The Summer She Was Under Water

By Jen Michalski

It has been twenty years since Sam Pinski, a young novelist, has spent the Fourth of July weekend with her family at their cabin on the Susquehanna River. There, she must confront a chaotic history of mental illness, alcoholism, and physical violence, and struggle to find perspective in the pulse of things familiar and respite from the shame of the taboo relationship that courses through her. As she does, a subplot emerges: Excerpts are included from Sam's metaphoric novel in which a pregnant man tries to solve the mystery of his fertility and absolve himself of his past. Then tragedy strikes the Pinskis and they must draw together, tentatively realizing that they will continue to spin off in their own orbits unless they begin the hard work of forgiveness themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Nov 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781945814570

Book preview

The Summer She Was Under Water

Jen Michalski

Dzanc Books

Dzanc Books

5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd

Ann Arbor, MI 48104

www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright © 2016 by Jen Michalski

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published 2017 by Dzanc Books

A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-945814-57-0

eBook Cover Designed by Brian Mihok

Cover art by Scout Cuomo, She Went Swimming (Acrylic on Birch)

Print layout by Adam Robinson

Printed in the United States of America

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Table of Contents

FRIDAY

1.

2.

i

SATURDAY

3.

4.

ii

5.

iii.

SUNDAY

6.

7.

iv.

v.

8.

vi.

MONDAY

9.

10.

FRIDAY

1.

I think the car is on fire, Eve says. Smoke tendrils curl out from under the hood of Samantha Pinski’s Volkswagen Jetta.

It’s just overheating, Sam answers. They are at the precipice of the soft, winding dirt road that leads up to her family’s cabin on the hill. She flips on the heater and hot air from the engine pours into the interior like batter into a pan. We’ll make it.

Tree branches whip the sides of the car on the narrow path as the sun shines and recedes repeatedly through the leaves. Sam thinks how much it would suck if her car breaks down right here, right in the middle of the road, blocking it for everyone else coming up to their cabins on the hill by the lake on Fourth of July weekend or at least for her brother Steve, who’s coming up later, and the look on her father’s face as he tries to fix it because he thinks he can fix everything although he will probably make it worse. And it will all be her fault because in her rush to pick up Eve she forgot to check the antifreeze at the gas station. Eve rolls down her window and blots her forehead with a McDonald’s napkin as Sam holds her breath, trying not to inhale the fumes escaping from the hood. But then they are on level ground, and the familiar red-and-white wooden cabin appears through the windshield before it disappears behind a cloud of smoke.

Jesus Christ, Sam hears her father say somewhere down the rutted, grassy hill, where the ground slopes to meet the creek below. She gets out with an old towel and touches the hood with it, searching for the latch. Didja put antifreeze in it like I told you?

She feels her father beside her, sweaty, emphysemic, grabbing the towel from her and wrenching up the hood in one motion. Smoke thins, and Karl Pinski materializes like a genie. He is hard and heavy across the front, like someone has stuffed a lead pillow under his shirt. The only thing that is soft is the lumpy flesh of his face, and his thick dark hair, combed back with Brylcreem, like a mobster’s. He chews at the filter of his cigarette as it burns close to his lips and leans over to pull off the antifreeze cap.

I’ll look at it after lunch when it’s cooled down, he decides as the car hisses, dragging on his cigarette. Driving a car like that—what the shit’s wrong with you?

Almost twenty years have passed since Sam has been at the family cabin and the creek it overlooks. Eve has come, too, for the holiday weekend, but when she leaves Sam figures she will stay a few more days, maybe a week. Maybe the whole summer. She’s not teaching the mini-semester. She’s now single. Her plans feel pretty open, in a crossroads kind of way.

Sam looks down the hill at the old pontoon boat, which still floats like a soggy bread slice on the narrow waterway that joins the lake, along with the motorboat, always broken. Various inflatable tubes that somehow her parents had managed to fill with their shallow lung capacity litter the dock. Sam’s mother and Eve meet in the middle of the hill, Eve twirling her sunglasses casually between her fingers, her combat boots and fatigue jacket out of place next to Sam’s mother’s sandals and matching shirt and Capri pants, Eve nodding at the older woman’s monologue. Despite their differing views on fashion, Sam imagines Eve would be a good daughter for her mother, and vice versa. She watches as her mother touches Eve’s arm lightly, drawing her in, sharing a throaty laugh.

Sam, do you need any help? Eve looks over her shoulder. Sam pretends not to hear her. Already she has been excluded, reduced to bystander in her own family. She reaches deep into the trunk, fiddling with a duffel bag, until she feels Eve standing next to her.

You okay? She feels Eve’s hand on her back.

Yes. She smiles, slamming the lid. I see you’ve met Mom.

Yeah, she’s met Mom. Sam’s mother has lumbered up the fifteen feet of pine cones and gravel and grass. The hard, blue-collar features of her face are hidden behind her big sunglasses, her straw hat. She is holding huge bottles of suntan lotion and bug spray. You better put some of these on, Eve. You look like you haven’t seen outside for the last twenty years.

They join Sam’s father down on the dock, where an old, weather-beaten picnic table has been dragged. He sits anchored at one end, his own legs slathered with suntan lotion that rests in clumps on his leg hairs, his feet small in a pair of rubber sport sandals that Sam’s mother likely picked up at Kmart before the trip, along with a faux-Bahamas shirt and khaki drawstring pants. He inhales, looking at Eve, nodding his head.

Eve, this is Karl, Sam’s father, Sam’s mother says, like he is retarded, and everyone is quiet in acknowledgment.

I think I got the boat figured out, he says, addressing no one in particular.

Oh yeah? Sam’s mother sits across from him, tapping out a cigarette. What was wrong with it?

Sam’s parents are probably the last people on earth who smoke. However, they aren’t normal smokers. Sam’s father awakes in the middle of the night to have a cigarette; her mother has smoked while on the patch. There is nothing more visceral, more affected, more rewarding to her parents, she thinks, than sharing their lives with a good cigarette. It was a miracle every summer that they didn’t burn down the cabin with their smoldering cigarettes that lived like fireflies in every available ashtray.

Duddin’ matter what was wrong with it. He shrugs. You wouldn’t know what it was, anyhow.

Do you need any more help with it? Sam remains standing while Eve joins the smokers, pulling her own pack of Marlboros from her purse.

What, you know something about boats now, too?

Jesus, Karl, her mother butts in. Can’t people offer you a hand, even if they don’t know nothing?

Why would that be helping? He scrunches his face up at Sam’s mother, who shakes her head.

Dad. Sam touches Eve’s shoulder. Eve is my friend from Baltimore.

So do you teach at Hopkins, too, Eve? Sam’s mother asks.

No. I don’t teach at Hopkins. I just work in a coffee shop.

Oh. Sam’s mother looks confused. Do you know Michael?

Nope. Not personally.

Sam was supposed to get married to him, you know, Sam’s father says. He is sanding some rust off a piece from, presumably, the boat. I guess I shouldn’t be complaining. It’s not like we coulda given her a big fancy wedding or nothing.

You could have had it here. Eve looks at Sam and smiles. It certainly is beautiful.

That’s an idea. Right on the dock, Sam’s mother agrees.

What a logistical nightmare that would be, Sam snorts. Can you imagine trying to get everyone up that road? Where would they park? Where would they stay?

In little rafts and donuts—they could sleep on the lake under the moonlight, Eve explains. Boy, for a writer, you sure have little imagination.

It’s a moot point. Sam turns toward the house. Since I broke up with him. I’m getting a beer.

Can you bring the cooler down, Sam? her mother instructs. Put that pitcher of ice tea in it for me and your father, and whatever you girls want.

Sam drags their bags through the screened porch and into the cabin. The cabin, two hours’ north of the Pinski home in Baltimore, has been in the family for generations, built pipe by pipe, before the road was laid, lumber and shingles and nails floated downstream on rafts in the Conowingo Creek during the days her grandfather and father and uncles had off from the steel mill. The cabin is a place Sam knows almost as well as herself; it has evolved, addition by addition, in the same way her limbs have grown awkwardly outward. A case for beauty could be made, for each, Sam considers, but only if one considered very hard.

Sam winds through the living room and two bedrooms, built one after another along the way, like a makeshift parade dragon—before reaching the last room in the back. Inside it a sliding door opens onto a deck that snakes along the front of the cabin, facing the vein of water. The room has been used for entertaining over the years—there is a padded bar from the seventies in the corner, along with her brother Steve’s elaborate stereo system that he lorded over her as a teenager in the late eighties. Various sofas from the Pinski home have found retirement here after their springs broke or their cushions started to reek or their patterns became hopelessly out of style. One of the sofas has a stowaway bed in it, and it is here where Sam has slept for most of her adulthood. The crocheted owl still hangs on the wall, as well as a Bananarama poster that she had put up in her teens. On the bar remain a few ancient, dusty, mid-priced bourbons and vodkas, along with a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps, its contents solidified. She can smell citronella but can’t find its source.

Sam stops in the adjoining room to leave Eve’s bags, the room she and her older brother Steve shared growing up. There are two beds, one of them in the loft, but no window. The fights over who got to sleep in the loft, even though it was the hottest and most suffocating place in the house, were legendary and started even before the Pinskis drove up to the cabin. Both Steve and Sam would corner their mother privately in the kitchen or in an aisle at the grocery store, pleading their case for the right to stay in the loft. Eventually their mother made up a calendar for the whole summer, breaking down the days that Sam or Steve would have it, but that did not stop them from bartering and trading—a McDonald’s coupon for a free sundae from a classmate’s birthday party, a handful of Bazooka Joe gum carefully stockpiled for such an occasion, and sometimes just the more traditional forms of negotiation—hair pulling and stomach punching.

Sam remembers the nights in the loft, dangling a thin rope, to which was tied an army figure or a recovered toy from the southern creek bed, down to the lower bed where Steve waited sprawled on top of the sheets. Sometimes he would be a bear, and his fist would devour the army figure or algae-spotted Barbie head while he growled, or he would be a tornado, grabbing the end of the rope and swinging the figure wildly into space. Sam would concentrate on the spinning object until it made her dizzy and she’d have to pull the rope up, lie in bed still for a few moments. Sometimes Steve would be quiet, listening to their parents fighting, their father breaking an oar on the kitchen counter, heaving the toaster oven against the wall. Steve’s fists would ball, whiten, while the rope swung limply between them. Sam would climb down into his bed, mash herself into the corner wall with the spider webs and moldy wood, and those nights nobody slept in the loft.

Her mother has been assuring Sam for weeks that Steve is making the trip down from New Jersey, although Sam is not sure what is so different this time than, say, any Christmas or Easter or birthday for which he has never bothered. If he is coming, she is not sure what she will say to him. She does not even know whether she wants to see him. The past she thought she’d shed always seemed to slide down her neck and into the small of her back, her body tight, when she wasn’t expecting it. Like when she was happy. Or when she was jogging or eating walnuts. Or when Michael proposed to her.

She knows one thing for certain: this time, Steve can have the fucking loft.

As she packs the old red cooler full of beer and iced tea she imagines him charming the women at the skunky New Jersey roadhouses where he ambles through Nebraska and Born to Run in Thunder Road, his Bruce Springsteen cover band, his voice rumbling and mucousy, his forearms shiny and sinewy and licked with sweat. Tramps like us, baby we were born to run. She thinks about his stupid Christmas and birthday cards, late, irregular, recycled. Why did he have to think about her at all? And her mother, always talking like Steve was five minutes away, down the street, ready to shovel the walk when it snowed. A perfect son. They wished. Over the years, Sam’s family has wished many things about Steve. They ranged from small wishes, like steady employment and calling more often, to larger ones such as healthy relationships with women and staying out of trouble with the law and kicking various narcotic habits he’d picked up here and there like change on the sidewalk.

But when her mother mentioned Steve might be visiting the cabin this summer, Sam sent him her book, the one she wrote about him. She sent him her words and she wondered whether he would read them, understand them, what he would say about them. It was possible that he would not show up, stupid bastard, or would be in jail, or off on tour, or strung-out somewhere between Brooklyn and Trenton. But she had begun the last chapter, and it was up to him to decide how it ended.

2.

When Sam returns to the dock her father has placed a plate of burgers on the table, along with grilled onions and toasted buns. It makes her almost want to cry when he is capable of such normalcy. The last few months, under a new doctor and the new drug cocktail, have been a miracle for him, for her mother. But even if his stay with reality is stronger than it has ever been, Sam thinks he is only marginally more likeable—his contact with them minimal, punctuated by grunts and scowls. Trapped, by choice, in his head of shadows.

I’m starving. These look great, Sam says automatically, sliding in next to Eve. Sam is used to saying so many light, cheery things around her father that she is worried she is becoming like her mother. And that he will begin to treat her as such. Thanks for cooking.

I’m giving your mother the summer off, he replies, handing her a plate. Although her doctor ain’t gonna like it. We packed a whole freezer full of meat, and her doctor’s telling her she can’t have none of it. What’s she gonna eat this summer? Berries and twigs?

Same as what I always eat. Her mother appears at the picnic table, inserting her finger in the slit of a hamburger roll and popping it open. I got blood pressure medication. And hell if I’m going to quit smoking.

Sam decides not to press the health issue any further. At least not within the first hour she’s there. You’re such a nag. Michael used to kid her. Just saying. But for years, she had thought it was called sanity. For years, it seemed that raising the stakes in the Pinski household was modus operandi. Everyone lived and behaved as if incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions, and she had been the one, always, to talk everyone down from the cliff.

Did you mention to Michael we were gonna be at the cabin like I asked? Sam’s mom crushes out her cigarette and picks up her hamburger.

No. Sam takes a long sip of beer. She does not tell them that she wanted to. Why would I do that? To give him hope we’ll get back together?

Give it to him.

Yeah, Mom, but I think the point of breaking up was so that we wouldn’t see each other anymore. And me getting my own place, you know? But I think he still thinks we’ll get back together.

You might—you been goin’ together for a while. Sam’s father stands up. I still think you were a fool.

Karl… Pat Pinski holds up her hand as Sam’s father shakes his head.

What, I’m gonna lie about my feelings? He brushes a sprinkling of crumbs off his shirt and makes his way back to the grill. Michael was the best thing you had going for you.

Best thing?

You know what I mean. He lights a cigarette, rests it on the wooden server on the side before sliding his spatula under a fresh round of burgers. You throw away a perfectly good thing because you’re unsure. It took you two years to be sure!

Karl, we’re not going to get into this. Sam’s mother rolls her paper plate into a funnel. We both want Sam to be happy. We’re going to be spending these few weeks together. We haven’t all been up here together like this since Sam and Steve were teenagers. We’re not gonna argue the whole time.

All right. I promised your mother—no fighting. He inhales and exhales quickly to clear his clogged nasal passages. Then he points toward Sam’s mother with the spatula. Of course, she ain’t making no promises about talking to Carol.

"Carol’s family."

And Sam ain’t?

We’re paying out the ass for them phone bills.

"I know what we’re paying—I pay the bills, don’t I?"

What was this I heard about no fighting? Sam holds her arms up as her father shoves a second plate of greasy burgers onto the table and sits down.

Sam, I gotta tell you I’ve been reading your book. Her mother lights another cigarette and plays with a strand of her dark, close-cropped hair. I try and read a chapter every night before I go to bed. It’s very…interesting. It’s not what I expected, but I think it’s interesting.

What she means, Sam’s father interrupts, hamburger tumbling out of his mouth, is that she wonders why you didn’t write about our family instead of writing about a man having a baby.

Why? Sam pushes around a clot of potato salad. I mean, I could write about what I know, but I like to write about what I don’t know. It helps me to understand.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to understand stuff that ain’t real.

It’s a metaphor, Sam answers, but does not pursue.

You only look like you’re having a baby, Pat laughs at Karl. "Maybe she’s writing about you, Karl. Besides, it got published. That means something."

With that, Sam’s mother pats her hand, then picks it up and holds it. There is no doubt in Sam’s mind her mother loves her, nor any doubt that the feeling is reciprocal. Yet, in her mother’s case, Sam often feels it is akin to loving a stranger. Certainly, Sam’s mother loved very specific things about her—but these things may well have been in another person, so dead were they in her. Her dislike of peas as a child, the way she danced to her Osmond records, her love of a favorite doll that peed clean, scentless water until Sam collected her own urine and poured it into the puckered spout of the doll’s mouth.

And with what had Sam replaced them? Years of hiding, tunneled under her bedcovers with her Walkman, listening to New Order and The Anniversary, writing screeds about how awful it was to be a blue-collar Pole in a