On the first day of school, I got so tired of waiting in the carpool line at pickup time that I parked and walked up to the front. I laughed in the principal’s face when he asked if I was new to the school . . . Nope, dickhead, I went here for ten years, I graduated high school here, I’ve met you at least a half dozen times, and our kids are in the same grades. His crony the guidance counselor came walking briskly past, the guy we call “Baby Dick” in my house. “Biker walker?” he said walking backwards and pointing at me as he went.
“Huh?”
“Walker biker?”
“No.”
You should’ve seen the teachers and assistant admin types puff up ready for a fight. I walked leisurely past them all in my baggy tee, green elastic-waist shorts, and crew socks and sneakers, shades on, all of them standing around doing nothing while people idled their cars in the hundred-degree heat waiting for forty-five minutes to creep to the front of the line and have their kids released to them. Let them say something. “Just give me my fucking kids, you lazy bitches,” I’d have liked to say.
I just smiled and played dumb, said I didn’t have the placard for the windshield with my younger son’s ID number, that I wanted to get my middle schooler too and wasn’t sure of the process. This I explained to the head bitch, the one with balls enough to speak up, after principal boy had already run in and sent Cartter and Scotty out to me. That little chore took him all of about ten seconds. Now, he was running around in the lower school building, looking for the placard that was already in the pack on Scotty’s back. Queen Bitch and I shared a little laugh at his expense, and I was off, Cartter and Scotty obliviously trailing me to the parking lot. “Thanks,” I said to the staring teachers . . . Bye Bye, Bitches! Try a little harder!
School might as well be the DMV, or a prison, the way these retarded teachers and administrators act, and yet, thanks in part to that troop of idiots, it was a blissful day. There was quiet in the house, and Danyelle and I sat and talked for hours. Mostly, we talked about how this most recent Sapphire trip felt like a big one, one we were going to remember. I cried a little when I told Danyelle how I couldn’t believe the way I could be right back in the blue room upstairs in the Laundry, so perfectly could I see it in my mind, and the way I could see the boys swimming away from me while I sat on the dam watching the sunlight gleaming off their little blond heads, the two of them cutting through the black surface with their freestyle and butterfly strokes out into the middle of the lake, hauling themselves out onto the little floating swim platform and diving back in again, Sassafrass looming over it all – our little paradise. If I think about it, I can smell the lake, taste it for just a fleeting moment. Now that we’re back and the boys come home from the neighborhood dock covered in creek water and pluff mud, beet red from casting their net in the August heat, cuts on their feet from stepping on oyster shells, it seems surreal that we were ever actually in Sapphire, like it was just a really vivid dream.
Now, I miss the beginning of our trip, but then, I was worried, thinking I wouldn’t be able to relax and forget about swim team and all the emails and calls that were sure to pile up while I was away. I thought staying in the Laundry for the first time in years, we wouldn’t be able to get comfortable, that I wouldn’t sleep. I worried about the start of a little blister on my foot from when I overdid it trying to break in my new hiking boots. I teased Scotty about having a bunch of girlfriends when we fished together on the Upper Lake, and when he asked why I always do that, I told him I guessed I was scared he and Cartter wouldn’t like me if I was too serious. That night Cartter followed me around while I cooked chicken thighs on the grill, imitating my beer drinking with a ginger ale, because if I was having a “special drink,” so was he. He watched me with total admiration, and I thought, no way I deserve this.
The hiking is always what turns my negative thinking around. By the time I was coming back down from the top of Sassafrass, tromping along the trail that meanders through the valley while the kids ran way ahead, I was talking my head off to Danyelle about how we can be better people, live our lives better, come up and visit more. By the time we were going out for our second big hike, I sighed reflexively while sliding my foot into its new boot, the sole all caked with sparkling, mineral-rich dirt. I wore blister pads and had no trouble with my feet. We did all three peaks, and then we did Sassafrass again. The second time was the day I let the boys jump off the dam for the first time ever and sat there watching them. Staring out at them with the sound of the falls in my ears, it felt almost like the trees wanted to talk to me.
In between the big hikes, we did smaller ones around the lakes and the creeks that feed the Upper Lake. The boys and I stomped through the brush and into the shallow water, looking at rocks and catching little waterfalls with our hands. About halfway through our trip, the day my cousin John was supposed to arrive, I walked home from the Lower Lake dam, past the big rock outcroppings that make me think of the way we’re hurtling through space, along the trail that cuts into the forest around the little rivulet that feeds the lake across from Aunt Elizabeth’s house.
It had been eight years since I’d seen John. That trip was one of the last times that I stayed in the Laundry. The kids were just babies, and I would walk them to the Upper Lake boathouse, and they’d sit there and watch John and his friends swim. That was when John was 42. Now, I’m 42, and John’s 50. I imagined running into him when I got back to the end of the trail, him noticing my knee brace and me explaining to him that hey, I’m not getting any younger. I thought about how that trip the last time I saw him didn’t seem so long ago, how in another eight years, I’d be 50, and Cartter would be graduated from high school. I cried.
Sammy only came on the baby hikes around the Upper Lake. She only howled on the screened in porch the first time we ditched her, but she let us know her feelings other ways. Every time we were about to go for a hike, she stood at the screen door with her ears perked, ready to dart out once someone forgot about the little gap the pneumatic door closer leaves for just a second; then, after her jailbreak, she’d stand like a statue in the grass while we tried to coax her back inside. With her arthritis she just can’t put in the miles anymore. Even a year ago she never would have missed the chance to run alongside or in front of the golf cart. Now, she wants to hop in and ride half the time. By the end of the trip, a hot spot was blooming all over the saggy skin on her throat and on one side of her face. We doped her with a double dose of trazadone plus gabapentin on the drive back, and for once, she succumbed and was tame behind the patchwork of barricades keeping her in the third row. No telling how many trips she has left. Maybe none.
Nor is there any telling how many more trips like this one we have left with the boys. For eleven days we shared the laundry, just the four of us and Sammy. We moved the king bed back up into the blue room, so that we could all sleep upstairs with the windows open and the big attic fan running. I kept all the fishing poles rigged up, half for bass and half for trout, and every morning Cartter and Scotty hit the lake before breakfast. I took them out a few times, but they’re well on their way to full blown Sapphire independence. They both drove the bass boat on the Lower Lake, and Cartter’s getting a lot better at the little electric motor on the Upper Lake. They drove the golf cart without supervision for the first time. One night we ate out at the Gazebo, and I waited until it got dark and told them the story about the man with the golden arm. Scotty had never heard it, but he barely even flinched when I got to the jump scare at the end. Too big to be scared by Daddy’s silly story. Not like when Cartter was a toddler, afraid of the crows because I told him they were spies for the “bear witch.” I can’t believe it’s over.
Before we left home for our vacation, I organized my season plan for the swim team into a calendar in excel – short course and long course, different periods within each, meets listed in their own column – fifty neat little rows accounting for 50 weeks. I printed it out and held it in my hand. It looked so impossibly quick and easy at first glance, but a second look at all the weekend events revealed a much more painstaking process. As I write this, I’m three days away from the start of week one. Looking at that calendar, I wonder, “Is this really how I’ll measure the days we have left with the boys under our roof?”
While I question myself, it’s funny to catch glimpses of how at ease the boys are with the start of the schoolyear. They lean on each other, and they don’t worry. Cartter told Danyelle he walks Scotty to his classroom in the morning after we illegally drop Scotty with him at the middle school. I can see them ambling along, the breezeway that separates the middle and lower schools not yet crowded with students, the two of them walking close together, heads bent forward while they chat incessantly and talk with their hands and laugh, absorbed in their own private world. Scotty said the lower school principal stopped them on the first day. He said it to Danyelle, trying to get a rise out of her, to make her think they’d gotten in trouble. “Oh, come on Scotty,” Cartter said, rolling his eyes. “It wasn’t a big deal.” Principal boy told them to wait just a minute before they went in the lower school building; he and a teacher were rearranging desks or something. Apparently, when he saw them approaching, he announced, “Here come those Lupton boys.” He doesn’t know who I am, but he could probably spot Cartter and Scotty a mile away.
Cartter likes the uptick in freedom that’s come with the beginning of middle school. The kids don’t get marched around from class to class. Instead, they have to make their own way and handle their own individual schedules. Cartter says he likes that they “have time to rest” between classes, and he likes how they’re allowed to roam. After he navigated the principal on the first day and dropped Scotty at his classroom, he went by his fourth-grade teacher’s class to say hello. The next day, Scotty wasn’t at the pickup area for afternoon carpool, so Cartter went and got him. According to him, all he had to do was say to the teacher, “Can I have Scotty?” and she said of course. Someone should put her in charge of carpool. She certainly couldn’t make it any worse.
The Raging Elitist 