Maxine Krenzel: Everything That Happens To You Happens To Me

Fiction by Maxine Krenzel
EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO YOU HAPPENS TO ME

The heat on I-95 creates mirages of metallic puddles that flood and evaporate as we get close. I try to count the exact distance between the car and the moment of the vanishing. In the backseat, my two aunts are sleeping, their heads pressed against opposite windows and their shoulders rising and falling in unison. Sadie is wrapped in a gray cardigan and Nancy is making a gentle whistling sound in her sleep. My mother is driving ten miles per hour under the speed limit in the left lane of the turnpike, staring straight ahead.

“You don’t remember when the highway was completely barren. It was the summer the state had planted thousands of saplings along the turnpike. That was the same year of the worst drought in Jersey’s history. You were five years old.” I shift my gaze to look at her profile, her jawline tighter yet somehow more abstract since the surgery. “We weren’t allowed to water our lawns or shower longer than five minutes, and all of the new trees died.”

I look out the window, pressing my forehead to the glass, feeling the heat of the outdoors against my goose-bumped skin while I imagine ghost trees and their skeletons snaking their way into the spaces between the pines. I see my body staying in the car while another part of me is curled up on a bed of warm pine needles and soft dirt in the roadside woods. The map on the GPS says we are only eighteen minutes from Lake Atison even though we are driving in the thick of the twelve-lane highway.

We pass a silver Nissan pulled to the side of the road. A man in red swim shorts that match his sunburned shoulders stands ten feet from a woman wrapped in a polka dot towel. She crouches next to two children, also in bathing suits. The trees behind them gently sway in the hushed breeze. For a split second while they are parallel with our car, they are all perfectly still. I watch them get smaller and smaller in the side mirror.

“See, Jeanie, this is why you should always lease,” my mom says while looking straight ahead. “Your grandfather kept the same dying car for almost twenty years, and we broke down almost every year on this highway. I remember I almost fainted from the heat waiting for the tow truck.” She is proud to rid herself of her car every three years, an extravagance that is a promise of forward motion.

Lake Atison, one of the small handful of lakes that is still open to the public in South Jersey, is where my mom and her siblings vacationed every summer as kids. We are driving there today to honor my uncle, Sal, who died in early February. Sal was a stern six-foot-four-inch former Marine with a red complexion and eyes that smiled. I only saw Sal once a year when my family celebrated the Jewish New Year. He and my mom had never gotten along, but she said his edges had softened in the last decade, as his memory and life slowly receded within the walls of the VA nursing home.

Since Sal’s delayed memorial service this week, my mom and my aunts have spent each night watching home videos of their vacations at Lake Atison. At 9 p.m., just as the sky shifted from cornflower to deep blue, my mom would slip the hard drive into her laptop and prop the thirteen-inch screen up on the coffee table. Captured by the shaky hand of my grandmother, the camera tracks my mom and Sal as they take turns jumping off the floating aluminum dock into the lake water. Nancy and Sadie stand together on the dock in matching black one-piece bathing suits resembling two smoking penguins while my mom’s noodle-like limbs fly through the air. She looks like a swan if a swan were made of pale skin and bones. Each time my mom gets ready for the jump, Sal protectively watches, gaze unwavering, while treading in the tea-colored water. The video always skips a little over two minutes in, starting and stopping like a scratched record, stuck on my mom mid-flight before she hits the surface. Eventually it corrects itself and cuts to my mom and Sal splashing in the water. Last night, I fell asleep during the rewatch, disoriented, dreaming about falling into a dark pool and waiting to reach the bottom.

With six minutes left, the highway splinters off into a two-lane road. We pass a “Welcome to the Pinelands” sign with bright corn fields to the west and dense pine forest on the east. The lake’s bathhouses appear at first as a distant dark shape on the horizon, like a sunspot floating above the acres of fields and forest.

Just before my mom misses the turn, Sadie’s cloudy eyeballs roll forward as she sits forward between the front seats and rasps, “We’re here.”

I can tell they have been to this part of the beach by how my aunts’ marbled legs push against the sand with deliberation, even while carrying a cooler and the beach chairs on their backs. With their towels wrapped around their shoulders, they resemble wobbly monks on a pilgrimage.

They lead us to a cove removed from the other people at the lake. We walk past gnarled and knotty bushes filled with crickets that go silent as we walk by. I recognize the docks from the grainy family footage, though the woods around this part of the lake are now thinned out and a newly built gray-slatted home is nestled fifty feet from the shoreline. My aunts cut across the house’s gravel front yard to get to what looks like a private beach.

“Are we allowed to be here?” I ask all of them, knowing that the question wouldn’t land.

Nancy shrugs, and Sadie makes a swatting motion with her hand, pushing my question out of her field of vision. My mom doesn’t or doesn’t want to hear me and instead starts to unpack the bottles of water and the deli sandwiches from the cooler while digging her beach chair into the sand with her red-painted toes. She situates her chair removed enough from Nancy and Sadie without being insulting. I roll out my towel on the ground next to her.

She slips out of her tan linen cover-up and begins gingerly applying the thick sunscreen to her face. “Don’t forget to protect your skin. Don’t want to look like a leather bag by age twenty-five,” my mom whispers to me while gazing over at Sadie and Nancy, who have stripped down to red-and-blue tankinis and matching Phillies hats. The sunscreen goes on thick and then disappears, her hands carefully rubbing the taut skin across her neck. I shift my focus to the papery skin hanging delicately off her arms. I think of putting my face on it like I would do whenever I had a fever, her body cooling mine.

When she first came home from the hospital, I wasn’t allowed to see her. It was last February on Valentine’s Day. I was against the whole procedure and so was relieved to have an excuse to stay far away. I could pretend distance kept time at a standstill. When I did come home for spring break, her face was still swollen and mask-like; her lips were drawn tight so that her words slurred together. It was hard to parse the happiness shining out of her eyes with the lingering bruises and swelling. She walked toward me for a hug while I stood in the front entryway, but she tensed up when I moved to put my arms around her. Before we could make eye contact, I retreated into my room to hide that my face had also distorted into something raw. My dad followed, standing in the doorway while I stared up at the ceiling. “You know your mother,” he said quietly, “she can’t be stopped.”

The sky is slate gray, and the air is still. The humidity is held under the thick blanket of clouds. I lie face up, feeling the stillness of the heat hovering over me. My mom has on her tortoiseshell sunglasses and a straw hat even though the sun is hidden. I can’t see if her eyes are open or closed.

I fall in and out of sleep. I dream of the highway and the lines on the road and the family we saw on the turnpike, only this time I’m watching them not from the car, but from the forest, and I watch our car drive by.

I don’t know how much time has passed, but I wake up to my mom’s bony toes tapping my shoulder. I turn my head to open my eyes away from the sky and immediately lock eyes with Sadie, who is either squinting or glaring at me. It’s never clear. My head is heavy with sleep.

“Jean, Sadie asked you a question,” my mom says.

Nancy is asleep again next to Sadie. I raise my eyebrows at Sadie.

“I asked you, how was your first year of college?” Sadie says loudly. There’s nothing competing with her voice other than the distant murmur from the families on the other side of the lake.

I sit up, aware of how stiff my back is from the dense sand underneath me.

“It was fine,” I respond, staring at the tiny slivers of dark blue polish at the tips of each of my toes, a kind of six-month calendar. I painted my toes during finals week last semester after I received my final grades—straight As. I had barely slept or eaten for a week.

“That’s about all I get from her too when I ask, don’t be offended,” my mom says to Sadie, looking away from me.

“You’d think there’d be a bit more to say given how much your mother is spending on your education,” Sadie cuts in. “Especially when none of us had the opportunity to go to college. Well, none of us except your mother.”

“That’s right. I went behind our dad’s back, applied, and got in.”

“And our father got a second mortgage,” Sadie says, with a bite.

My mom ignores her. “But Jeanie,” she says, turning back to me, “don’t you want to do well and not waste such an opportunity? I don’t know where I’d be without a college education.”

I could finish the sentence for her: I’d be a secretary or a housewife. Unlike her sisters who traded in their identities as homemakers for widows like badges of honor, she has worked as a financial advisor at a local bank for thirty-five years, the only woman in her position until seven years ago.

I see myself reflected in her dark lenses as I absentmindedly pick at a scabbed mosquito bite. The blood that had receded surfaces and pools eagerly into a thick syrup that cools the itch.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Nancy perk up and raise her plastic water bottle, sand sticking to the condensation. She’s revving up for a toast. I feel a surge of affection for her as she changes the subject, though it’s possible she wasn’t aware we were talking about anything else before.

“To Sal, who should be here with us today. He lives on through us,” bellows Nancy. “I believe he is with us today.”

“To Sal,” Sadie says back, picking up her own sandy bottle.

My mom nods and exhales, her breath shaky. She is looking straight ahead at the water, no longer at us. She’s somewhere else. I watch her eyes crease in the corner of her glasses. Her toes curl in the sand. A breeze shimmers the needles of the trees hugging the periphery of the beach.

“I’m going to cool off in the water,” I say while getting up and walking toward the dock.

I feel their eyes on me long after I dive in.

The water is soft, glowing shades of magenta and rust. I release my limbs and begin to tread slowly, watching the water claim each hair on my arms, bathing my skin. I lick the cool water off my lips and kick my legs without splashing. I swim further and further away.

The lake is over a mile wide and shaped like an almond. The tiredness that had been sitting like lead in my body slides off me with each stroke. I’m swimming backward. I see my mom and aunts bob as the gentle current rocks me westward. I let my eyes cross so they become three dark blotches, little fields of energy radiating out towards me.

On the opposite shore, a new house is going up. I see its blonde wood frame in the clearing. A bright yellow bulldozer is parked in a gravel yard similar to the one on the other end of the beach; the perimeter of the lot is lined with shiny black plastic garbage bags. The bald patch of ground shows exactly how much taller the pines are on that side of the lake, their craning skinny trunks almost looking down on the house. It’s as if they’ll bend over and retake what’s being built in their place at any moment. Nature always wins, I think to myself.

I swim, involuntarily counting my strokes, until I am exhausted. Rather than swim back, I decide to head towards the weed-covered island midway between the far western part of the shore and the middle of the lake, invisible from where I was sitting before. I flip over so my arms and legs expand and contract in tandem while I watch shapes form in the impenetrable thick clouds. The sky turns into an ocean, the clouds forming waves that lap up the sea-gray water. For the first time in months, I feel my whole body loosen and turn buoyant as the water pets me.

The water in this part of the lake is deeper and colder, the ombre shifting from iced tea into impenetrable darkness. The water stains the hair on my arms so I’m coated in a darker and thicker fur. Every hair stands up. I don’t recognize my own limbs; they look like the arms of a boy. The water’s properties are like a photo bath, surfacing parts of me hidden in plain sight.

When my mom called to tell me about my uncle, I was in my dorm room with Matt in my bed. Matt was a senior getting ready to move to New York for an internship at an art gallery that his father financed. Matt and I hooked up for three weeks at the start of the semester until we both used midterms as an excuse to stop seeing each other. That afternoon, right before she called, his skinny body was pressed against mine so I could feel his hipbone pressing into my stomach. I told him that I felt lost, a feeling of weariness that often crept in after we had sex. With his mouth to my ear, he said with swagger, “So drop out. Come to New York.” I shifted my gaze up to the plaster ceiling, noticing for the first time a brown stain that must’ve been from an old leak. He would never understand that leaving was not an option for me. I could feel my phone buzzing under the pillow as he talked to me. Everything that happens to you happens to me, my mom had whispered as she squeezed me goodbye when she dropped me off in September.

With Matt wrapped around me, I returned my mom’s missed calls and texts and asked her what had happened. She said Sal died in the exact same way her father had died eighteen years before I was born. His heart stopped while in the shower. She said this as if it were just a matter of fact, a family truth proved through repetition. “The men in this family just drop like flies,” she said. I asked Sadie to confirm this detail two weeks later, and all she said was He dropped like a fly in the sky.

I softly asked, “Should I come home?”

“No,” she responded quickly, “stay where you’re supposed to be, don’t bother with the trip home.” The real reason was that her surgery was scheduled for the next week, but she wouldn’t say this. She didn’t want to open the door to what I really wanted to do, which was try to talk her out of it. By the time I hung up, Matt was putting his pants on, heading for the door. I hadn’t noticed I’d turned away from him to face the wall, an instinct like rolling over in my sleep.

I’m measuring time with the movement of my body through the water until I’m pulled underneath before I can take a breath.

I shoot my head back up above the surface, expanding my lungs so they lick the edges of my ribs. The fragments of the moment assemble themselves into awareness: something behind me is grabbing my ankle. What the fuck, I say to nobody.

My pulse in tandem with my heartbeat vibrates the water. The air throbs with me. Everything is beating and connected to my breath. I spin around to see who is there and feel the grip tighten. I scan the surface of the water for air bubbles or any sign of life. Nobody appears. Fear like electricity crackles in all my limbs. I try to swim away but I’m held even tighter. I’m flailing like I did when I was five years old and learning to swim at the YMCA, my mom holding onto my hips while my arms and legs hit the surface trying to turn water into solid ground.

The sun peeks out bright and blinding from behind a cloud for a moment and then disappears again. I hear something that sounds like a crying animal or maybe a child, something between a wail and a yelp. I listen closely to decipher its voice, hoping it would get closer, but all goes quiet. Maybe the sound is coming from me. I see a flash of red between the trees in the opposite woods. I call for help again, but the breeze picks up and carries my words away. I can smell the metallic water and taste my thick hot spit in my mouth. I open my eyes, willing myself to wake up as my body goes slack with exhaustion. Wake up.

I slip under water. The deeper I push myself under, the less the resistance there is between me and whatever is holding onto me. I make out a translucent glowing white form billowing under the water’s weight, right below my legs. The darkness lifts its curtain even further and shows me the outline of a submerged body.

The moment rearranges itself again and I know what is happening because I have been here before. This is the moment right before I crash through the water’s surface into Sal’s arms. He’s right below me, ready for me. I let my arms fan out and soften my body towards his as I sink deeper into the cool water. I’m safe, I tell myself; everybody is close by, watching me.

Except there’s no hand to catch me and the specter of Sal quickly dissolves. My fingers find my ankle, with the handle to a plastic bag wrapped tightly around, its crinkly form ballooned out like an old jellyfish. The darkness recedes and I see the other handle knotted tightly around the skinny algae-covered trunk of a submerged pine with spiky branches radiating outward as if electrocuted. I can see the faint outline of a yellow smiley face on the takeout bag. My mind rewinds back to the sandwich shop in Shamong and the shaky hands of the cashier, Lucy, who knew my uncle. They had gone to summer camp together, she said to me after she recognized Sadie in the checkout line. When I passed her my sandwich to be added to the bill, she took my hands into her hands, thin with knuckles that bulged with arthritis. I could feel the soft ridge of a pale purple vein pumping blood and heat into her hands. “You have his eyes,” she said to me, “and his smile.” I could feel my mom standing by, listening as loud as if she were speaking.

I spin myself around underwater and slide the handle off my ankle as my thirst for breath overtakes me. I shoot back up above the surface just as the sun pierces through the clouds, casting everything in an ancient light that feels new every time.

The sun has begun to make its descent. I swim until the lake deposits me on the island’s shore, where I stretch my pulsating body on the sand. My breath slows and softens so I can hear the wind rustling the island’s tufts of weeds and grasses. I lie under the bright sky until a family of ants finds a path across my ankles and shoulders, making me long for the water again.

This time I wade back in slowly, feeling the lake’s floor, smooth like clay. I walk until the water meets my collarbone and I can push off and guide myself back towards the beach. Making a wide circle around the sunken tree, I swim until the sounds of the shoreline find their way back to me: kids shouting, a lifeguard in the distance on a loudspeaker, the hum of cars on the highway that sounds like ocean waves.

My mom and aunts come into view. I keep my eyes on them while I pull myself against the current, seeing Nancy and Sadie both tucked close to each other and my mom, sitting by herself, looking outward. They are faint outlines of themselves and yet I see them like they’re in front of me, my memory correcting the distance. My mom sees me and gets out of her chair. She stands on the shore; her purple suit and pale flesh blur together while the sun casts a long marionette-like shadow of her against the sand. She holds one hand on her hip while she waves at me, her lanky arm gliding through the air calmly and gracefully. She never looked more beautiful.

Maxine Krenzel is a writer, educator, and Assistant Professor in English at Kingsborough Community College. She is originally from Philadelphia and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. This is her first fiction publication.