How it begins is that he is gone. He is gone more and more. Where gone? Gone fishing. Where gone? Gone to the woods. Gone to the lake to his sister’s house.
The switchboard girl calls and even she can’t find him. Where is he? He’s gone and gone some more. Gone for whole weekends, and then he comes in so late at the end of the weekend that Starsky & Hutch is on and I am hardly able to concentrate on him at all.
One day, he turns up in the afternoon while I am at home by myself. By myself but with my brother, because sometimes my brother is in charge of me but in the way where I never see him. I remain still in front of the TV, he remains in his room where there is another, smaller TV, and a trundle bed with a train set inside the bottom drawer instead of another bed.
My father appears suddenly out of nowhere and suggests I come to the lake. We go to the lake where his sister lives. Her name is (honest to God) Feral. My father’s sister is named after a wild thing, and indeed she is famously a wild a thing: a cocktail waitress! Well, no longer a cocktail waitress, but once a cocktail waitress. But she is so much older than my dad, they are further apart even than me and my brother. She is old enough to be his mother, and in fact much later I am told, perhaps she really is his mother, and Vesta just covered for her. It’s hard for me to know. I only meet her once or twice.
And by hook and crook Feral, the former cocktail waitress, has come to own a house on the lake, the coveted lake of the rich, the one kept so high that it floods our town. At Feral’s house there are fine furnishings from the Early American Collection with wooden arms and wooden footstools, and there are lots of bits of shining driftwood, and out the windows is a view of the still high lake, and the trees surrounding them. There are also lots of fancy rocks lying around in a decorative fashion. I am not allowed to touch them. Not allowed to touch the rocks? They are rocks! No, they are special rocks. Okay, I say, I see. But I do not see. I resist a tantrum because I am rarely permitted to go to the lake where my father and his sister have a secret special world. On that occasion I play upon the rocks outside, the rocks that are okay to touch, near the water’s edge. My mother would never let me go so close to the water’s edge. She can’t swim at all, and she thinks everyone is on the verge of a drowning all the time. Here at the lake, I enjoy a special freedom.
Then I am returned home, where my mother has been waiting in an ever-increasing panic, and where my brother sits smugly on the sofa, his arms crossed. He shrugs. Not his problem. My mother screams hysterically, and forbids my father to ever take me there again. Then, she tells me if he tries to take me there, I should never ever go. What happened there? Was that switchboard girl there? I should never go there. I should revolt! It is not safe there! It is dangerous. Feral is a drinker!
And so it continues, that he is less and less in the home, and more and more in the secret world of the lake. The dark, deep, still cool lake. Floating, perhaps, in a flat-bottomed boat. Or perched on a bench very near to an arrangement of fancy rocks. What does he do there? He is not a drinker. He is a teetotaler forever and always. Drinking is a weakness, he says. He says it often. Drinkers are weak people. Perhaps he doesn’t feel this applies to his sister, Feral, former cocktail waitress and keeper of the lake. I am not ever again invited.