Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

On winter weekends he watched football on television speechlessly.

He looked like a plumber on a TV show who comes in halfway through the program and who someone, though not the main character, falls in love with, because he’s so manly and can replace faucet washers. He would be the kind of plumber who wisecracks and makes the whole studio audience break up, but he would be charming, too, when he had to be. But then sometimes at a stoplight, or when he saw a car pull in front of him, her dad’s face changed out of its TV sitcom expression: suddenly he grimaced like someone had started to do surgery on him right over his heart without anesthetic, and he was pretending that nothing was happening to him even though his chest was being cut open, bared to fresh air. And then that expression vanished like it had never been there. What was that about? His pain. His secret squirrel life, probably.

Still, there was no point in talking to him about Gordy Himmelman.

At the lake they settled in on their beach towels. Bertie, who was oblivious to everything, went on playing with his Game Boy. Gina’s mom stretched out on her back in an effort to immerse herself in lethal tanning rays. Her dad carried the picnic basket into the shade and started to read his copy of Car and Driver, sitting on the picnic-table bench. Gina went to the concession stand to get herself an ice cream cone, which she would buy with her own money.

The stand itself had been constructed out of concrete blocks, painted white, covered overhead by a cheap corrugated roof. Under it, everything seemed to be sun-baking. Behind the counter was a popcorn machine with a high-intensity yellow heat lamp shining on the popped kernels in their little glass house, making them look radioactive. The sidewalk leading up to and away from the stand, stained with the residue of spilled pink ice cream and ketchup, felt sticky on the soles of Gina’s feet. The kid who worked at the stand, selling snack food and renting canoes, was a boy she didn’t recognize — about her age, maybe a year or two older, with short orange hair and an earring — and he stood behind the counter next to the candy display, staring, in pain and boredom, at the floor. He was experiencing summer-job agony. He had a rock station blaring from his battery-powered radio perched on top of the freezer, and his body twitched quietly to the beat. When Gina appeared, the boy looked at her with relief, relief followed by recognition and sympathy, recognition and sympathy followed by a leer as he checked out her tits, the leer followed by a friendly smirk. It all happened very fast. He was like other boys: they shifted gears so quickly you couldn’t always follow them into those back roads and dense forests where they wanted to live with the other varmints and wolves.

Raspberry, please, single scoop. She smiled at him, to tease him, to test out her power, to give him an anguished memory tonight, when he was in bed and couldn’t sleep, thinking of her, in the density of his empty, stupid life.

Walking back to the sand and holding her ice cream cone, she started to think about Gordy Himmelman, and when she did, the crummy lake and the public beach with the algae floating in it a hundred feet offshore in front of her, she felt weird and dizzy, as if: What was the point? She kept walking and taking an occasional, personal, lick at the ice cream. There weren’t too many other people in the sand, but most of the men were fat, and their wives or girlfriends were fat, too, and already they had started to yell at each other, even though it was just barely lunchtime.

She kept walking. It was something to do. Nobody here was beautiful. It all sucked.

The lake gave her a funny feeling, just the fact that it was there. The sky was sky blue, and her mother had said it was a perfect day, but if this was a perfect day, if this was the best that God could manage with the available materials, then. . well, no wonder Gordy Himmelman had shot himself, and no wonder her mother had put up that picture of Switzerland in her bedroom. Gina saw her whole life stretched out in front of her, just like that, the deck of fifty-two cards with Family Day printed on one side, like the picture of the lake in Switzerland that she could barely stand to glance at, vacuuming her up. Why couldn’t anything ever be perfect? It just wasn’t possible. This wasn’t perfect. It was its opposite: fect. A totally fect day. Just to the side, off on another beach towel, somebody’s mom was yelling at and then slapping a little boy. Slapping him, wham wham wham, out in public and in front of everybody, and of course the kid was screaming now, screaming screaming screaming screaming.

Everybody having their own version of Family Day.

Gina carried the ice cream cone to the water’s edge.

Right there, she saw herself in the algaed water, walking upside down holding a raspberry ice cream cone, and, next to her own water-image, another water-image, the sun this time. Gina walked into the water, out to where the algae dispersed, staring first at her diminishing reflection and then at the sun. It’d be interesting to go blind, she thought, people and seeing-eye dogs would take care of you and lead you through the rest of your life forever. You’d be on a leash. The dog would make all the big decisions. Then she noticed that when she walked into the water her images were sucked into it. As the water got deeper, there was less of you above it, as if you had gone on an instant diet. Okay, now that her legs had disappeared, you didn’t have to look at her legs, because they weren’t there anymore. Well, they were underwater, but the water was so dirty she couldn’t see them as well as she could see her reflection at the surface: of her waist, her head, her chest, the ice cream cone. She wished she were prettier, movie-pretty, but walking into the water was a kind of solution, watching your girl-image get all swallowed up, until there was no image left, just the water.

She held the ice cream cone above the water and then after another lick let it go as she went under.

Under the surface she held her breath as long as she could, and then she thought of Gordy Himmelman, and, sort of experimentally, she tried breathing in some water, just to see what it was like, and she choked. She felt herself panicking and going up to the surface but then she fought the panic when she imagined she saw somebody like Gordy Himmelman, though better-looking, more like her dad, under the water with her, holding her hand and telling her it was better down here, and all the problems were solved, so she tried to relax and breathe in a little more water. She registered thunderbolts of panic, then some peace, then panic. Then it was all right, and Family Day was finally over, and, because she wasn’t a very good swimmer anyway, she began to sink to the bottom, though there were all those annoying voices. She would miss Wilbur, the guinea pig, but not much else, not even the boys who had tried to feel her up.

She drifted down and away.

Her father and the lifeguard had seen the cone of ice cream floating on the surface of the lake at the same time. They both rushed in, and Gina’s dad reached her body first. He pulled her up, thrashed his way to the beach, where, without thinking, he gave his daughter the Heimlich maneuver. Water erupted out of her mouth. Gina’s eyes opened, and her father laid her down on the sand, and she said, “Gordy?” but what she said was garbled by the water still coming out of her lungs into her mouth and out of her mouth into the sand. As she came around, her hair falling around her eyes, she seemed disarrayed somehow, but pleased by all the fuss, and then she smiled, because she had seen her father’s face, smeary with love.