The days are filled with balancing-act bike rides, with her beach chair laid across her handlebars. She rides through quiet alleys, and driveways, past groups of young children nestled on blankets on soft lawns, captivated as senior citizens read to them under small green roof-tents.
She smiles and waves as she passes them, strangers to her, yet familiar as if they are actors portraying her charmed childhood of warm summer mornings at story hour.
At the beach, she lays on her chair and stares out at the ocean for hours at a time, at once thinking of everything and nothing. She thinks of writing, and takes out her notebook, but becomes bored with her writing: words that convey no feelings, no soul, just aloof observations like a poor man's George Carlin. Frustrated, she puts the book away.
At night, she eats dinner with her family. The common theme through dinner seems to be the wine and cocktail glasses that are frequently refreshed. She drinks her wine in tandem with a diet coke, to avoid getting drunk. She is the only one at the table who does this, although they do not notice.
After dinner, she is subjected to an adult version of story time. She listens to a story her mother tells her frequently during the summer months, as if summer is some type of anniversary for this oral history.
The men, silently safe in the confines of the kitchen under the pretense of cleaning up, are not subjected to the tale told to her for the umpteenth time by the flicker of citronella candlelight by her mother.
Her mother warns her of hereditary alcoholism on both sides of her family, as she rests her hand on her Manhattan (perfect, on the rocks, with a twist). She tells her daughter that alcoholism is a terrible disease. She shuts her eyes as if when they are open, she is watching her own mother strapped down again going through the DT's in a hospital and then again in her former family home. Sometime during the story, she sucks in her breath and unconsciously covers an ear, as if she can hear her mother as she did forty years ago at 21, screaming at the hallunciated rats crawling on the ceiling.
The daughter remains silent throughout the story, which is shared more as therapy for her mother rather than a warning. She makes an excuse to leave as the story ends and the men come back outside. They seem startled to see her leave so suddenly. They haven't heard the stories, those stories are saved for mother and daughter, an oral journey that tranfers pain from one to the other but heals no one in it's telling.
She goes home alone to a dark house and immediately gets into a hot shower, the water burning her tanned skin offering a physical relief.
She dresses in a skirt her mother made for her and sits in her house alone, clean, smoking and thinking, wondering if the ghosts she has heard about are with her in the room.
A friend comes in and sits down with a beer. She pours herself a glass of wine from a half drunk bottle and proceeds to finish the bottle as they sit there in relative silence.
The phone rings with calls from friends looking to go out and extend the buzz they have been working on for several hours, numbing their own demons of struggling marriages and mortages and sick parents and unhappy existences sprinkled with memories of fun.
She sits with her demons and does not answer the phone. She imagines being out at a bar, filled with hundreds of other people chasing concoctions that will temporarily erase the demons those strangers bring with them. The divorcee out on her wedding anniversary. The landscaper out with his friends for a night without unplanned children and bills. The cleptomanic waiter with a prescription drug problem. The lifeguard who spent age 7 kidnapped across country with his biker outlaw Dad until his gandfather tracked him down and bought him home. The fiance searching for her betrothed who is in a different area of the bar scamming college girls and oxys.
She turns off the TV and the lights and goes to bed. She is not unhappy or sad, she is simply understanding of life and hopeful with the thought of rising in the morrow to a new day, when the sun will shine again and she will ride her bike past story hour and sit on the beach and peacefully stare at the ocean feeling grounded in the belief that life is a struggle for everyone. She will feel blessed to have a struggle because without one, she thinks she surely would be dead.
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