Skipping Reality at Lake Burton, GA (Greek travelogue #2)
One hour into the six-hour drive, my dad announces: “Rob doesn’t like pronouns. Rob is going to stop using pronouns.”
I break into a fit of laughter at this, nearly spilling the Whole Foods baked potato I’m cradling in my lap. My dad has always been able to make me laugh, even in the height of my teen angst years, when I was perennially angry at him and my mom and myself and the world at large.
In this moment, laughing in the car with my dad and my potato, I felt happy and excited. We were embarking on a somewhat spontaneous (as in, planned within a week) road trip to Lake Burton, Georgia from our home in North Carolina. My mom was in Maui with an old friend from her younger and more glamorous years, so it was just me and my dad for a few weeks. I was a junior in high school, though, so naturally I was harboring at least a little bit of existential dread and directionless dissatisfaction. The trip, now that I’m thinking back on it, may have been proposed to me as a bit of a pick-me-up, since I was going through a tough time that year. School had gotten a lot harder, all of a sudden, and I was beginning to feel rejected by my group of friends. When you’re fifteen, just a little bit of distance from your best friends can feel like drowning.
We were eating dinner in our little yellow kitchen, probably tacos or spaghetti because that’s all we eat when Mom’s not around, when my dad asked me if I wanted to go for the long weekend.
“Yes!” I said, thinking of the rolling Georgia hills and the gooey sunset light that reflects off the lake, how the beauty makes everything feel so simple there. “Did Aunt Sally and Uncle Warren invite us to come down? Is Granny going?”
“Well, no,” he said, straight-faced. “But we can just go down anyway.”
“Shouldn’t we ask Aunt Sally?”
“Let’s just go. I have a key. They’ll probably be in Atlanta,” he said. Atlanta is where they live, an hour or so away from the lake house, which they own and usually let us use in the summers.
“What if they’re not in Atlanta, though? What if we drive all the way down to the lake and look in the window and they’re there?” I took a bite of guacamole, or maybe of a soy meatball, expectantly.
“Okay,” he said, unfazed. “What we’ll do is, we’ll drive down on the assumption that they’re not there. If we get there and the driveway’s empty, we get the whole place to ourselves for the weekend. But if we see that they are there, I’ll just call Sally and ask if it’s okay for us to come down for the weekend, and she’ll say yes, of course, so it’ll be fine.”
“And then we just wait outside for six hours so it doesn’t seem like we were already there?”
“No, okay, then what we would do is go around the back of the house and start messing with the circuit board. Like turning the lights on and off. Then, we walk in talking about some crazy electrical storm, acting totally normal, as if we’ve actually been driving for six hours. We just play it cool. They’ll have to assume that lightning hit their house and they passed through a wormhole.”
Again, I’m laughing too much to say anything to this.
He ended up calling them ahead of time like a real adult, so they drove up to meet us and we had to share the place with them for the weekend. The whole time, my dad was grumbling about how his plan would have worked.
His plan did work, I guess. His larger plan, to cheer me up. We spent the weekend sitting on the screened-in porch, reading Kurt Vonnegut novels (our mutual favorite author) and drinking sweet tea. We went tubing and water skiing, and he broke several boating laws, driving incredibly recklessly to try and knock me into the water. We played Pictionary with Sally and Warren, which was an exercise in patience as neither fully grasped the concept of the game at their advanced ages. It was everything I remember Lake Burton as: simple and fun and energetic and easy. You just drive up the winding, hilly roads and collapse on the wicker furniture and eat peach pie. You watch the fireflies on the lawn and the two silver moons—one in the sky and one on the dark blue water. You laugh at your dad’s extended jokes and don’t think about real life.
My junior year continued to be awful, though, after we got back to Chapel Hill; I got more B’s than A’s for the first time in my life, which was a huge deal to my overachieving teen self. I broke away completely from my circle of friends, and felt alone for the first time in my life, which was also a huge deal to my image-conscious, cripplingly insecure teen self. I remember eating lunch alone and feeling like everyone in the school was watching me take my slow, sad bites of PB&J. I remember crying to my perplexed mother, back from Maui by then, because my no-longer-best-friend, Lulu*, did better than me on a test in A.P. Comparative Government.
That year was bad, but it helped me grow up. I learned how to rely on myself, to loosen my grip on things, how to accept change. I felt a little darker by the end of it, but stronger, too. And then it was over, and it was summer, carefree and bright, the time of year I got to see my oldest, closest friend, Jade*, who came to visit me from California annually. I had talked to her sporadically about what I was going through, and she would always listen, but what she was best at was distracting me. And I was good at distracting her, too, from her own darkness and difficulty. We fantasized together about going to college, getting boyfriends, starting our unrealistic, artistic careers. It was easy to push realism aside with her and spend hours on the phone, planning every detail of the apartment we would one day share in Manhattan.
I’ve known Jade since I was six and she was eight, when we met on a playground in our little town in the mountains of southern California. We spent our youth as creative partners, always side by side, in a constant cycle of fighting and making up because one of us had a new idea. We made horror movies using her dad’s video camera, borrowed without his knowledge, and way too many bottles of prop blood, purchased at the bizarre costume shop that operated year-round in our tiny, strange village (I can only remember the name of one of our movies: "The Spirit of Chandra"). We built forts in the piney woods and acted out scenes from our favorite books. We co-founded and edited a children’s newspaper, called Kids Kollage, which we regularly published as an addendum to our town paper. I didn’t need to ask permission if she wanted to sleep over at my house, which she did frequently, usually when her parents forgot to buy groceries, or when they left her alone with seven siblings and no notice.
When I moved to North Carolina, age twelve, we kept in near-constant contact via AIM (my screen name: ocelots4ever, and hers: bluerose) and actual, voiced phone calls. And every summer, she begged her spacey, forgetful parents to buy her a plane ticket, and she came and stayed in my bedroom and we had a month-long sleepover.
I wanted that summer to be different, like a return to normalcy after the funk that I had been in all year. But as soon as I hugged Jade’s tiny, bony body at the airport, I could feel something was off. I felt different, gloomier, after my long, lonely junior year, and Jade felt different, like she was keeping something from me, which I was unaccustomed to. And I didn’t know how to say that, or how to ask about it.
We caught each other up, she told me about all of her siblings and I told her about my college applications. My mom and dad told her how beautiful she was and how happy they were that she was there, pushing pancakes and board games on her like the loving godparents they may as well have been. We had fun, watched movies, played mini-golf, whatever else teens do in the summer. And we talked about our lives, but I felt like we were operating on a surface level. As if the distance wasn’t all that had separated us that past year, that there was a lot we were leaving unspoken. With Jade, it was easy to regress to my childhood self; we could have silly string fights in the backyard and write nonsensical stories together, alternating the author line by line. I wanted us to chase joy with reckless abandon, the way we did when we were kids racing through the California woods. But there we were, reunited, and I was still sad. I could still feel that sadness unvoiced, and I could feel hers, too, somewhere in the space between us, wanting to be heard, neither of us knowing what to do with it.
When it came time to make our yearly pilgrimage to Lake Burton, we packed Jade into the car with us, an unquestioned part of our family. There, I thought, things would settle into relaxed, blissful, simplicity. The darkness that we had both begun to carry wouldn’t follow us there, couldn’t reach the little wooden dock where we would push each other off with gleeful shrieks, or the sunny lawn where we played cornhole, bare feet delighting in the springy, green grass. We would act like kids, like we always did, like we had always been, and grown-up things would not trouble our sweet little heads.
But when we got there, after we spilled out of my mom’s Subaru and threw open the glass doors and breathed in the warm, woodsy air, we remained the same slightly sad sixteen- and eighteen-year-olds that we were. We were in a beautiful place, but that couldn’t blind us to the loneliness and fear we had both learned how to feel that year. And as much as I tried to look away, to point her to books, to make up games, to bring her to my dad so that he would make us laugh, she continued to show me that she was not okay.
That summer, she left every chocolate shake undrunk. She picked at her peach pie and gave it to me to finish. She wore sweaters, even in the sweltering Georgia heat, and held the sleeves tightly in her palms. We went up into the attic to watch 30 Rock, and when she reached to click through to the next episode, I saw that she was wearing ten or twenty elastic hair ties on each arm, cuffing her wrists in rainbow colors. I saw all these things and held them at face value. Jade never ate more than I did, that was how she grew up. She did kooky things, like wearing hair ties because she thought they looked cool. It was nothing new, nothing worth examining, I told myself. She gave me all the pieces but I refused to put them together, to even look at them for more than a few seconds. They were a nagging reminder that our lives were changing; we were growing apart and getting hurt without each other. It was no longer the two of us against the world, like it had been for so long. We didn’t know how to talk to each other. I didn’t even know how to talk to myself. I just wanted, for a few weeks, at my pretty, peaceful lake house, to feel normal, and immature, and unburdened.
One night, as we lay in our twin beds, watching the rhythm of the ceiling fan cutting through the dark heat, she told me about a blog she was following on Tumblr. I don’t remember the name of the blog, or of the girl who wrote it. But I remember she told me that the girl was roughly our age, that she lived by herself in Portland, separate from her parents, and that she, like Jade, had been homeschooled her whole life.
“I like her so much,” Jade told me. “Like, it makes me want to move to Portland and meet her.”
“That would be so cool,” I said, beginning to fall asleep, sheets bunched by my ankles in an attempt to escape the heavy, damp air.
“I just want to know her so badly,” she said. I couldn’t see her, I wasn’t looking, but her voice sounded far away.
“Mhm.” We both loved bloggers and vloggers that summer. I would have said the same about Charlie McDonnell, who sang songs with a ukulele on YouTube.
“I could see myself living with her, even. Like I just feel like we have so much in common. I could just get married to her.”
I was barely awake by then, but I remember thinking that I needed to ask more about that. “Really?” I should have asked, “Do you mean that literally?” But I stayed quiet and let the tension that filled the room pass with the moment, and when I woke up the next morning, I didn’t mention it. Neither did she. We just put on our bathing suits and went swimming, like we always did. I told myself not to push, that if she had something to tell me, she would. But it took her another three months to come out to me, when she was back in California, over Facebook message.
“I knew it!” I typed excitedly into the chat box, remembering that conversation and feeling guilty for not listening to her. I looked up that girl’s blog, and suddenly everything from that strange, eerie summer clicked. She posted a lot about scars and skipped meals, almost as if she were bragging. I finally let myself really think about Jade’s unfinished desserts and hair tie sheaths. I had a series of flashbacks: standing in our bedroom in the lake house, me trying on Jade’s skirt and complaining that I needed to lose weight, feeling her frowning when I said that; a Band-Aid on her thumb, which she said was from nicking a razor blade as she reached into her suitcase; me complaining about my parents getting on my nerves and her nodding and not saying anything. I pieced it together, finally, three months after she had left and gone back to her big, hectic, anonymous family, where I couldn’t reach her.
She ended up okay, anyway. I talked to her and helped her find other people to talk to, too. She left home, which was important. She spent a few years hitchhiking and sleeping on strangers’ floors, she went to a writer’s retreat in New Jersey, she worked on a hops farm in Colorado, she hula hooped on the streets of New Orleans for money. Now she’s in a travelling circus, and she doesn’t wear so many elastic hair ties. I learned to release some of the heavy moodiness of my teen years, or at least how to shoulder it better. I’ve accepted that change happens, that you can’t rely on people to transport you back in time, no matter how much you want them to be the thick-skinned, bright-eyed eight-year-old who taught you how to break rules. They grow up, usually in different directions than you do, sometimes picked or pruned, but still there. And places, even warm, easy ones, marbled green and blue, removed, up on Georgia mountains, aren’t portals. Shadows can creep in anywhere. You can find ways to let sunlight in, too, but you can’t live without both.
Chloe Anderson Ladd (June, 2015)
Póros, Greece
*names changed