A Song in the Daylight (68 page)

Larissa’s head was cracking open. She should’ve taken an aspirin. If she had one, she would’ve. They could afford aspirin in balmy December when they worked non-stop from dawn to dusk. The irony was, she was too busy to get headaches in December. It was the rum! she realized. The fermented sugar cane did something funky to her brain, it always had. Usually she stayed away from it, but yesterday it must have been free, for how else to explain the raging head? No liquor affected Kai, except to make him dance and sing. He drank a lot to dance and be happy, but the next day always got up and went to work. He wasn’t like Che’s Lorenzo.

Larissa hadn’t heard from Che for so long. Whatever had
happened to her old friend? She lost count of the summers that were winters and the winters that were summers. Did she have to count them twice? Because that would make Larissa over fifty. She stopped celebrating her birthday on April 4. Her birthday was in spring, not fall. She was born when everything in the world was beginning, not ending; she wasn’t born when the leaves fell off the poplar trees, when it rained and the air got cold. She was born when the days were resurrected by forsythia and daffodils and yellow tulips. She wasn’t born in rain and wind. There were so many degrees of wrong with that, that the first year they were in Jindabyne and April washed over May, Kai said to her, suddenly remembering, did you have a birthday last month and I missed it? Larissa shrugged and said
meh
, and he consoled her with, you’re forever young to me. That was sweet. She went with that. Ran with it. He didn’t mention it again, and neither did she. His birthday was in January and he loved celebrating it when it was hot and the Alpine daisies were out, and they had resumed their tours and were making money again. They cleaned their Land Cruiser troop carrier, bought new hiking boots, invested in new tents, new fishing lines, summer jackets, flasks, Thermoses. And every twenty-third day of January they went out and got extra-expensive tequila at Balcony Bar and partied till closing time and then came home and partied some more, just the two of them. He was
so
good. Didn’t agave used for tequila have sugar in it? Weren’t the flowers edible, and had sugar, like rum? So maybe it was the cheap tequila that was cracking her head open this morning.

She clutched her stomach through her jacket pockets as she walked.

She wished she knew how to ski. How did learning that skill pass
her
by? No surprise that it passed him by, Kai of the Hawaiian volcano beaches, but how did it pass her by, from the New Jersey mountains, where there was a ski lift on every
hill? When she was a child she didn’t ski. They lived near the Hudson River and when the town pond froze in Piermont, they ice skated, but there wasn’t much call for ice skating in Jindabyne. After she got married and had kids, skiing was too expensive. By the time the children were older and there was money, there was no time for skiing. No time for skiing, or theater, or a job. No time for much of anything, yet every day was filled to bursting. Here in these summers/winters she had nothing but time.

But not for long. She decided she was going to get a job at Caldwell’s. It wasn’t too far; she could walk it every day. She could make some extra, sorely needed money to put toward the business. They could buy new tents and tune up their safari troopie, repaint the signs, upgrade the microphones and the radio, invest in new disposable cameras for the customers, make sure they had enough money left over for worms, lunch pails, trout lines, drinks, sun hats, for advertising online. They ran a beautiful tour. They designed it themselves, researched it, wrote it. Larissa performed it while Kai drove. Her theater training came in handy. Three times a week she put on a twenty-eight-hour-long performance. They took eight people a hundred and twenty miles into the wilderness, down the Thredbo, through the mountains and the Great Gorge and the Great Dividing Range of the Snowy River, to Tumbarumba. They sat on granite boulders and fished for trout in the Thredbo and the Murray, and for salmon in the streams. They cleaned and cooked their own fish while the wallabies grazed nearby and the wombats hid in the grasses. They bushwalked and talked about the high country wildflowers and poisonous snakes and the music of the Grateful Dead and the Animals; they drank beer, sang “The House of the Rising Sun” by the campfire, accompanied by Kai’s spectacular ukulele, sang “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Angie,” and slept under the everlasting stars in the Australian Alps.

Right after Halloween, Larissa would tell her favorite ghost story by the flickering flame, that of the Snowy Mountain River Dam project. To dam the river to divert the water into the driest part of New South Wales, to grow the businesses and the farms and the vineyards, the government created the artificial Lake Jindabyne in the flat valley between the hills, and all would have been fine except the old town of Jindabyne was laid out in the flat of that valley. Can’t dam a river without burying a town or two, and so Jindabyne was buried in its watery grave, and in the heat of the summertime, when the tide is low and the water level drops, you can still see the church steeple rising up out of the lake like a phoenix, like something that will out, no matter how well it’s buried. The myth says there were people in that town, and now they’re in their watery grave, too, and every Halloween their souls rise up from the lake and wander the new city. They buried a real town to make a fake lake, Larissa would say. Does that make you shiver?

And one time, a heavyset, out-of-breath American man said to Larissa, “I have stories of destruction perpetrated on human beings by human beings that would make you shiver. What you’re telling us—it’s just a story. What I have seen with my own eyes is true terror. Wanna hear?” He stared at Larissa too pointedly, too intensely. Now
that
made her shiver, to the chill of her heart.

And funny enough, that dark night, no one wanted to hear.

The next morning they drove on to the sprawling grape-growing country near Tumbarumba and partook in a tasting tour of the region’s best cool-climate sparkling wine made from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. They took all unmarked trails out, but on the way back to Jindabyne they drove down the almost inaccessibly narrow but paved Alpine Way past Mount Kosciusko, through the snow gum and Alpine ash woodlands, all the new bushies exhausted and exhilarated. Many people
said it was the best tour they’d ever been on. Larissa knew what they meant.

The first time she and Kai marked the tour on the dirt roads that ran parallel to the paved highways, she never thought her lungs could breathe so deep, her heart could beat so profoundly, that she could feel so happy. She was giddy with the altitude, with rapture, as she chanted the name of her grandest lover under the stars, his mighty limbs the length of grace. Kai…Kai…There had never been anyone like him in the open country.

After two years, when the birth control pill ran out, she didn’t go to the clinic to get more. Let’s see what happens, they said with an excited shrug. If it’s meant to be, it will be. She wanted to say to him, you know, children are a big responsibility, but didn’t. He had lost one of his. She had lost three of hers. No use dredging up the bottom-dwelling grief.

There was no baby.

They shrugged. Obviously it wasn’t meant to be.

And things had changed in the five seasons they’d been here. Without getting a second vehicle and hiring more people, they reached a ceiling to the money they could make off eight people for a twenty-eight-hour tour. They were busy, but they weren’t growing their profit. Last summer all the money they made went right back into renewing the supplies and repainting the desert-tan Land Cruiser a jungle camo color. It felt like business was drying up, like there was no way out.

Caldwell’s market was before town, on the downhill road overlooking the lake. They knew her there; Caldwell, the man who owned the store, kept trying to sell her kangaroo tail. “Jimmy, I just want ground beef,” she would say to him. “Got any of that?” Not giving up, Jimmy kept trying to convince her kangaroo soup and stew were just the ticket on a cold winter’s night, and she couldn’t explain that it was July and wasn’t supposed to need winter stew. She kept buying ground beef
because she wanted to make a summer barbecue. “Do you have some chicken wings, Jim? I want to marinate them,” she said to him this morning, rubbing her hands together to get warm. Caldwell didn’t have chicken, but he ground up some chuck for her.

“Jim,” she asked tentatively, her palms on his glass counter, “is there any work around here?”

“What kind of work are you lookin’ for, darling?” he said. He was a short man, perpetually in overalls and a plaid shirt. He had told her he was from Scotland, but his wife was Polish, and she made stuffed cabbage sometimes and pierogi that Larissa loved, having never had them before. Such foreign tastes, but good. Every once in a while Anna asked her if she needed a cleaning woman, and Larissa was surprised by that, as in: the Caldwells own a store that’s open seven days a week and is the only provider of fresh produce and packaged foods for miles around. And yet Anna asks if she can clean Larissa’s house, as if Anna is the one who needs the money and not the other way around.

“Oh, no. There’s no work here,” Jimmy Caldwell said. “Our son wants to go to England to college next year. We don’t know what to do. How to explain to your only son that you can’t afford to send him?”

“Is he smart?” said Larissa. “Does he have sports or musical ability? Maybe he can get a scholarship?”

“I don’t think so,” Caldwell replied. “He rides horses. He fishes. Do they even give out scholarships for that?”

Larissa was about to offer Jared’s sage advice. Mortgage your store, she wanted to tell Jimmy. Take out a large loan with your business as collateral. That’s what Kai and I would do, if we had a child. Sending one son to college in another country was a big expense. Now imagine if you had two children, barely eighteen months apart, and they were both in college at the same time. Imagine they went to private universities that cost
tens of thousands of dollars a year. Those parents would have to mortgage their business, their house, their cars, their jewelry, everything, wouldn’t they, to send two grown children through four years of higher education. Larissa suddenly felt sick. The feeling came again, falling straight down, all oxygen sucked out of her lungs, unable to catch even a shallow breath, the steepest rollercoaster drop but without the childhood and the joy, and the rollercoaster. First it assaulted her only during dreams, the awful rushing plunge, but then started to come during the waking hours too, like now, hatefully increasing in occurrence.

“I’m sorry, darl,” Caldwell said. “Don’t look so sad. I want to help you. I would, if I could.”

“No, that’s fine.” But he looked worried; she must have lost the blood in her face. Long ago she lost the color in her hair. She started bleaching it herself, dousing it with peroxide and lemon, to remove all color. She removed it, all right. She wasn’t so much Winter Gold now, as winter ash. Kai said he liked it; called it lemon blonde.

Caldwell gave her a pound of ground beef and two baked potatoes on credit until Wednesday. He gave her coffee for free. She drank it black, without sugar, the way she hated it, and then slowly walked back uphill to Rainbow Drive, carrying the little plastic bag of food for Kai.

A woman was taking out her garbage. “Good morning!” the woman said. “Isn’t it lovely out? Did you see the lake today? It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

“Good morning,” said Larissa, speeding up. She didn’t glimpse at the lake.

What was it that haunted her? She had been doing well for so long.

Was that true? Had she been?

After she got home, she scoured the kitchen for something to eat. The bread was stale (thought she didn’t throw it out,
just in case; after all, what was a little mold when you were hungry), and the milk was sour. She thought of taking the six dollars and walking downtown to Gloria’s Jeans, where she could get a coffee and a delectable pear and raspberry bread and sit and read the newspaper. Often there was news from back home. America this, America that. Even New Jersey was in the news once, something about a governor resigning amid charges of flagrant impropriety. “This is my truth,” he had said. Larissa liked that formulation so much.
My
truth. She had some truths of her own. Inarguable really.

Maybe instead of reading the paper, she could ask Serge at Gloria’s if there was any work. She could serve coffee to the migrants.

She didn’t want to walk so far again, but she liked the idea of being there, the smell of the coffee, the sitting down in a warm place full of food and people. Hearing other voices. No wonder she couldn’t put on any weight, all that walking. Larissa didn’t think Kai liked her this thin. She didn’t know for sure, he never said, he wasn’t mean, but…when they were in bed and he fitted in behind her, he didn’t say, you feel so good, as he ran his hands over her. He didn’t compliment her in clothes or out. Well, what was there to compliment? Her clothes were his clothes. Jeans, Henleys, boots, Akubra hats, his a Cattleman, hers a Stylemaster. Her body was his body. If it weren’t for the breasts, she’d be narrow-hipped, long-legged and tall like him. Her hair was straight, his was kinky, but when they put it in ponytails, put on their safari jackets and hiking boots, from the back who could tell they were man and woman?

From the front who could tell they were lovers?

Once you could tell.

Yet at Balcony Bar on Wednesday nights after he got paid, they drank and danced, and she put on a little lipstick, and let her hair down. She still looked pretty, she thought; did she still look young? Ish?

The bungalow they rented came sparsely furnished. In the years they lived in it, they bought a new mattress for the bed because they broke the old one; all the coils burst out of it one night, a slasher movie about the evils of too much sex.

The TV flickered, and there was no radio, except for the clock by the bed that hissed the AM stations and was full of static on the FM as if the DJs were walking on carpet as they spun the records. In the kitchen, there was a small table for
almost
four, in the living room a brown couch and an armchair by the window. The curtains remained drawn. They had no pictures on their walls. No framed and well-placed photos of their families, of her children in the pool, of each other. She had started to acquire some second-hand books, to rebuild her collection, but when the brakes went out on the troopie, they pawned the books and what remained of her jewelry to get them fixed, and then let the deadline pass for getting her things back. At night, they rode the Ducati to town to drink. Sometimes, when they were
really
broke, they stayed home. They weren’t much for T V, but they read a little bit—when they had books. They played cards, pretending they were in Vegas or Reno. They had a pretty good time, sipping whiskey mixed with heavy cream to make it taste like Bailey’s. But whiskey was expensive, and heavy cream went off. It cost three dollars, and sometimes they didn’t have it. So they played cards without whiskey and cream. Sometimes, she lay down in bed and pretended to sleep. Like now.