XI: The Indifference of Heaven
It was autumn now, and the summer homes had all been deserted, leaving only a few reminders like archaeological artifacts from the neo-yuppie culture. A tin pie plate had been tossed by the side of the road, full of murky water from the last rainfall. One shoe, a Nike, laces untied, was right where she used to cross the dirt path to go down to the lake as a child, the sneaker's canvas-and-vinyl construction permanently in shadow from the arching trees overhead. The trees rustled with life, now and then trembling with bird song or chipmunk chatter.
At the lake, the boats were tied up, immobile for the winter, some with tarps draped over them to shield them from the harsh weather in the months to come. The woman never understood the point of the boats. The people that came upstate were from Long Island, from places with names like Water Mill, Fire Island, Bayport. She thought that they would have wanted to do something other than rev up the motorboats when they came upstate, but that seemed to be their primary passion upon getting away from an island. She could never understand that.
The boaters weren't that bad, though. The worst were the ATVers. They would race their vehicles through the woods, careless about what was state land and what was personal property, knocking down branches of bushes they passed, cutting up the ground beneath. Last year, one of them had died when he ran straight into a tree. The satisfaction that the tragedy brought within her was odd, but all she could think was, He deserved it.
Some months were better than others, though, and this stretch in early September, when the ATVers and tourists in their fancy homes had disappeared, and hunting season had not yet started, let alone the Christmas vacationers – this was a nice few weeks. She could relax for once, be left alone with just her dog and her books. She liked that. Maybe she would even go to the corner store, an all-but-dilapidated shack that despite her reference sat ten miles down the road in an equally dilapidated town. She didn't have to, though. She was fine by herself.
In a place like this, even the most menial tasks seemed more like a duty, something she was meant to do and bound to do, than a chore from which she had to devise ways to escape. That was a different feeling for her. She expected to hate it. She had hated it when she had to write papers and conduct evaluations on spec and deadline, so she had expected to hate cleaning as well. Now that she had nobody making her do things to their limits and their timeframes, even manual labor became her own thing, and she claimed it, taking it in, making it a part of her, creating a purpose for it that she had never found before. Something in her stayed removed, though. It always did.
She was surprised: The cleaning she had done earlier was fun, with the sharp, astringent scent of the cleaner and the glass warm to the touch from the sunlight beaming down upon it. She had never done that before when left to her own devices. When she cleaned the glass, she watched the dogs outside, circling around one another, the mismatched pair of Jack Russell and Golden Retriever running around, the terrier making sharp turns, darting around the retriever's loping gait, through the spotted legs to emerge again, challenging the bigger dog with an impish growl. She had doled out their food and left them to their own devices, not bothering to lock the door to her house as she headed up the road to see if the tourists had gone. They clearly had.
The lake diverted itself into a creek that ran past her and into the woods, bubbling and clear, and she leaned down to stare at herself in it, creating her own impressions out of the gray-brown mottled shadows that gazed back. Over the past few months, she had been intermittently surprised as her face had started to change on her, already turned from young adult to proper adult, and now starting to lose the tightness it had maintained thus far through her twenties.
Even her skin was beginning to betray her. She wanted to molt out of it, to have her youth visibly restored like Elizabeth Bathory after a bath in blood, or like Osiris regenerated. There were creams for it, but she was not that vain. It was not her looks that bothered her, so much as the wasted potential. She had intended far more public things than to be living like Thoreau, and she was nearly thirty, and had done none of her intentions.
She would do them, she determined, watching her face in the water shift and sway, the altered look of it pleasing her somehow. She had made good on nothing so far, and now she would. The first thing to do was to get in her car and drive, and she made plans to do that. She had nothing to worry about here. What books she would otherwise have wanted amongst the plethora were cheap and easily replaced. The dogs would find some way out of their predicament, after a few days cooped up in the house with no food and water. She would be well on her way to finding a solution to her own troubles, too, and hopefully would be as far as she could from home.
She started back to the house, thinking, Pay attention. This is the last time you'll see it. Give the dogs strong hugs when you go in. They'll have run away within a few days, so they need something to remember you by. She would make sure to notice the details.