotta ask – why’d ya wanna be here for this? With a couple of strangers?” […]

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