Doing a random search, I discovered a MARVELOUS short story written by Nancy Reisman. There's not much else about her, other than a Wikipedia Entry, 2 books and a unconnected profile on Goodreads.
It's called, Walden, Etc. READ IT! She's captured a certain feeling, contrasting real life with the beauty of The Pond. She got into my head. (I HAVE driven from Watertown Square to Walden, despite people in my car asking me to turn!)
Reproduced here (just in case the U Mich file becomes unavailable). Sorry, Nancy-but if & when you find this and are offended, I'll gladly take it down. I just want to make sure that I don't lose it!!
It's called, Walden, Etc. READ IT! She's captured a certain feeling, contrasting real life with the beauty of The Pond. She got into my head. (I HAVE driven from Watertown Square to Walden, despite people in my car asking me to turn!)
Reproduced here (just in case the U Mich file becomes unavailable). Sorry, Nancy-but if & when you find this and are offended, I'll gladly take it down. I just want to make sure that I don't lose it!!
WALDEN, ET CETERA
On the phone long distance to her mother—for whom Becca often believes she would do anything—Becca describes her late afternoon swims at Walden Pond, how syrupy the light becomes, striations of pink and orange beyond the trees and reflected in the pond, light you can swim through. It’s the end of the season, but she’s squeezed in some final weekday trips.
“Honey, that’s terrific,” her mother says, her words oddly taut.
Oh. So maybe this won’t be the day to confess, though thinking of the light on the pond, and hearing her mother’s voice, Becca feels the impulse swell. It doesn’t happen often. But she isn’t usually this unmoored from herself, or from the self she thought she was. Sweet Becca, kind Becca—that self seems altogether illusory. Angelo, her boyfriend of four years, was away all summer and she did not miss him. Nor did she miss his mother. She does not like his mother, who is beautiful but flinty and standoffish, and now dying. (Why would dying make her more likeable? It does not.) Beneath these revelations lie older, inchoate yearnings and ineffable shards, like liquid color studded with mica. There’s no getting to the bottom of it; instead there’s just the occasional small triumph of meaning what she says. For example, her description of the pond, and those luminous hours: that seems true. And if her mother were in Massachusetts, if her mother were at the pond herself, with Becca, her mother relaxed and smiling, leaning back in the sun on the little outcropping of beach where Becca often lies after she swims, her mother listening, frankly listening and peeling an orange to share as Becca speaks, still smiling and petting Becca’s head no matter what Becca confesses, offering slices of orange, the two of them dozing in the sun, Becca would tell her, My heart is a quail’s egg. A tomato seed. A spore. She can imagine telling no one but her mother this, and apparently not even her mother, not after the tinny “Honey, that’s terrific.”
Only because of her mother does she think egg, not stone. But all summer (and not for the first time) her dreams of another life have fattened, the life she’d once imagined with Angelo evaporating while he was away, working in Maine. Angelo, her boyish musician, Angelo of the tender little offerings, the singing on the phone, the kiwis on the bed stand, Angelo the shy comic, herAngelo began falling apart last year when his mother was diagnosed and began chemo. In March, he somersaulted into a spectacular bender: he went AWOL from work—really from everything—and didn’t return to his apartment for a night and a day, or call, or remember his plans with Becca until after the killing hangover and the self-flagellating and grief-stricken tears abated. It happens. You are managing your life and reckoning with the ordinary questions: What to make for dinner? When will you move in together? Fix your bike? Berry or melon? Movie or nightclub? and wham: the tornadic news that maybe has been hovering in the rear view all along sweeps you up, dumps you sideways. Instead of righting yourself, you flatten out completely. During her sister’s worst psychotic break, Becca’s evenings filled up with Camel Lights and Rolling Rock; in the morning she’d buy doughnuts and giant coffees and smoke more Camel Lights. Eventually she regrouped, returned to her workouts and glasses of juice. And Angelo regrouped for a while. His mother went into remission; he went up to his camp job in Maine. But now Angelo’s back in town, fragile and angry and humiliated by a brand-new DUI. His license is suspended until November. “I can’t tell my family,” he said. “You can’t either.”
Becca hasn’t. And she hasn’t told her mother that Angelo is back, or that Colleen’s remission has tanked. But her visions of escape have grown dense with thickets of both cowardice and bravery, like warm and cold spots in the pond. When she is not at Walden swimming, she imagines other lakes, lakes as large as cities and larger, the minor oceans of the Midwest; she pictures a bridge on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, the gigantic sky spread above even the most feverish, tower-thick blocks of the city, pushing north up the coast, where the lake reveals itself to be a country.
Not the view from her apartment window, though sycamore leaves screen her from the near-neighbors’ peeling paint. A red delivery truck bangs along the street below, and Becca sinks into her reading chair. “I miss you,” she says, closing her eyes, thinking orange slices, thinking pond.
“Sweetie, I miss you too,” her mother says. “We all miss you. Maybe your sister will swim at the pool with you, the next time you visit.”
How quickly Laura crawls into their sentences: oh, for a few more Laura-free sentences. Becca can hardly remember the old Laura, the artistic, flamboyant teenager she idolized: it’s as if her sister had always been a delicate bundle of nerves.
“Sure,” Becca says and opens her eyes to old velvet upholstery, a blue worn patch beneath her wrist, the scuffed wood apartment floor. “How is she?”
“Great,” Becca’s mother says.
“Really?” Because you’d have to redefine great, because Becca’s parents do somersaults to keep Laura stable, and her last call from Laura was so-so.
“Hmm . . .” her mother says. “Not bad.”
My heart is a quail’s egg the color of Laura, the color of Mom.
A week ago, Becca retrieved Angelo from Maine: he didn’t tell her why he needed retrieval. She thought his car had died, and she drove the hours north to find him sitting handsomely on the steps of a cabin, at first a poster boy for backwoods living, slim and tan and shaggy haired, blue workshirt matching the wide gray-blue eyes. When she got close he seemed to crumble, his face pinkish and damp. She tried kissing him on the mouth, and he dropped his head to the side, held his cheek against hers.
“Do you want to rest?” she said. “Why don’t we stop someplace? A motel?”
He shook his head and put his duffel in the trunk. “Just home,” he said. He started for the passenger door and paused, held out his hands, palms up. “There was a DUI,” he said, as if it had been a weather event.
Around them: bird calls, flapping wings, animal rustlings in the near woods, a breeze coming in off the lake. When she climbed into the car, his scent—salt and warm leaves and nutmeg—wafted over her. He slept for hours, most of the way to Boston, then directed her not to his place or to hers but directly to his mother’s.
It was after seven when she pulled into the parking lot of Colleen’s condo, the cooled air of the car giving way to still-radiating parking lot heat. She and Angelo were both grimy, salt-skinned from sweat. The foyer blasted cold air, which shifted beyond the doorway to Colleen’s unit, warming, instantly medicinal and scrubbed: disinfectant solution, air freshener over traces of smoke and urine. The dining table was set for illness: a tray of amber pill bottles, a clipboard schedule, insurance bills, a pile of linens, disinfectant wipes. By the bedroom door a health aide in pale blue worked a crossword puzzle. The door stood ajar, and from inside the television shouted, but Colleen was asleep, a thin figure beneath mushrooming blankets, Angelo already at the head of the bed conferring with his sister Gina.
When Becca returned to the condo the next day, Colleen was propped up against a stack of pillows, waving vaguely toward the windows and the bureau. At her bedside, Angelo nodded. Colleen’s emerald green headscarf matched her silk robe, and a white oval patch covered her left eye; she’d become hollow-cheeked, her skin now the color of old plaster, but she wore peach lipstick. Her words tumbled away in aphasiac gusts that seemed to emanate from the eye patch.
Becca offered a bouquet of daisies, which Colleen gazed at for a moment without comment.
“Good to see you,” Becca said. She leaned in and kissed Colleen on the cheek—as always, an awkward, obligatory kiss.
Colleen’s blue unpatched eye fixed on Becca. “You too,” she said, flatly. “How was . . . ?”
It seemed the sentence had ended. “Fine. Good,” Becca said.
“When I . . . ,” Colleen shrugged, waved toward the windows. “I’ll go.”
“Okay.” It was not unlike talking with Laura during recovery.
“But, do you have cigarettes?”
“Sorry, no,” Becca said. Maybe Colleen was asking everyone. Maybe Becca just looked like a crisis smoker.
“My boy,” Colleen said, puzzled.
Angelo sagged on the far side of the bed, the eye patch side. “Over here, Mom,” he said.
Later that day, Becca drove out to Walden alone, and swam out into the middle of the lake and back to the small beachhead on the way to Thoreau’s cabin site, settling among the pebbles and knobby exposed roots, where she ate plums and watched the bright reflections shift to gold and rose and darken, until the sun dropped behind the cabin site and a chill set in. It was her last weekend swim of the summer.
In her memory, Becca’s first year with Angelo is a blur of public kissing, Also private, overheated, sometimes hilarious sex. A shock of pleasures, a renewed shock that you could live for a time in a bubble of sensation, arrange your life around the moments of touching each other and wandering the city drinking coffee and wine, trading goofy anecdotes. And when the other world intruded, first as the erratic run-up to a bad episode (a storm of weepy irrational phone calls from Laura) then as the full-blown crisis (Laura’s delusional calls, her psych ward admission, panicky calls from Becca’s parents, sad, rattled calls from her brother Richie), it seemed to absorb everything Becca understood to be herself. Angelo let Becca collapse. On weekend afternoons, Becca would fall asleep on Angelo’s bed, in the muted light from the windowed alcove, Angelo sitting beside her as if guarding her. These were the best, the deepest of sleeps, recalling her to the first house she remembers, where she spent whole days in her mother’s company and napped in the afternoons on her parents’ broad double bed.
She did the same for Angelo, last winter and spring, and for at least a while with a sincerity that now seems implausible. But sincerity isn’t everything, and despite her quail’s egg heart, Becca divides the vanishing bright weeks of September between work hours and hours in Colleen’s condo, where Colleen drifts or wakes to argue, and Angelo and his sister sort medical bills and hospice schedules and watch B movies. Becca supplies dinners, drives Angelo to the pharmacy, to his apartment, to the bank. In fact, she goes everywhere with Angelo; this togetherness resembles devotion, but it’s variegated with lies and dissociation. For whole days, she does not think. Some nights Angelo stays at her apartment and he seems to fall into her, into sex, but it’s sex without wonder, without the tenderness of recognition. Some nights he slumps on Colleen’s sofa and Becca wants to kick him.
A Sunday afternoon. Becca’s mother’s on the phone. “Sweetheart,” she says. “I’m so sorry about Angelo’s mother. That’s very sad.”
“It is sad,” Becca says. She doesn’t mean to be terse, but there it is.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m sad, ” Becca says, un-sadly.
“This must be very stressful,” her mother says, and then Becca becomes weepy.
“Oh Becca honey,” her mother tells her. “I know.”
Late September. It’s mid-morning when Angelo calls Becca at work, asking her to come to Waltham. “My mom wants to go for a drive,” he says. For days his mother has been drifting, barely speaking, but this morning she was up early, alert and entirely articulate, selecting her clothes for the day, announcing that she and Angelo would go driving. “I’ve been stalling,” Angelo says. “Bee, help me out here.”
What can you say? So Becca is parked in front of the condo complex, while Angelo and a hospice aide wheel Angelo’s mother out to the parking lot, Angelo’s mother frail and gangly in her purple sweatsuit and purple turban, the white eye patch over her left eye glowing.
From the driver’s seat of her Civic, Becca smiles and waves at the parking lot trio; she is partly here and partly elsewhere—a stone, a root—not remembering: she is in the place not-remembering takes you.
Angelo waves back and opens the passenger door.
Colleen peers in at Becca. “What’s this?” Colleen says. “This is not my car.” She is very purple, her unpatched eye sharp as an owl’s.
“Hi Colleen,” Becca says, “I thought I’d drive.”
“Angelo, go get my car.”
“I forgot to fill it up,” Angelo says. “This will be easier.”
But it isn’t, really: the Honda’s low to the ground, Colleen too fragile. It’s hard to maneuver her out of the wheelchair and into the front seat, and various parts of Angelo and the aide and Colleen inadvertently collide. Once buckled up, Colleen waves the aide off. Angelo slips into the back.
“Becky,” Colleen says. “We’re going to see the leaves.”
Becca assumes she means “Becca,” assumes she means the changing, multicolored leaves, the leaves New England is famous for. North, in Vermont and New Hampshire, they probably have changed. Here, maybe another week or two, maybe more. But you can’t argue the logic of space and time with people in altered states, and there’s no disputing that something has happened to Colleen’s coolly luminous brain.
For too long Becca fiddles with the car radio, a pastiche of static and shouts. The usual minor dilemma: avoiding bad news, avoiding free jazz, canned pop, experimental classical, anything with nasty lyrics. The blues Angelo loves irritates Colleen; Becca’s folk station Angelo calls, sorry baby, cloying.
“Just go,” Colleen says. “Take a left.” Becca hits the button for a public station, pulls left. Left again.
The nearby trees are full, green, the tall grasses by the roadside flecked with yellow and red. Vivaldi streams out of the speakers. “Right,” Colleen says. “Left.” Then another left. She’s directing them toward the city, into Watertown.
“Where is it you want to go?” Becca says.
“Becky. The country.”
“Okay,” Becca says, but they are nearing Watertown Square.
“This way,” Colleen says, waving a translucent hand. “Go up.” Up is Arsenal street, increasingly gritty.
“Maybe we should backtrack,” Angelo says.
“I know how to get to the country,” Colleen says. And she does, or did—she’s lived in the area for years—but her geography has scrambled.
“Mom,” Angelo says.
“It’s just,” Becca says, “that I’ve gotten a little turned around.”
“These aren’t the trees,” Colleen says.
“It’s early,” Becca says.
“It’s FALL,” Colleen says.
Angelo is silent, the sound of the motor mixing with cello and Colleen’s wheezing. In the rearview mirror, he is all eyelashes. Becca loops the car around, crosses Mount Auburn, takes Common down to Belmont Street.
“Go right here,” Colleen says, and Becca makes a left onto Trapelo Road, back toward Waltham.
“Turn here,” Colleen says at the next stoplight, and Becca nods but continues, straight down Trapelo, where the air is humming—where, no, Angelo is humming to Vivaldi’s violins.
“You aren’t turning. You haven’t turned,” Colleen says.
At least more red highlights the trees, though green still predominates. They’ve crossed into residential Waltham; they’re nearing the Lincoln line, a route Becca could drive in her sleep. A year ago, Colleen could have too. “I’ll turn soon,” Becca lies.
“Angelo,” Colleen says. “You drive.”
“It’s Becca’s car, Mom.” In the rearview, he’s watching Becca.
“I wanted my car,” she says. “This isn’t fall.”
No, Becca wants to say, this isn’t a lot of things. Love, for example, though she can’t say where love’s borders are. If only their bodies would carry them forward. The day Becca picked Angelo up, when they climbed into the car, that flash of desire: it wasn’t so long ago.
Along the road in Lincoln, more maples and oaks line the street, the houses hidden behind larger groves and long driveways. She passes the Lincoln library, heads toward the DeCordova museum and the meadows at the Concord line, and then she’s closing in on Walden. Up the hill from the pond, at a clearing, she turns the car around and parks illegally. Today the water’s a vivid blue.
“It’s Walden Pond, Mom,” Angelo says.
For a moment Colleen’s quiet. “I want to get out,” she says.
“The ground’s not steady here,” Becca says.
“Angelo,” Colleen says.
“She’s right about the ground.”
“I can’t see from here,” Colleen says.
“Let’s roll down your window,” Becca says.
“This isn’t fall,” Colleen says.
“There’s some red in the trees,” Angelo says.
“You brought us the wrong way,” Colleen says.
“Mom, look at the pond,” Angelo says.
“Shall we go back?” Becca says.
“This is the wrong way.”
“It’s the way I know,” Becca says.
“You don’t listen. You don’t know where you’re going, you shouldn’t drive.”
No, maybe she shouldn’t, at least not with a passenger. The day is another mistake. But here is the pond, her pond. Becca opens the driver’s door. “I’m going to take a little break,” she says.
“I’m the one who wants to get out,” Colleen says.
Just shut up, she’d like to say. I’m here too.
One of the spillover tyrannies of illness: you’re not allowed to fight back. During Laura’s first recovery, Becca’s parents repeated, “Don’t let her bait you,” as swift little darts flew out of Laura’s mouth. And back then, the alphabet had devolved: Laura had forgotten how to read. You couldn’t even write her a note. Becca, fifteen, slipped crayon frowning faces under Laura’s bedroom door. Occasionally her mother would find them and cry, and Becca would apologize, which did not stop the crying—nothing she did would stop the crying—or her mother’s own weepy flurry of apologies. Until Becca left for college, it could be like that; during her first months in Boston, Becca rarely answered the phone.
At Walden, the path down the embankment opens out at the wide main beach and Becca speeds up as she moves downhill, until she is running. A few young mothers with toddlers scoop sand on the beach. At the water’s edge, Becca pulls off her stockings and shoes and steps in, her feet tingling from the cold. In front of her, the pond stretches its full length, a broad plate of blue, the house site hidden in the woods on the far shore. Then Angelo’s calling her, rushing down the path toward the beach. She wades in up to her shins, the hem of her dress grazing the water.
“What are you doing?” Angelo says, stricken. His is a tender, arresting face, lovely even now, she thinks. How lovely we were.
In her dress, she dives under the water, for an instant blacking out, then becoming starry from the cold and sharply aware of the light and her soles against the silty lake bottom. High above the surface, white cirrus clouds rib a cornflower sky. Underwater the pond thrums, a half-familiar lowing, the sound breaking open, chill water beading down her as she rises up."
