Memoirs, Ink

Summer Waters

By Julian Bentley Edelman

1969

This street is soft, as if the asphalt never quite hardened. It is where my mother parks on these summer days at Green Lake, under the fatherly chestnut trees that will shade our Chevy all day long.

It is the 1960's and my mother Beth is in her forties. She is older than my friends' mothers, yet somehow more full of life. She has piles of books in the living room and unkempt kitchen cupboards. Her closet is bursting with ethnic prints, her jewelry boxes with beaded treasures. The pictures on our walls would make other mothers uncomfortable. Some are nudes sketched by my 16 year-old brother. Beth spends a lot of time in the back bedroom, working at her desk. She spends whole mornings writing poetry. Both my parents write, although my father has an excuse; he teaches at the university. I've sussed out that writing poetry is not quite excusable. I can see from the expressions on my friends' parents' faces that writing is along the same lines as playing with puzzles all day long.

Beth takes me and my friends Lynn, Rosie and Pam to the lake to swim almost every summer day. She doesn't smile and talk down to us in a sweet voice. Why should she? We are children, not characters in a Shirley Temple movie. We migrate to our customary place, which, characteristically, is far from the lifeguard's purview. Beth grew up in Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes, and she likes to swim. No ropes are going to hem her in. After the sun has warmed her olive skin till the lotion glistens, after she is good and hot, she'll call us back from our splashing and play to watch her things. She'll walk down to the lake's edge and enter slowly, contemplatively, perhaps imagining forty summers ago when she, too, was eight years old, in the middle of summer, slipping into  a small, cool lake.

 

1977

Paris is not beautiful in the springtime. At least, not this year. It is cold and rainy and I indulge in pitying my poor, suffering self.

Beth received the news last winter that she'd won a grant allowing her to spend eight months in France doing research and writing. She'd told me she wanted me to come with her, and I had been elated. We'd traveled overseas once before, after an aunt died and left her a chunk of money, and we were perfectly paired as travelers: intrepid, impressionable, able to shrug off inconveniences. Daddy, of course, was not interested in these trips. He had never flown in an aircraft, and the idea of leaving the university campus and his students must have seemed as wild a notion as leaving Seattle to take up sudden residence in Istanbul. He was relieved when Beth made the executive decisions, two now, to go ahead and do what she dreamed.

But now . . . Now, I have fallen in love with a boy at school, Spud Gellein. He is blond and blue eyed. He has strong, muscular arms and a very cool sneer, and a best friend who drives a Camaro, and he calls me Sweetheart. He got D's on his report card, and this I acknowledge in the back of my mind, but he's chosen me to fall in love with. Beth left for Paris six weeks before I joined her. During that time, I took action to solidify my understanding with Spud.

And now here we are, in the city of love. My mother is separated from my father, for all intents and purposes, and I am separated from Spud. None of this is verbalized. At Le Bon Marché, we inspect strange cuts of meat and confer about how to prepare them. Afternoons we spend in Les Jardins Luxembourg, reading novels we've purchased at WH Smith, or, when it's raining, sitting inside a café pretending to be Parisian. With my mother's black hair and impressively exotic profile, her small, serious mouth, and her soft-versioned daughter, we might be anything: Russian Jewish refugees, Italians with an intriguing back story, a French auteur and her daughter. I almost never bring up Spud, though I think about him constantly. Beth will scoff at Spud. Beth scoffs at boys and love in general because she has never been afflicted. I don't dare ask her whether her being here and Daddy's being back home equals Separation. Aren't they supposed to be like the sun and moon, a fact of my existence?

I read nearly every English classic that WH Smith carries. The more romantic, the better: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters. I learn from Jane Eyre that the way to win love forever is to be completely, selflessly devoted to the man you love. If you love him with all your heart and defend him always, he cannot help but, in the end, to love you absolutely. The summer of 1977, I devote myself to Spud Gellein. My mother devotes herself to translating French women poets.

 

1990

Beth is sitting on my brother and his wife's boat, a 32-foot 1920's cruiser on which they live. She is awkward on the craft, which I imagine she associates somehow with confident, tanned, wealthy people who take their leisure in boat shoes and nautical attire. Misconceptions and misinterpretations have always plagued her. My brother's wife moves effortlessly through the tidy space, placing cool drinks in front of us. Literary paperbacks and engine mechanics manuals are stuffed into the netting that festoons the sides of their home.

"So?" my mother says, vaguely testy, uncomfortable at being manipulated by her offspring, mostly myself. She has been called back from what will turn out to be her last able-bodied trip to Europe, and she has been told, on the way to the marina from the airport, that she is not going straight home, but to a family meeting sans père.

One week earlier I had taken my father to the doctor's office for an exam and he had been diagnosed with colon cancer. In the hall outside my father's examination room, I had been told that he had six months to two years to live, and that I had better tell my mother before telling him myself. On our way out of Group Health, out in the mid-May sunlight, I had walked beside him and withheld.

I had called my brother. We had decided not to tell Mom the extent of the news until we could be by her side. I then called her overseas, saying only that Daddy had been diagnosed with cancer, not that his prognosis looked so dim.

Now, I tell her. I am angry with her. She has been off in Europe, stimulating herself culturally. Her voice on the other end had been full of life, full of English countryside and the universe beyond. She questioned her need to return, and only at my insistence did she relent.

She turns her lemonade glass, half empty, around and around with her small, thin fingers. She and I sit as we always sit, still and tense, emotions indefinable, thoughts expressed in measured phrases and rational procedures. My brother and his wife collect the glasses.

 

2002

She felt near the end last summer. Hip replacement surgery left her confined not only to the house, but to bed for the better part of two weeks. On the day I finally took her outside and down the sidewalk in front of the modest brown rambler I grew up in and she has grown old in, she was nearly overcome. Just to be outdoors, amidst the gingko and Japanese maple trees, the blueberry bushes.

Now we are at the ocean, one of her favorite places. The July sun is bright, the wind, thank God, piercing as ever. Heaven forbid the most powerful and beautiful things in life should cease to almost knock us to our knees.

We have ambled down to the sand very slowly, as Beth's footing is precarious on a surface with so much give. "Wow!" She is near tears at the enormity of what is before us. High, kelp-colored waves crest, cascade onto the shore, burble across dead birds, pieces of wood, rock, and clam shell. Then the mass is pulled back, inevitably repossessed by its mother's body, the ocean, sucked back hard over bits of debris.

Her need to sit is sudden. There is no log in sight because Nye Beach is one long, sandy stretch. We head to a rock formation, a dun and rust-colored menhir which should be good for leaning. I look for a ledge of some sort that will offer her relief, act as a makeshift bench. There is not really a suitable shelf, but she is able to lean in a way that is a little less exhausting than standing. She says wistfully, "Gee, I can't sit on the sand anymore." We stare out to the green, cresting rollers. My thoughts, hers I suspect, reel over decades.

 

 

Born and raised in Seattle, Julian grew up in a household dominated by language: bookshelves stuffed to overflowing, verbal quips flying across the dinner table, poems recited spontaneously and regularly like songs. My father, Nelson Bentley, was a poet and beloved English professor at the University of Washington. Her mother Beth is actively sending out manuscripts at 88.  These two people continue to be powerful influences in Julian's writing and life.

Julian holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Washington. Convinced that life is more fantastic than fiction, she started writing autobiographical pieces in the late 1990's.  She teaches at St. Thomas School near Seattle, where she is humbled by her young students' ability to cast the world in fresh, new lights.